Thomas Carlyle Quotes
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Cherish what is dearest while you have it near you, and wait not till it is far away. Blind and deaf that we are; oh, think, if thou yet love anybody living, wait not till death sweep down the paltry little dust clouds and dissonances of the moment, and all be made at last so mournfully clear and beautiful, when it is too late.
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There is a perennial nobleness, and even sacredness, in work. Were he never so benighted, forgetful of his high calling, there is always hope in a man that actually and earnestly works: in idleness alone there is perpetual despair.
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Everywhere in life, the true question is not what we gain, but what we do.
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Oh, give us the man who sings at his work.
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All human things do require to have an ideal in them; to have some soul in them.
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It is a strange trade that of advocacy. Your intellect, your highest heavenly gift is hung up in the shop window like a loaded pistol for sale.
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One life; a little gleam of Time between two Eternities; no second chance to us for evermore!
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So much of truth, only under an ancient obsolete vesture, but the spirit of it still true, do I find in the Paganism of old nations. Nature is still divine, the revelation of the workings of God; the Hero is still worshipable: this, under poor cramped incipient forms, is what all Pagan religions have struggled, as they could, to set forth.
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Youth is to all the glad season of life; but often only by what it hopes, not by what it attains, or what it escapes.
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I too acknowledge the all-out omnipotence of early culture and nature; hereby we have either a doddered dwarf-bush, or a high-towering, wide-shadowing tree! either a sick yellow cabbage, or an edible luxuriant green one. Of a truth, it is the duty of all men, especially of all philosophers, to note down with accuracy the characteristic circumstances of their education,--what furthered, what hindered, what in any way modified it.
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We do everything by custom, even believe by it; our very axioms, let us boast of free-thinking as we may, are oftenest simply such beliefs as we have never heard questioned.
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Happy season of childhood! Kind Nature, that art to all a bountiful mother; that visitest the poor man's hut With auroral radiance; and for thy nursling hast provided a soft swathing of love and infinite hope wherein he waxes and slumbers, danced round by sweetest dreams!
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Acorns are planted silently by some unnoticed breeze.
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The person who cannot laugh is not only ready for treason, and deceptions, their whole life is already a treason and deception.
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Great men are the modelers, patterns, and in a wide sense creators, of whatsoever the general mass of men contrived to do and attain.
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There is no life of a man, faithfully recorded, but is a heroic poem of its sort, rhymed or unrhymed.
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Stern accuracy in inquiring, bold imagination in describing, these are the cogs on which history soars or flutters and wobbles.
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Respectable Professors of the Dismal Science.
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Not what you possess but what you do with what you have, determines your true worth.
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The great law of culture is, Let each become all that he was created capable of being; expand, if possible, to his full growth; resisting all impediments, casting off all foreign, especially all noxious adhesions, and show himself at length in his own shape and stature be these what they may.
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History shows that the majority of people that have done anything great have passed their youth in seclusion.
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To the vulgar eye, few things are wonderful that are not distant.
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Innumerable are the illusions and legerdemain-tricks of custom: but of all of these, perhaps the cleverest is her knack of persuading us that the miraculous, by simple repetition, ceases to be miraculous.
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What this country needs is a man who knows God other than by heresay.