Top 835 Quotes & Sayings by Thomas Carlyle - Page 9

This London City, with all of its houses, palaces, steam-engines, cathedrals, and huge immeasurable traffic an tumult, what is it but a Thought, but millions of Thoughts made into One-a huge immeasurable Spirit of a Thought, embodied in brick, in iron, smoke, dust, Palaces, Parliaments, Hackney Coaches, Katherine Docks, and the rest of it! Not a brick was made but some man had to think of the making of that brick.

A good book is the purest essence of a human soul.

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.

These Arabs, the man Mahomet, and that one century, - is it not as if a spark had fallen, one spark, on a world of what proves explosive powder, blazes heaven-high from Delhi to Granada! I said, the Great man was always as lightning out of Heaven; the rest of men waited for him like fuel, and then they too would flame.

A thought once awakened does not again slumber.

He that has a secret should not only hide it, but hide that he has it to hide.

A true delineation of the smallest man is capable of interesting the greatest man.

Perfect ignorance is quiet, perfect knowledge is quiet; not so the transition from the former to the latter.

Look around you. Your world-hosts are all in mutiny, in confusion, destitution; on the eve of fiery wreck and madness! They will not march farther for you, on the sixpence a day and supply-demand principle; they will not; nor ought they, nor can they. Ye shall reduce them to order, begin reducing them. to order, to just subordination; noble loyalty in return for noble guidance. Their souls are driven nigh mad; let yours be sane and ever saner.

At worst, is not this an unjust world, full of nothing but beasts of prey, four-footed or two-footed?

O thou who art able to write a book which once in the two centuries or oftener there is a man gifted to do, envy not him whom they name city-builder, and inexpressibly pity him whom they name conqueror or city-burner.

A dandy is a clothes-wearing man--a man whose trade, office, and existence consist in the wearing of clothes. Every faculty of his soul, spirit, person and purse is heroically consecrated to this one object--the wearing of clothes, wisely and well; so that, as others dress to live, he lives to dress.

Be a pattern to others, and then all will go well; for as a whole city is affected by the licentious passions and vices of great men, so it is likewise reformed by their moderation.

Know what thou canst work at, and work at it like a Hercules.

Democracy will itself accomplish the salutary universal change from delusive to real, and make a new blessed world of us by and by.

Nothing ever happens but once in all this world. What I do now I do once for all. It is over and gone, with all its eternity of solemn meaning.

The sincere alone can recognize sincerity.

If you are looking at data over and over you better be taking away valuable insight every time. If you are constantly looking at data that isn't leading to strategic action stop wasting your time and look for more Actionable Analytics.

Man, it is not thy works, which are mortal, infinitely little, and the greatest no greater than the least, but only the spirit thou workest in, that can have worth or continuance.

Hardened round us, encasing wholly every notion we form is a wrapping of traditions, hearsay's, and mere words.

Armed Soldier, terrible as Death, relentless as Doom; doing God's judgement on the Enemies of God. It is a phenomenon not of joyful nature; no, but of awful, to be looked at with pious terror and awe.

A noble book! all men's book!

Midas-eared Mammonism, double-barrelled Dilettantism, and their thousand adjuncts and corollaries, are not the Law by which God Almighty has appointed this His universe to go.

Rare benevolence, the minister of God.

The situation that has not its duty, its ideal, was never yet occupied by man. Yes, here, in this poor, miserable, hampered, despicable actual, wherein thou even now standest, here or nowhere is thy ideal; work it out therefrom, and, working, believe, live, be free. Fool! the ideal is in thyself.

To the wisest man, wide as is his vision. Nature remains of quite infinite depth, of quite infinite expansion and all experience thereof limits itself to some few computed centuries and measured square miles.

Is not every meanest day the confluence of two eternities?

This is the eternal law of Nature for a man, my beneficent Exeter-Hall friends; this, that he shall be permitted, encouraged, and if need be, compelled to do what work the Maker of him has intended by the making of him for this world! Not that he should eat pumpkin with never such felicity in the West India Islands is, or can be, the blessedness of our Black friend; but that he should do useful work there, according as the gifts have been bestowed on him for that.

