Top 835 Quotes & Sayings by Thomas Carlyle - Page 4

Stop a moment, cease your work, and look around you.

He who has no vision of eternity has no hold on time.

Every human being has a right to hear what other wise human beings have spoken to him. It is one of the Rights of Men; a very cruel injustice if you deny it to a man!

You can make even a parrot into a learned political economist - all he must learn are the two words "supply" and "demand."

Do nothing, only keep agitating, debating; and things will destroy themselves.

See deep enough, and you see musically.

Why tell me that a man is a fine speaker, if it is not the truth that he is speaking?

Rest is a fine medicine. Let your stomachs rest, ye dyspeptics; let your brain rest, you wearied and worried people of business; let your limbs rest, ye children of toil!

The genuine essence of truth never dies.

A strong mind always hopes, and has always cause to hope.

A man protesting against error is on the way towards uniting himself with all men that believe in truth.

A star is beautiful; it affords pleasure, not from what it is to do, or to give, but simply by being what it is. It befits the heavens; it has congruity with the mighty space in which it dwells. It has repose; no force disturbs its eternal peace. It has freedom; no obstruction lies between it and infinity.

The first duty of man is that of subduing fear.

The lightning spark of thought generated in the solitary mind awakens its likeness in another mind.

The soul gives unity to what it looks at with love.

There is often more spiritual force in a proverb than in whole philosophical systems.

A man with a half volition goes backwards and forwards, and makes no way on the smoothest road; a man with a whole volition advances on the roughest, and will reach his purpose, if there be even a little worthiness in it. The man without a purpose is like a ship without a rudder - a waif, a nothing, a no man. Have a purpose in life and having it, throw such strength of mind and muscle into your work as God has given you.

The tragedy of life is not so much what men suffer, but rather what they miss.

Instead of saying that man is the creature of circumstance, it would be nearer the mark to say that man is the architect of circumstance. It is character which builds an existence out of circumstance. From the same materials one man builds palaces, another hovels; one warehouses, another villas; bricks and mortar are mortar and bricks until the architect can make them something else.

It is the first of all problems for a man to find out what kind of work he is to do in this universe.

Work is the grand cure of all the maladies and miseries that ever beset mankind.

The battle that never ends is the battle of belief against disbelief

Laws, written, if not on stone tables, yet on the azure of infinitude, in the inner heart of God's creation, certain as life, certain as death, are there, and thou shalt not disobey them.

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.

Nature, after all, is still the grand agent in making poets.

The weakest living creature, by concentrating his powers on a single object, can accomplish something. The strongest, by dispensing his over many, may fail to accomplish anything. The drop, by continually falling, bores its passage through the hardest rock. The hasty torrent rushes over it with hideous uproar, and leaves no trace behind.

Of all your troubles, great and small, the greatest are the ones that don't happen at all.

The secret of business is to know something that nobody else knows. The greatest of faults, I should say is to be conscious of none.

Woe to him, . . . who has no court of appeal against the world's judgment.

Cherish what is dearest while you have it near you, and wait not till it is far away. Blind and deaf that we are; oh, think, if thou yet love anybody living, wait not till death sweep down the paltry little dust clouds and dissonances of the moment, and all be made at last so mournfully clear and beautiful, when it is too late.

There are but two ways of paying debt: Increase of industry in raising income, increase of thrift in laying out.

Money, in truth, can do much, but it cannot do all. We must know the province of it, and confine it there, and even spurn it back when it wishes to get farther.

Virtue is like health: the harmony of the whole man.

No man sees far, most see no farther than their noses.

One life; a little gleam of Time between two Eternities; no second chance to us for evermore!

Democracy means despair of finding any heroes to govern you, and contented putting up with the want of them.

Laws themselves, political Constitutions, are not our Life; but only the house wherein our Life is led.

Just in the ratio knowledge increases, faith decreases.

The merit of originality is not novelty; it is sincerity. The believing man is the original man; whatsoever he believes, he believes it for himself, not for another.

No iron chain, or outward force of any kind, could ever compel the soul of man to believe or to disbelieve: it is his own indefeasible light, that judgment of his; he will reign and believe there by the grace of God alone!

Instead of saying that man is the creature of circumstance, it would be nearer the mark to say that man is the architect of circumstance.

Only the person of worth can recognize the worth in others.

Today is not yesterday: we ourselves change; how can our works and thoughts, if they are always to be the fittest, continue always the same? Change, indeed is painful; yet ever needful; and if memory have its force and worth, so also has hope.

Laughter means sympathy.

There can be no acting or doing of any kind till it be recognized that there is a thing to be done; the thing once recognized, doing in a thousand shapes becomes possible.

All work, even cotton-spinning, is noble; work is alone noble.

Tell a person they are brave and you help them become so.

It is not to taste sweet things; but to do noble and true things, and vindicate himself under God's heaven as a God-made man, that the poorest son of Adam dimly longs. Show him the way of doing that, the dullest day-drudge kindles into a hero. They wrong man greatly who say he is to be seduced by ease. Difficulty, abnegation, martyrdom, death, are the allurements that act on the heart of man. Kindle the inner genial life of him, you have a flame that burns up all lower considerations.

There is precious instruction to be got by finding we were wrong.

A man lives by believing something.

Men's hearts ought not to be set against one another, but set with one another and all against evil only.

Who is it that loves me and will love me forever with an affection which no chance, no misery, no crime of mine can do away? It is you, my mother.

Language is called the garment of thought: however, it should rather be, language is the flesh-garment, the body, of thought.

Time has only a relative existence.

To say that we have a clear conscience is to utter a solecism; had we never sinned we should have had no conscience. Were defeat unknown, neither would victory be celebrated by songs of triumph.

Let him who gropes painfully in darkness or uncertain light, and prays vehemently that the dawn may ripen into day, lay this precept well to heart: "Do the duty which lies nearest to thee," which thou know to be a duty! Thy second duty will already have become clearer.

The world is a thing that a man must learn to despise, and even to neglect, before he can learn to reverence it, and work in it and for it.

With stupidity and sound digestion, man may front much.

The eternal stars shine out again, so soon as it is dark enough.

Great is wisdom; infinite is the value of wisdom. It cannot be exaggerated; it is the highest achievement of man.