Top 835 Quotes & Sayings by Thomas Carlyle - Page 14

No man at bottom means injustice; it is always for some obscure distorted image of a right that he contends: an obscure image diffracted, exaggerated, in the wonderfulest way by natural dimness and selfishness; getting tenfold more diffracted by exasperation of contest, till at length it become all but irrecognis-able.

There is always hope in a man that actually and earnestly works: in Idleness alone is there perpetual despair.

A man's perfection is his work.

What is all Knowledge too but recorded Experience, and a product of History; of which, therefore, Reasoning and Belief, no less than Action and Passion, are essential materials?

In the huge mass of evil as it rolls and swells, there is ever some good working toward deliverance and triumph.

Are not our greatest men as good as lost? The men that walk daily among us, warming us, feeding us, walk shrouded in darkness, mere mythic men.

What I loved in the man was his health, his unity with himself; all people and all things seemed to find their quite peaceable adjustment with him, not a proud domineering one, as after doubtful contest, but a spontaneous-looking peaceable, even humble one.

No age seemed the age of romance to itself.

When I gaze into the stars, they look down upon me with pity from their serene and silent spaces, like eyes glistening with tears over the little lot of man. Thousands of generations, all as noisy as our own, have been swallowed up by time, and there remains no record of them any more. Yet Arcturus and Orion, Sirius and Pleiades, are still shining in their courses, clear and young, as when the shepherd first noted them in the plain of Shinar!

A vein of poetry exists in the hearts of all men.

Have not I myself known five hundred living soldiers sabred into crows' meat for a piece of glazed cotton, which they call their flag; which had you sold it at any market-cross, would not have brought above three groschen?

The true epic of our times is not "Arm's and the Man," but "Tools and the Man"--an infinitely wider kind of epic.

Also, what mountains of dead ashes, wreck and burnt bones, does assiduous pedantry dig up from the past time and name it History.

Men worship the shows of great men; the most disbelieve that there is any reality of great men to worship.

One is hardly sensible of fatigue while he marches to music.

The steam-engine I call fire-demon and great; but it is nothing to the invention of fire.

For the superior morality, of which we hear so much, we too would desire to be thankful: at the same time, it were but blindness to deny that this superior morality is properly rather an inferior criminality, produced not by greater love of Virtue, but by greater perfection of Police; and of that far subtler and stronger Police, called Public Opinion.

Love not pleasure; love God. This is the Everlasting Yea, wherein all contradiction is solved.

We do everything by custom, even believe by it; our very axioms, let us boast of free-thinking as we may, are oftenest simply such beliefs as we have never heard questioned.

The Christian must be consumed by the conviction of the infinite beauty of holiness and the infinite damnability of sin.

What unknown seas of feeling lie in man, and will from time to time break through!

Rightly viewed no meanest object is insignificant; all objects are as windows through which the philosophic eye looks into infinitude itself.

That a Parliament, especially a Parliament with Newspaper Reporters firmly established in it, is an entity which by its very nature cannot do work, but can do talk only.

If you will believe me, you who are young, yours is the golden season of life. As you have heard it called, so it verily is, the seed-time of life; in which, if you do not sow, or if you sow tares instead of wheat, you cannot expect to reap well afterwards, and you will arrive at little. And in the course of years when you come to look back, if you have not done what you have heard from your advisers,-and among many counsellors there is wisdom,-you will bitterly repent when it is too late.

All work is as seed sown; it grows and spreads, and sows itself anew.

Experience takes dreadfully high school-wages, but he teaches like no other.

Neither had Watt of the Steam engine a heroic origin, any kindred with the princes of this world. The princes of this world were shooting their partridges... While this man with blackened fingers, with grim brow, was searching out, in his workshop, the Fire-secret.

The world is an old woman, and mistakes any gilt farthing for a gold coin; whereby being often cheated, she will thenceforth trust nothing but the common copper.

Not one false man but doth uncountable evil.

Fire is the best of servants, but what a master!

That monstrous tuberosity of civilised life, the capital of England.

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.

So much of truth, only under an ancient obsolete vesture, but the spirit of it still true, do I find in the Paganism of old nations. Nature is still divine, the revelation of the workings of God; the Hero is still worshipable: this, under poor cramped incipient forms, is what all Pagan religions have struggled, as they could, to set forth.

Lives the man that can figure a naked Duke of Windlestraw addressing a naked House of Lords?

No good book, or good thing of any sort, shows its best face at first.

Parties on the back of Parties, at war with the world and with each other.

The man who cannot wonder, who does not habitually wonder (and worship), were he President of innumerable Royal Societies, and carried the whole Mecanique Celeste and Hegel's Philosophy, and the epitome of all Laboratories and Observatories with their results, in his single head, is but a Pair of Spectacles behind which there is no Eye. Let those who have Eyes look through him, then he may be useful.

The authentic insight and experience of any human soul, were it but insight and experience in hewing of wood and drawing of water, is real knowledge, a real possession and acquirement.

A sad spectacle. If they be inhabited, what a scope for misery and folly. If they be not inhabited, what a waste of space.

The king is the man who can.

Democracy is, by the nature of it, a self-canceling business: and gives in the long run a net result of zero.

The greatest fault is to be conscious of none.

Let a man try faithfully, manfully to be right; he will grow daily more and more right. It is at bottom the condition on which all men have to cultivate themselves.

A witty statesman said, you might prove anything by figures.

Wonderful Force of Public Opinion! We must act and walk in all points as it prescribes; follow the traffic it bids us, realize the sum of money, the degree of influence it expects of us, or we shall be lightly esteemed; certain mouthfuls of articulate wind will be blown at us, and this what mortal courage can front?

Eternity looks grander and kinder if time grow meaner and more hostile.

Thirty millions, mostly fools.

Skepticism . . . is not intellectual only it is moral also, a chronic atrophy and disease of the whole soul.

We are not altogether here to tolerate. We are here to resist, to control and vanquish withal.

Friendship, in the old heroic sense of that term, no longer exists. It is in reality no longer expected or recognized as a virtue among men.

Not on morality, but on cookery, let us build our stronghold: there brandishing our frying-pan, as censer, let us offer sweet incense to the Devil, and live at ease on the fat things he has provided for his elect!

In a different time, in a different place, it is always some other side of our common human nature that has been developing itself. The actual truth is the sum of all these.

The coldest word was once a glowing new metaphor.

A thinking man is the worst enemy the Prince of Darkness can have; every time such an one announces himself, I doubt not there runs a shudder through the nether empire; and new emissaries are trained with new tactics, to, if possible, entrap and hoodwink and handcuff him.

The mystical bond of brotherhood makes all men brothers.