Thomas Carlyle Quotes
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The fearful unbelief is unbelief in yourself.
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Respectable Professors of the Dismal Science.
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France was long a despotism tempered by epigrams.
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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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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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Ill-health, of body or of mind, is defeat. Health alone is victory. Let all men, if they can manage it, contrive to be healthy!
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Neither had Watt of the Steam engine a heroic origin, any kindred with the princes of this world. The princes of this world were shooting their partridges... While this man with blackened fingers, with grim brow, was searching out, in his workshop, the Fire-secret.
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Not what you possess but what you do with what you have, determines your true worth.
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I have no patience whatever with these gorilla damnifications of humanity.
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Parliament will train you to talk; and above all things to hear, with patience, unlimited quantities of foolish talk.
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For all right judgment of any man or things it is useful, nay, essential, to see his good qualities before pronouncing on his bad.
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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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A thought once awakened does not again slumber.
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If you do not wish a man to do a thing, you had better get him to talk about it; for the more men talk, the more likely they are to do nothing else.
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All human souls, never so bedarkened, love light; light once kindled spreads till all is luminous.
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In a certain sense all men are historians.
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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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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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Wealth has more and more increased, and at the same time gathered itself more and more into masses, strangely altering the old relations, and increasing the distance between the rich and the poor.
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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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He that will not work according to his faculty, let him perish according to his necessity: there is no law juster than that.
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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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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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In every object there is inexhaustible meaning; the eye sees in it what the eye brings means of seeing.