Top 835 Quotes & Sayings by Thomas Carlyle - Page 3

Every new opinion, at its starting, is precisely in a minority of one.

To us also, through every star, through every blade of grass, is not God made visible if we will open our minds and our eyes.

Humor has justly been regarded as the finest perfection of poetic genius.

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.

If you are ever in doubt as to whether to kiss a pretty girl, always give her the benefit of the doubt.

No ghost was every seen by two pair of eyes.

Man is, properly speaking, based upon hope, he has no other possession but hope; this world of his is emphatically the place of hope.

The fearful unbelief is unbelief in yourself.

For all right judgment of any man or things it is useful, nay, essential, to see his good qualities before pronouncing on his bad.

A man's felicity consists not in the outward and visible blessing of fortune, but in the inward and unseen perfections and riches of the mind.

Good breeding differs, if at all, from high breeding only as it gracefully remembers the rights of others, rather than gracefully insists on its own rights.

It is a vain hope to make people happy by politics.

I grow daily to honour facts more and more, and theory less and less. A fact, it seems to me, is a great thing; a sentence printed, if not by God, then at least by the Devil.

The spiritual is the parent of the practical.

Worship is transcendent wonder.

A man cannot make a pair of shoes rightly unless he do it in a devout manner.

It were a real increase of human happiness, could all young men from the age of nineteen be covered under barrels, or rendered otherwise invisible; and there left to follow their lawful studies and callings, till they emerged, sadder and wiser, at the age of twenty-five.

One must verify or expel his doubts, and convert them into the certainty of Yes or NO.

Thought once awakened does not again slumber; unfolds itself into a System of Thought; grows, in man after man, generation after generation, - till its full stature is reached, and such System of Thought can grow no farther, but must give place to another.

What you see, but can't see over is as good as infinite.

Originality is a thing we constantly clamour for, and constantly quarrel with.

Talk that does not end in any kind of action is better suppressed altogether.

Necessity dispenseth with decorum.

It is a strange trade that of advocacy. Your intellect, your highest heavenly gift is hung up in the shop window like a loaded pistol for sale.

Happy the people whose annals are vacant.

Science must have originated in the feeling that something was wrong.

Imagination is a poor matter when it has to part company with understanding.

The difference between Socrates and Jesus? The great conscious and the immeasurably great unconscious.

The outer passes away; the innermost is the same yesterday, today, and forever.

I don't pretend to understand the Universe - it's a great deal bigger than I am.

There is a great discovery still to be made in literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write.

No iron chain, or outward force of any kind, can ever compel the soul of a person to believe or to disbelieve.

Respectable Professors of the Dismal Science.

A great man shows his greatness by the way he treats little men.

It's a man's sincerity and depth of vision that makes him a poet.

History: A distillation of rumor.

Not what you possess but what you do with what you have, determines your true worth.

Speak not at all, in any wise, till you have somewhat to speak; care not for the reward of your speaking, but simply and with undivided mind for the truth of your speaking.

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.

Speech is silver, silence is golden.

The best effect of any book is that it excites the reader to self activity.

Is not light grander than fire? It is the same element in a state of purity.

The past is always attractive because it is drained of fear.

They only are wise who know that they know nothing.

Naps are a way of traveling painlessly through time into the future.

One monster there is in the world, the idle man.

Our grand business undoubtedly is, not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand.

There is so much data available to us, but most data won't help us succeed.

If a man was great while living, he becomes tenfold greater when dead.

If Jesus Christ were to come today, people would not even crucify him. They would ask him to dinner, and hear what he had to say, and make fun of it.

Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do that with all thy might and leave the issues calmly to God.

Do not be embarrassed by your mistakes. Nothing can teach us better than our understanding of them. This is one of the best ways of self-education.

Popular opinion is the greatest lie in the world.

Without kindness there can be no true joy.

Happy the People whose Annals are blank in History Books!

Experience is the best of school masters, only the school fees are heavy.

Speech is too often not the art of concealing thought, but of quite stifling and suspending thought, so that there is none to conceal.

A person with a clear purpose will make progress, even on the roughest road. A person with no purpose will make no progress, even on the smoothest road.

Once the mind has been expanded by a big idea, it will never go back to its original state.

Of all God's creatures, Man alone is poor.