A Quote by Thomas Carlyle

Nothing is more terrible than activity without insight.

Thomas Carlyle

Quote Topics

Activity Insight More Nothing Terrible Than Without

Quote Author

Thomas Carlyle
Scottish - Philosopher
December 4, 1795 - February 5, 1881

There is nothing so terrible as activity without insight.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Every man gives his life for what he believes. Every woman gives her life for what she believes. Sometimes people believe in little or nothing, nevertheless they give up their lives to that little or nothing. One life is all we have, and we live it as we believe in living it, and then it's gone. But to surrender what you are, and live without belief - that's more terrible than dying - more terrible than dying young.

Joan of Arc

As a painter, cursed or blessed with a terrible and vital sensuousness, I must look for wisdom with my eyes. I repeat, with my eyes, for nothing could be more ridiculous or irrelevant than a 'philosophical conception painted purely intellectually without the terrible fury of the senses grasping each visible form of beauty and ugliness.

Max Beckmann

There is nothing more harmful to you than improving only your material, animal side of life. There is nothing more beneficial, both for you and for others, than activity directed to the improvement of your soul.

Leo Tolstoy

The joy in what I do is mostly creativity. I think creativity is an ecstatic impulse that we all have. And there's nothing more joyful than having a moment of creative insight and actually creating, or rather manifesting or incarnating your creative insight into actual, physical reality.

Deepak Chopra

Is there anything more terrible than perpetual motion, than doing and doing and doing, without a reason, without a consciousness, without a change, without an end?

T. H. White

The fact is that nothing is more difficult to believe than the truth; conversely, nothing seduces like the power of lies, the greater the better. It's only natural, and you will have to find the right balance. Having said that, let me add that this particular old woman hasn't been collecting only years; she has also collected stories, and none sadder or more terrible than the one she's about to tell you. You have been at the heart of this story without knowing it until today.

Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Granny Weatherwax, who had walked nightly without fear in the bandit-haunted forests of the mountains all her life in the certain knowledge that the darkness held nothing more terrible than she was.

Terry Pratchett

Without God the economy is only economy, nature is nothing more than a deposit of material, the family only a contract, life nothing more than a laboratory product, love only chemistry, and development nothing more than a form of growth.

Giampaolo Crepaldi

There's nothing worse than a director who feels more like a cop than a comrade, so I try to never give orders or create an environment where it's 'my way or the highway,' because actually allowing talented people to bring their originality and insight always brings more depth and complexity than if everyone has to do what you tell them to!

Tamzin Merchant

Only a world without love strikes me as instantly and decisively more terrible than one without music.

Kingsley Amis

. . .nothing is more important than freedom. Nothing is more sacred than freedom. Nothing is greater than freedom. Nothing. . .can be permitted to stand in the way of freedom. Freedom. . .is all that makes men great. It is all men have to live for. Without freedom, what good is life?

Allen Drury

Nothing in life is more exciting and rewarding than the sudden flash of insight that leaves you a changed person .

Arthur Gordon Webster

Just as science is more immediate and exciting than the history of science, so is insight more compelling than a history of insight.

Robert D. Richardson

Some of us need to discover that we will not begin to live more fully until we have the courage to do and see and taste and experience much less than usual... And for a man who has let himself be drawn completely out of himself by his activity, nothing is more difficult than to sit still and rest, doing nothing at all. The very act of resting is the hardest and most courageous act he can perform.