Top 835 Quotes & Sayings by Thomas Carlyle - Page 10

Debt is a bottomless sea.

The philosopher is he to whom the highest has descended, and the lowest has mounted up; who is the equal and kindly brother of all.

The deadliest sin were the consciousness of no sin

Not our Logical, Mensurative faculty, but our Imaginative one is King over us; I might say, Priest and Prophet to lead us heavenward; or Magician and Wizard to lead us hellward.

We call that fire of the black thunder-cloud "electricity," and lecture learnedly about it, and grind the like of it out of glass and silk: but what is it? What made it? Whence comes it? Whither goes it?

Why did not somebody teach me the constellations, and make me at home in the starry heavens, which are always overhead, and which I don't half know to this day?

Once turn to practice, error and truth will no longer consort together.

A force as of madness in the hands of reason has done all that was ever done in the world.

Fame, we may understand, is no sure test of merit, but only a probability of such; it is an accident, not a property of man.

Poverty, we may say, surrounds a man with ready-made barriers, which if they do mournfully gall and hamper, do at least prescribe for him, and force on him, a sort of course and goal; a safe and beaten, though a circuitous, course. A great part of his guidance is secure against fatal error, is withdrawn from his control. The rich, again, has his whole life to guide, without goal or barrier, save of his own choosing, and, tempted, is too likely to guide it ill.

The past is all holy to us; the dead are all holy; even they that were wicked when alive.

Music... a kind of inarticulate, unfathomable speech, which leads to the edge of the Infinite.

Properly speaking, all true work is religion.

The person who cannot laugh is not only ready for treason, and deceptions, their whole life is already a treason and deception.

Just in ratio as knowledge increases, faith diminishes.

There must be a new world if there is to be any world at all!... These days of universal death must be days of universal new birth, if the ruin is not to be total and final! It is Time to make the dullest man consider; and ask himself, Whence he came? Whither he is bound?

Is there no God, then, but at best an absentee God, sitting idle, ever since the first Sabbath, at the outside of his Universe?

And man's little Life has Duties that are great, that are alone great, and go up to Heaven and down to Hell.

Battles, in these ages, are transacted by mechanism; with the slightest possible development of human individuality or spontaneity; men now even die, and kill one another, in an artificial manner.

The greatest mistake is to imagine that we never err.

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.

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.

Is man’s civilization only a wrappage, through which the savage nature of him can still burst, infernal as ever?

Freedom is the one purport, wisely aimed at, or unwisely, of all man's struggles, toilings and sufferings, in this earth.

The dead are all holy, even they that were base and wicked while alive. Their baseness and wickedness was not they, was but the heavy and unmanageable environment that lay round them.

In books lies the soul of the whole Past Time; the articulate audible voice of the Past, when the body and material substance of it has altogether vanished like a dream.

A background of wrath, which can be stirred up to the murderous infernal pitch, does lie in every man.

After all manner of professors have done their best for us, the place we are to get knowledge is in books.

Coining "Dismal Science" as a nickname for Political Economy

Man is, and was always, a block-head and dullard; much readier to feel and digest, than to think and consider.

Pin thy faith to no man's sleeve. Hast thou not two eyes of thy own?

Hunger whets everything, especially Suspicion and Indignation.

All that a university or final highest school. can do for us is still but what the first school began doing--teach us to read. We learn to read in various languages, in various sciences; we learn the alphabet and letters of all manner of books. But the place where we are to get knowledge, even theoretic knowledge, is the books themselves. It depends on what we read, after all manner of professors have done their best for us. The true university of these days is a collection of books.

The meaning of song goes deep. Who in logical words can explain the effect music has on us? A kind of inarticulate, unfathomable speech, which leads us to the edge of the infinite, and lets us for a moment gaze into that!

The greatest of all heroes is One--whom we do not name here! Let sacred silence meditate that sacred matter; you will find it the ultimate perfection of a principle extant throughout man's whole history on earth.

Except by name, Jean Paul Friedrich Richter is little known out of Germany. The only thing connected with him, we think, that has reached this country is his saying,-imported by Madame de Staël, and thankfully pocketed by most newspaper critics,-"Providence has given to the French the empire of the land; to the English that of the sea; to the Germans that of-the air!" Richter: German humorist & prose writer.

A collection of books is the best of all universities.

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.

Great souls are always loyally submissive, reverent to what is over them: only small mean souls are otherwise.

Thought will not work except in silence.

Lord Bacon could as easily have created the planets as he could have written Hamlet.

A judicious man looks at Statistics, not to "get knowledge, but to save himself from having ignorance foisted 'on him".

The wise man is but a clever infant, spelling letters from a hieroglyphical prophetic book, the lexicon of which lies in eternity.

It is part of my creed that the only poetry is history, could we tell it right.

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.

O Time! Time! how it brings forth and devours! And the roaring flood of existence rushes on forever similar, forever changing!

Consider in fact, a body of six hundred and fifty-eight miscellaneous persons, set to consult about "business," with twenty-seven millions, mostly fools, assiduously listening to them, and checking and criticising them. Was there ever, since the world began, will there ever be till the world end, any "business" accomplished in these circumstances?

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.

He who takes not counsel of the Unseen and Silent, from him will never come real visibility and speech.

Men are grown mechanical in head and in the heart, as well as in the hand. They have lost faith in individual endeavour, and in natural force of any kind.

Alas! we know that ideals can never be completely embodied in practice. Ideals must ever lie a great way off--and we will thankfully content ourselves with any not intolerable approximation thereto! Let no man, as Schiller says, too querulously "measure by a scale of perfection the meager product of reality" in this poor world of ours.

History is the new poetry.

Let Time and Chance combine, combine! Let Time and Chance combine! The fairest love from heaven above, That love of yours was mine, My Dear! That love of yours was mine.

Statistics is a science which ought to be honourable, the basis of many most important sciences; but it is not to be carried on by steam, this science, any more than others are; a wise head is requisite for carrying it on.

How were friendship possible? In mutual devotedness to the good and true; otherwise impossible, except as armed neutrality or hollow commercial league. A man, be the heavens ever praised, is sufficient for himself; yet were ten men, united in love, capable of being and of doing what ten thousand singly would fail in. Infinite is the help man can yield to man.

What are your historical Facts still more your biographical Wilt thou know a man by stringing-together beadrolls of what thou namest Facts

Skepticism, as I said, is not intellectual only; it is moral also; a chronic atrophy and disease of the whole soul. A man lives by believing something; not by debating and arguing about many things. A sad case for him when all that he can manage to believe is something he can button in his pocket, and with one or the other organ eat and digest! Lower than that he will not get.

A very sea of thought; neither calm nor clear, if you will, yet wherein the toughest pearl-diver may dive to his utmost depth, and return not only with sea-wreck but with true orients.

To the vulgar eye, few things are wonderful that are not distant

No sooner does a great man depart, and leave his character as public property, than a crowd of little men rushes towards it. There they are gathered together, blinking up to it with such vision as they have, scanning it from afar, hovering round it this way and that, each cunningly endeavoring, by all arts, to catch some reflex of it in the little mirror of himself.