Thomas Carlyle Quotes
All work of man is as the swimmer's: a vast ocean threatens to devour him; if he front it not bravely, it will keep its word.
The essence of humor is sensibility; warm, tender fellow-feeling with all forms of existence.
The scandalous bronze-lacquer age of hungry animalisms, spiritual impotences, and mendacities, will have to run its course, till the pit follow it.
He who takes not counsel of the Unseen and Silent, from him will never come real visibility and speech.
How, without clothes, could we possess the master organ, soul's seat and true pineal gland of the body social--I mean a purse?
Shakespeare says, we are creatures that look before and after; the more surprising that we do not look around a little, and see what is passing under our very eyes.
Speech is too often not the art of concealing thought, but of quite stifling and suspending thought, so that there is none to conceal.
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.
Why tell me that a man is a fine speaker, if it is not the truth that he is speaking?
There is often more spiritual force in a proverb than in whole philosophical systems.
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!
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!
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.
Laws themselves, political Constitutions, are not our Life; but only the house wherein our Life is led.
By nature man hates change; seldom will he quit his old home till it has actually fallen around his ears.
Time is the silent, never-resting thing ... rolling, rushing on, swift, silent, like an all-embracing oceantide, on which we and all the universe swim.
Science has done much for us; but it is a poor science that would hide from us the great deep sacred infinitude of Nescience, on which all science swims as a mere superficial film.
It is in general more profitable to reckon up our defeats than to boast of our attainments.
There are depths in man that go to the lowest hell, and heights that reach the highest heaven, for are not both heaven and hell made out of him, everlasting miracle and mystery that he is.
Great men are the commissioned guides of mankind, who rule their fellows because they are wiser.
One is weary of hearing about the omnipotence of money. I will say rather that, for a genuine man, it is not evil to be poor.
The suffering man ought really to consume his own smoke; there is no good in emitting smoke till you have made it into fire.
It is now almost my sole rule of life to clear myself of cants and formulas, as of poisonous Nessus shirts.
Democracy will prevail when men believe the vote of Judas as good as that of Jesus Christ.
