Thomas Carlyle Quotes
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Not what you possess but what you do with what you have, determines your true worth.
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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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No violent extreme endures.
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Parties on the back of Parties, at war with the world and with each other.
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To the vulgar eye, few things are wonderful that are not distant.
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Success in life, in anything, depends upon the number of persons that one can make himself agreeable to.
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The leafy blossoming present time springs from the whole past, remembered and unrememberable.
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Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together.
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If an eloquent speaker speak not the truth, is there a more horrid kind of object in creation?
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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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Laws themselves, political Constitutions, are not our Life; but only the house wherein our Life is led.
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If there be no enemy there's no fight. If no fight, no victory and if no victory there is no crown.
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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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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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Science must have originated in the feeling that something was wrong.
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The great soul of this world is just.
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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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Nature admits no lie.
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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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All men, if they work not as in the great taskmaster's eye, will work wrong, and work unhappily for themselves and for you.
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The first purpose of clothes... was not warmth or decency, but ornament.... Among wild people, we find tattooing and painting even prior to clothes. The first spiritual want of a barbarous man is decoration; as indeed we still see among the barbarous classes in civilized countries.
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Well might the ancients make silence a god; for it is the element of all godhood, infinitude, or transcendental greatness,--at once the source and the ocean wherein all such begins and ends.
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Everywhere the human soul stands between a hemisphere of light and another of darkness on the confines of two everlasting empires, - Necessity and Free Will.
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Habit is the deepest law of human nature.