Thomas Carlyle Quotes
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Happy the People whose Annals are blank in History Books!
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The barrenest of all mortals is the sentimentalist.
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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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Acorns are planted silently by some unnoticed breeze.
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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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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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Is not every meanest day the confluence of two eternities?
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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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The healthy know not of their health, but only the sick: this is the physician's aphorism, and applicable in a far wider sense than he gives it.
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The old cathedrals are good, but the great blue dome that hangs over everything is better.
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Endurance is patience concentrated.
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A person who is gifted sees the essential point and leaves the rest as surplus.
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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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Nothing builds self-esteem and self-confidence like accomplishment.
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Hunger whets everything, especially Suspicion and Indignation.
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Before philosophy can teach by Experience, the Philosophy has to be in readiness, the Experience must be gathered and intelligibly recorded.
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Tobacco smoke is the one element in which, by our European manners, men can sit silent together without embarrassment, and where no man is bound to speak one word more than he has actually and veritably got to say. Nay, rather every man is admonished and enjoined by the laws of honor, and even of personal ease, to stop short of that point; and at all events to hold his peace and take to his pipe again the instant he has spoken his meaning, if he chance to have any.
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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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That great mystery of TIME, were there no other; the illimitable, silent, never-resting thing called Time, rolling, rushing on, swift, silent, like an all-embracing ocean tide, on which we and all the Universe swim like exhalations, like apparitions which are, and then are not: this is forever very literally a miracle; a thing to strike us dumb,-for we have no word to speak about it.
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A pygmy standing on the outward crust of this small planet, his far-reaching spirit stretches outward to the infinite, and there alone finds rest.
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Intellect is the soul of man, the only immortal part of him.
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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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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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History is a great dust heap.