Thomas Carlyle Quotes
Pain was not given thee merely to be miserable under; learn from it, turn it to account.
Great souls are always loyally submissive, reverent to what is over them: only small mean souls are otherwise.
What are your historical Facts still more your biographical Wilt thou know a man by stringing-together beadrolls of what thou namest Facts
Well might the ancients make silence a god; for it is the element of all godhood, infinitude, or transcendental greatness,--at once the source and the ocean wherein all such begins and ends.
Is man’s civilization only a wrappage, through which the savage nature of him can still burst, infernal as ever?
Not our Logical, Mensurative faculty, but our Imaginative one is King over us; I might say, Priest and Prophet to lead us heavenward; or Magician and Wizard to lead us hellward.
In books lies the soul of the whole Past Time; the articulate audible voice of the Past, when the body and material substance of it has altogether vanished like a dream.
The past is all holy to us; the dead are all holy; even they that were wicked when alive.
A judicious man looks at Statistics, not to "get knowledge, but to save himself from having ignorance foisted 'on him".
Burke said there were Three Estates in Parliament; but, in the Reporter's gallery yonder, there sat a fourth estate more important far than they all.
We have not read an author till we have seen his object, whatever it may be, as he saw it.
O Heaven, it is mysterious, it is awful to consider that we not only carry each a future Ghost within him; but are, in very deed, Ghosts!
To the mean eye all things are trivial, as certainly as to the jaundiced they are yellow.
There is a great discovery still to be made in literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write.
Speech is human, silence is divine, yet also brutish and dead: therefore we must learn both arts.
Histories are as perfect as the Historian is wise, and is gifted with an eye and a soul.
Speech that leads not to action, still more that hinders it, is a nuisance on the earth.
He who talks much about virtue in the abstract, begins to be suspected; it is shrewdly guessed that where there is great preaching there will be little almsgiving.
The modern majesty consists in work. What a man can do is his greatest ornament, and he always consults his dignity by doing it.
The cut of a garment speaks of intellect and talent and the color of temperament and heart.
If those gentlemen would let me alone I should be much obliged to them. I would say, as Shakespeare would say... Sweet Friend, for Jesus sake forbear.
The nobleness of silence. The highest melody dwells only in silence,--the sphere melody, the melody of health.
In every object there is inexhaustible meaning; the eye sees in it what the eye brings means of seeing.
In this world there is one godlike thing, the essence of all that was or ever will be of godlike in this world: the veneration done to Human Worth by the hearts of men.
The true past departs not, no truth or goodness realized by man ever dies, or can die; but all is still here, and, recognized or not, lives and works through endless change.
There is no heroic poem in the world but is at bottom a biography, the life of a man.
An everlasting lodestar, that beams the brighter in the heavens the darker here on earth grows the night.
Insurrection, never so necessary, is a most sad necessity; and governors who wait for that to instruct them are surely getting into the fatalest course.
