Thomas Carlyle Quotes
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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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The work an unknown good man has done is like a vein of water flowing hidden underground, secretly making the ground green.
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Contented saturnine human figures, a dozen or so of them, sitting around a large long table...Perfect equality is to be the rule; no rising or notice taken when anybody enters or leaves. Let the entering man take his place and pipe, without obligatory remarks; if he cannot smoke...let him at least affect to do so, and not ruffle the established stream of things.
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Intellect is the soul of man, the only immortal part of him.
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Armed Soldier, terrible as Death, relentless as Doom; doing God's judgement on the Enemies of God. It is a phenomenon not of joyful nature; no, but of awful, to be looked at with pious terror and awe.
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No iron chain, or outward force of any kind, can ever compel the soul of a person to believe or to disbelieve.
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Social Science, is not a 'gay science' but rueful, which finds the secret of this universe in 'supply and demand' and reduces the duty of human governors to that of letting men alone. Not a 'gay science', no, a dreary, desolate, and indeed quite abject and distressing one; what we might call, the dismal science.
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In the true Literary Man there is thus ever, acknowledged or not by the world, a sacredness: he is the light of the world; the world's Priest; -- guiding it, like a sacred Pillar of Fire, in its dark pilgrimage through the waste of Time.
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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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We are to take no counsel with flesh and blood; give ear to no vain cavils, vain sorrows and wishes; to know that we know nothing, that the worst and cruelest to our eyes is not what it seems, that we have to receive whatsoever befalls us as sent from God above, and say, "It is good and wise,--God is great! Though He slay me, yet I trust in Him." Islam means, in its way, denial of self. This is yet the highest wisdom that heaven has revealed to our earth.
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Speech that leads not to action, still more that hinders it, is a nuisance on the earth.
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I don't like to talk much with people who always agree with me. It is amusing to coquette with an echo for a little while, but one soon tires of it.
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It is in general more profitable to reckon up our defeats than to boast of our attainments.
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I think Scandinavian Paganism, to us here, is more interesting than any other. It is, for one thing, the latest; it continued in these regions of Europe till the eleventh century; 800 years ago the Norwegians were still worshipers of Odin. It is interesting also as the creed of our fathers; the men whose blood still runs in our veins, whom doubtless we still resemble in so many ways.
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Nature is the time-vesture of God that reveals Him to the wise, and hides him from the foolish.
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The leafy blossoming present time springs from the whole past, remembered and unrememberable.
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Nothing builds self-esteem and self-confidence like accomplishment.
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History is a great dust heap.
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History is philosophy teaching by experience.
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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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Culture is the process by which a person becomes all that they were created capable of being.
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Happy the People whose Annals are blank in History Books!
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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.
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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.