Thomas Carlyle Quotes
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The world is a thing that a man must learn to despise, and even to neglect, before he can learn to reverence it, and work in it and for it.
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To a shower of gold most things are penetrable.
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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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Of all acts of man repentance is the most divine. The greatest of all faults is to be conscious of none.
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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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Laughter is one of the very privileges of reason, being confined to the human species.
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Social Science, is not a 'gay science' but rueful, which finds the secret of this universe in 'supply and demand' and reduces the duty of human governors to that of letting men alone. Not a 'gay science', no, a dreary, desolate, and indeed quite abject and distressing one; what we might call, the dismal science.
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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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All human souls, never so bedarkened, love light; light once kindled spreads till all is luminous.
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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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This is the eternal law of Nature for a man, my beneficent Exeter-Hall friends; this, that he shall be permitted, encouraged, and if need be, compelled to do what work the Maker of him has intended by the making of him for this world! Not that he should eat pumpkin with never such felicity in the West India Islands is, or can be, the blessedness of our Black friend; but that he should do useful work there, according as the gifts have been bestowed on him for that.
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Make yourself an honest man, and then you may be sure there is one less rascal in the world.
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Everywhere in life, the true question is not what we gain, but what we do.
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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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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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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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Blessed is he who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness. He has a work, a Life-purpose... Get your happiness out of your work or you will never know what real happiness is... Even in the meanest sorts of Labour, the whole soul of a man is composed into a kind of real harmony the instant he sets himself to work!
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Before philosophy can teach by Experience, the Philosophy has to be in readiness, the Experience must be gathered and intelligibly recorded.
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The fearful unbelief is unbelief in yourself.
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What this country needs is a man who knows God other than by heresay.
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Are we not Spirits, that are shaped into a body, into an Appearance; and that fade away again into air and Invisibility? Oh, Heaven, it is mysterious, it is awful to consider that we not only carry a future Ghost within us; but are, in very deed, Ghosts! These Limbs, whence had we them; this stormy Force; this life-blood with its burning Passion? They are dust and shadow; a Shadow-system gathered round our Me; wherein, through some moments or years, the Divine Essence is to be revealed in the Flesh.
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O Time! Time! how it brings forth and devours! And the roaring flood of existence rushes on forever similar, forever changing!
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Out of the lowest depths there is a path to the loftiest heights.
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There is no heroic poem in the world but is at bottom a biography, the life of a man.