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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The true Sovereign of the world, who moulds the world like soft wax, according to his pleasure, is he who lovingly sees into the world.
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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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History shows that the majority of people that have done anything great have passed their youth in seclusion.
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Tobacco smoke is the one element in which, by our European manners, men can sit silent together without embarrassment, and where no man is bound to speak one word more than he has actually and veritably got to say. Nay, rather every man is admonished and enjoined by the laws of honor, and even of personal ease, to stop short of that point; and at all events to hold his peace and take to his pipe again the instant he has spoken his meaning, if he chance to have any.
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Not what you possess but what you do with what you have, determines your true worth.
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In every man's writings, the character of the writer must lie recorded.
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Whoso has sixpence is sovereign (to the length of sixpence) over all men; commands cooks to feed him, philosophers to teach him, kings to mount guard over him,to the length of sixpence.
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Respectable Professors of the Dismal Science.
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It is now almost my sole rule of life to clear myself of cants and formulas, as of poisonous Nessus shirts.
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True friends, like ivy and the wall Both stand together, and together fall.
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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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Laughter is one of the very privileges of reason, being confined to the human species.
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Man's earthly interests,'are all hooked and buttoned together, and held up, by Clothes.
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In every object there is inexhaustible meaning; the eye sees in it what the eye brings means of seeing.
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Intellect is the soul of man, the only immortal part of him.
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All greatness is unconscious, or it is little and naught.
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To the vulgar eye, few things are wonderful that are not distant.
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Wondrous is the strength of cheerfulness, altogether past calculation its powers of endurance.
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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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Does it ever give thee pause that men used to have a soul? Not by hearsay alone, or as a figure of speech, but as a thruth that they knew and acted upon. Verily it was another world then, but yet it is a pity we have lost the tidings of our souls. We shall have to go in search of them again or worse in all ways shall befall us.
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Music is well said to be the speech of angels; in fact, nothing among the utterances allowed to man is felt to be so divine. It brings us near to the infinite.
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Venerable to me is the hard hand,--crooked, coarse,--wherein, notwithstanding, lies a cunning virtue, indispensably royal as of the sceptre of the planet.
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The times are very bad. Very well, you are there to make them better.