Thomas Carlyle Quotes
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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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One must verify or expel his doubts, and convert them into the certainty of Yes or NO.
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All greatness is unconscious, or it is little and naught.
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The errors of a wise man are literally more instructive than the truths of a fool. The wise man travels in lofty, far-seeing regions; the fool in low-lying, high-fenced lanes; retracing the footsteps of the former, to discover where he diviated, whole provinces of the universe are laid open to us; in the path of the latter, granting even that he has not deviated at all, little is laid open to us but two wheel-ruts and two hedges.
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It is a strange trade that of advocacy. Your intellect, your highest heavenly gift is hung up in the shop window like a loaded pistol for sale.
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The leafy blossoming present time springs from the whole past, remembered and unrememberable.
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The barrenest of all mortals is the sentimentalist.
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Work is the grand cure of all the maladies and miseries that ever beset mankind.
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Innumerable are the illusions and legerdemain-tricks of custom: but of all of these, perhaps the cleverest is her knack of persuading us that the miraculous, by simple repetition, ceases to be miraculous.
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Laughter means sympathy.
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Is there no God, then, but at best an absentee God, sitting idle, ever since the first Sabbath, at the outside of his Universe?
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I have no patience whatever with these gorilla damnifications of humanity.
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This we take it is the grand characteristic of our age. By our skill in Mechanism, it has come to pass, that in the management ofexternal things we excel all other ages; while in whatever respects the pure moral nature, in true dignity of soul and character, we are perhaps inferior to most civilised ages.
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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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True friends, like ivy and the wall Both stand together, and together fall.
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The grand result of schooling is a mind with just vision to discern, with free force to do: the grand schoolmaster is Practice.
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Hunger whets everything, especially Suspicion and Indignation.
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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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In a certain sense all men are historians.
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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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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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There is no life of a man, faithfully recorded, but is a heroic poem of its sort, rhymed or unrhymed.
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A force as of madness in the hands of reason has done all that was ever done in the world.
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The times are very bad. Very well, you are there to make them better.