Thomas Carlyle Quotes
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Self-contemplation is infallibly the symptom of disease.
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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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Thought is the parent of the deed.
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I don't pretend to understand the Universe - it's a great deal bigger than I am.
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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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Burke said there were Three Estates in Parliament; but, in the Reporter's gallery yonder, there sat a fourth estate more important far than they all.
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A man perfects himself by working. Foul jungles are cleared away, fair seed-fields rise instead, and stately cities; and with the man himself first ceases to be a jungle, and foul unwholesome desert thereby. The man is now a man.
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No iron chain, or outward force of any kind, could ever compel the soul of man to believe or to disbelieve: it is his own indefeasible light, that judgment of his; he will reign and believe there by the grace of God alone!
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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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Oh, give us the man who sings at his work.
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All greatness is unconscious, or it is little and naught.
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France was long a despotism tempered by epigrams.
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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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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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A thought once awakened does not again slumber.
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To the vulgar eye, few things are wonderful that are not distant.
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I have no patience whatever with these gorilla damnifications of humanity.
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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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Work is the grand cure of all the maladies and miseries that ever beset mankind.
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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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Make yourself an honest man, and then you may be sure there is one less rascal in the world.
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Work earnestly at anything, you will by degrees learn to work at all things.