Thomas Carlyle Quotes
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To the vulgar eye, few things are wonderful that are not distant.
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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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Heroes have gone out; quacks have come in; the reign of quacks has not ended with the nineteenth century. The sceptre is held with a firmer grasp; the empire has a wider boundary. We are all the slaves of quackery in one shape or another. Indeed, one portion of our being is always playing the successful quack to the other.
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Neither let mistakes and wrong directions - of which every man, in his studies and elsewhere, falls into many - discourage you. There is precious instruction to be got by finding that we are wrong. Let a man try faithfully, manfully to be right, he will grow daily more and more right. It is, at bottom, the condition which all men have to cultivate themselves. Our very walking is an incessant falling - a falling and a catching of ourselves before we come actually to the pavement! - it is emblematic of all things a man does.
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A stammering man is never a worthless one. Physiology can tell you why. It is an excess of sensibility to the presence of his fellow creature, that makes him stammer.
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With respect to duels, indeed, I have my own ideas. Few things in this so surprising world strike me with more surprise. Two little visual spectra of men, hovering with insecure enough cohesion in the midst of the unfathomable, and to dissolve therein, at any rate, very soon, make pause at the distance of twelve paces asunder; whirl around, and simultaneously by the cunningest mechanism, explode one another into dissolution; and, offhand, become air, and non-extant--the little spitfires!
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Fire is the best of servants, but what a master!
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No good book or good thing of any kind shows it best face at first. No the most common quality of in a true work of art that has excellence and depth, is that at first sight it produces a certain disappointment.
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Parties on the back of Parties, at war with the world and with each other.
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If there be not a religious element in the relations of men, such relations are miserable and doomed to ruin.
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Science must have originated in the feeling that something was wrong.
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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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When Pococke inquired of Grotius, where the proof was of that story of the pigeon, trained to pick peas from Mahomet's (Muhammad's) ear, and pass for an angel dictating to him? Grotius answered that there was no proof!
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A person who is gifted sees the essential point and leaves the rest as surplus.
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Every day that is born into the world comes like a burst of music and rings the whole day through, and you make of it a dance, a dirge, or a life march, as you will.
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The leafy blossoming present time springs from the whole past, remembered and unrememberable.
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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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There is no life of a man, faithfully recorded, but is a heroic poem of its sort, rhymed or unrhymed.
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The crash of the whole solar and stellar systems could only kill you once.
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No conquest can ever become permanent which does not show itself beneficial to the conquered as well as to the conquerors.
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It is well said, in every sense, that a man's religion is the chief fact with regard to him.
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Habit is the deepest law of human nature.
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A heavenly awe overshadowed and encompassed, as it still ought, and must, all earthly business whatsoever.
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Universal history, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here.