Thomas Carlyle Quotes
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What this country needs is a man who knows God other than by heresay.
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Produce, produce! Were it but the pitifulest, infinitesimal fraction of a product, produce it in God's name. 'Tis the utmost thou hast in thee? Out with it then! Up, up! Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy whole might.
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Success in life, in anything, depends upon the number of persons that one can make himself agreeable to.
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Love not Pleasure; love God.
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Respectable Professors of the Dismal Science.
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The condition of the most passionate enthusiast is to be preferred over the individual who, because of the fear of making a mistake, won't in the end affirm or deny anything.
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In our wide world there is but one altogether fatal personage, the dunce,--he that speaks irrationally, that sees not, and yet thinks he sees.
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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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In every man's writings, the character of the writer must lie recorded.
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The fearful unbelief is unbelief in yourself.
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Goethe's devil is a cultivated personage and acquainted with the modern sciences; sneers at witchcraft and the black art even while employing them, and doubts most things, nay, half disbelieves even his own existence.
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The first sin in our universe was Lucifer's self conceit.
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No man lives without jostling and being jostled; in all ways he has to elbow himself through the world, giving and receiving offence.
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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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Not what you possess but what you do with what you have, determines your true worth.
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Laughter is one of the very privileges of reason, being confined to the human species.
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Society is founded upon Cloth.
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Men are to be guided only by their self-interests. Good government is a good balancing of these; and, except a keen eye and appetite for self-interest, requires no virtue in any quarter. To both parties it is emphatically a machine: to the discontented, a taxing-machine; to the contented, a machine for securing property. Its duties and its faults are not those of a father, but of an active parish-constable.
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No great man lives in vain. The history of the world is but the biography of great men.
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The purpose of man is in action not thought.
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Thought is the parent of the deed.
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If you will believe me, you who are young, yours is the golden season of life. As you have heard it called, so it verily is, the seed-time of life; in which, if you do not sow, or if you sow tares instead of wheat, you cannot expect to reap well afterwards, and you will arrive at little. And in the course of years when you come to look back, if you have not done what you have heard from your advisers,-and among many counsellors there is wisdom,-you will bitterly repent when it is too late.
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I grow daily to honour facts more and more, and theory less and less. A fact, it seems to me, is a great thing; a sentence printed, if not by God, then at least by the Devil.
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Self-contemplation is infallibly the symptom of disease.