He who cannot withal keep his mind to himself cannot practice any considerable thing whatsoever.

O thou that pinest in the imprisonment of the Actual, and criest bitterly to the gods for a kingdom wherein to rule and create, know this for a truth: the thing thou seekest is already here, "here or nowhere," couldst thou only see.

The insignificant, the empty, is usually the loud; and after the manner of a drum, is louder even because of its emptiness.

The great silent man! Looking round on the noisy inanity of the world,--words with little meaning, actions with little worth,--one loves to reflect on the great Empire of Silence.

Earnestness alone makes life eternity.

We arc the miracle of miracles, the great inscrutable mystery of God.

On the whole, I would bid you stand up to your work, whatever it may be, and not be afraid of it; not in sorrows or contradictions to yield, but to push on towards the goal.

Laughter is the cipher key wherewith we decipher the whole man

What the light of your mind, which is the direct inspiration of the Almighty, pronounces incredible, that, in God's name, leave uncredited. At your peril do not try believing that!

There is in man a higher than love of happiness; he can do without happiness, and instead thereof find blessedness.

Caution is the lower story of prudence.

A lie should be trampled on and extinguished wherever found. I am for fumigating the atmosphere when I suspect that falsehood, like pestilence, breathes around me.

History after all is the true poetry.

Wondrous is the strength of cheerfulness, altogether past calculation its powers of endurance.

It is a fact which escapes no one, that, generally speaking, whoso is acquainted with his worth has but a little stock to cultivate acquaintance with.

There is no permanent place in this universe for evil... Evil may hide behind this fallacy and that, but it will be hunted from fallacy to fallacy until there is no more fallacy for it to hide behind.

Happy season of virtuous youth, when shame is still an impassable barrier, and the sacred air-cities of hope have not shrunk into the mean clay hamlets of reality; and man, by his nature, is yet infinite and free.

Our works are the mirror wherein the spirit first sees its natural lineaments. Hence, too, the folly of that impossible precept, Know theyself; till it be translated into this partially possible one, know what thou canst work at.

Friend, hast thou considered the "rugged, all-nourishing earth," as Sophocles well names her; how she feeds the sparrow on the housetop, much more her darling man?

Prayer is and remains always a native and deepest impulse of the soul of man.

Even in the meanest sorts of labor, the whole soul of a man is composed into a kind of real harmony the instant he sets himself to work.

Unity, agreement, is always silent or soft-voiced; it is only discord that loudly proclaims itself.

A heavenly awe overshadowed and encompassed, as it still ought, and must, all earthly business whatsoever.

All comes out even at the end of the day.

If there be not a religious element in the relations of men, such relations are miserable and doomed to ruin.

Social Science, is not a 'gay science' but rueful, which finds the secret of this universe in 'supply and demand' and reduces the duty of human governors to that of letting men alone. Not a 'gay science', no, a dreary, desolate, and indeed quite abject and distressing one; what we might call, the dismal science

Piety does not mean that a man should make a sour face about things, and refuse to enjoy in moderation what his Maker has given.

But the whim we have of happiness is somewhat thus. By certain valuations, and averages, of our own striking, we come upon some sort of average terrestrial lot; this we fancy belongs to us by nature, and of indefeasible rights. It is simple payment of our wages, of our deserts; requires neither thanks nor complaint. Foolish soul! What act of legislature was there that thou shouldst be happy? A little while ago thou hadst no right to be at all.

Reform, like charity, must begin at home.

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.

The goal of yesterday will be our starting-point to-morrow.

But deepest of all illusory Appearances, for hiding Wonder, as for many other ends, are your two grand fundamental world-enveloping Appearances, SPACE and TIME. These, as spun and woven for us from before Birth itself, to clothe our celestial ME for dwelling here, and yet to blind it, lie all-embracing, as the universal canvas, or warp and woof, whereby all minor Illusions, in this Phantasm Existence, weave and paint themselves. In vain, while here on Earth, shall you endeavor to strip them off; you can, at best, but rend them asunder for moments, and look through.