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| Thomas Carlyle born December 1795 died February 1881 was a renowned Scottish author, philosopher, and satirist |
Quotes by Thomas Carlyle
In a different time, in a different place, it is always some other side of our common human nature that has been developing itself. The actual truth is the sum of all these.Speech is too often not the art of concealing thought, but of quite stifling and suspending thought, so that there is none to conceal.
Might and right do differ frightfully from hour to hour, but then centuries to try it in, they are found to be identical.
A sad spectacle. If they be inhabited, what a scope for misery and folly. If they be not inhabited, what a waste of space. (Thomas Carlyle describing the stars in the night sky.)
Adversity is sometimes hard upon a man; but for one man who can stand prosperity there are a hundred that will stand adversity.
If Jesus Christ were to come today, people would not even crucify him. They would ask him to dinner, and hear what he had to say, and make fun of it.
If you do not wish a man to do a thing, you had better get him to talk about it; for the more men talk, the more likely they are to do nothing else.
It is through symbols that man consciously or unconsciously lives, works and has his being.
We are firm believers in the maxim that for all right judgment of any man or thing it is useful, nay, essential, to see his good qualities before pronouncing on his bad.
Silence is deep as Eternity, speech is shallow as Time.
The greatest of faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none.
Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves.
Mirth resting on earnestness and sadness, as the rainbow on black tempest: only a right valiant heart is capable of that.
If a book comes from the heart, it will contrive to reach other hearts; all art and author-craft are of small amount to that.
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 man who has once heartily and wholly laughed can be altogether irreclaimable and bad.
Eternity looks grander and kinder if time grows meaner and more hostile.
Conclusive facts are inseparable from inconclusive except by a head that already understands and knows.
Blessed is he who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness.
All that mankind has done, thought, gained or been, it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books. They are the chosen possession of men.
There are female dandies as well as clothes-wearing men; and the former are as objectionable as the latter.
Sarcasm I now see to be, in general, the language of the Devil; for which reason I have, long since, as good as renounced it.
Rightly viewed no meanest object is insignificant; all objects are as windows through which the philosophic eye looks into infinitude itself.
To know, to get into the truth of anything, is ever a mystic art, of which the best logic's can but babble on the surface.
Enjoying things which are pleasant; that is not the evil; it is the reducing of our moral self to slavery by them that is.
Long stormy springtime, wet contentious April, winter chilling the lap of very May; but at length the season of summer does come.
The mystery of a person, indeed, is ever divine to him that has a sense for the godlike.
It is meritorious to insist on forms; religion and all else naturally clothes itself in forms. Everywhere the formed world is the only habitable one.
What, in the devil’s name, is the use of respectability, with never so many gigs and silver spoons, if thou inwardly art the pitifulness of all men?
In the long run every government is the exact symbol of its people, with their wisdom and non-wisdom.
The authentic insight and experience of any human soul, were it but insight and experience in hewing of wood and drawing of water, is real knowledge, a real possession and acquirement.
All destruction, by violent revolution or however it be, is but new creation on a wider scale.
Music is well said to be the speech of angels; in fact, nothing among the utterances allowed to man is felt to be so divine. It brings us near to the infinite.
Innumerable are the illusion and legerdemain tricks of custom; but of all these, perhaps the cleverest is her knack of persuading us that the miraculous by simple repetition ceases to be miraculous.
It is not honest inquiry that makes anarchy; but it is error, insincerity, half belief and untruth that make it.
