Carlyle, Thomas quotes
1795-1881 Scottish Philosopher AuthorA person with half volition goes backwards and forwards, but makes no progress on even the smoothest of roads.
Carlyle, Thomas
Commitment
Clever men are good, but they are not the best.
Carlyle, Thomas
Cleverness
The depth of our despair measures what capability and height of claim we have to hope.
Carlyle, Thomas
Despair
The devil has his elect.
Carlyle, Thomas
Devil
Wondrous is the strength of cheerfulness, and its power of endurance -- the cheerful man will do more in the same time, will do it ;better, will preserve it longer, than the sad or sullen.
Carlyle, Thomas
Cheerfulness
Our life is not really a mutual helpfulness; but rather, it s fair competition cloaked under due laws of war; it s a mutual hostility.
Carlyle, Thomas
Competition
The eternal stars shine out as soon as it is dark enough.
Carlyle, Thomas
Difficulties
One must verify or expel his doubts, and convert them into the certainty of Yes or NO.
Carlyle, Thomas
Certainty
No sadder proof can be given of a person s own tiny stature, than their disbelief in great people.
Carlyle, Thomas
Critics and Criticism
A man cannot make a pair of shoes rightly unless he do it in a devout manner.
Carlyle, Thomas
Crafts
No sooner is your ocean filled, than he grumbles that it might have been of better vintage. Try him with half of a Universe, of an Omnipotence, he sets to quarrelling with the proprietor of the other half, and declares himself the most maltreated of men. Always there is a black spot in our sunshine: it is even as I said, the Shadow of Ourselves.
Carlyle, Thomas
Dissatisfaction
What we become depends on what we read after all the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is the collection of books.
Carlyle, Thomas
Books - Reading
I do not believe in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.
Carlyle, Thomas
Ignorance
The best effect of any book, is that it excites the reader to self-activity.
Carlyle, Thomas
Books - Reading
The fearful unbelief is unbelief in yourself.
Carlyle, Thomas
Doubt
The block of granite which was an obstacle in the pathway of the weak becomes a stepping-stone in the pathway of the strong.
Carlyle, Thomas
Decisions
Oh, give us the man who sings at his work.
Carlyle, Thomas
Cheerfulness
Egotism is the source and summary of all faults and miseries.
Carlyle, Thomas
Egotism
Show me the man you honor, and I will know what kind of a man you are. It shows me what your ideal of manhood is, and what kind of a man you long to be.
Carlyle, Thomas
Character
The dust of controversy is merely the falsehood flying off.
Carlyle, Thomas
Controversy
If there be no enemy there s no fight. If no fight, no victory and if no victory there is no crown.
Carlyle, Thomas
Enemies
There are but two ways of paying debt: Increase of industry in raising income, increase of thrift in laying out.
Carlyle, Thomas
Debt
The three great elements of modern civilization, Gun powder, Printing, and the Protestant religion.
Carlyle, Thomas
Civilization
The old cathedrals are good, but the great blue dome that hangs over everything is better.
Carlyle, Thomas
Churches
Doubt, of whatever kind, can be ended by action alone.
Carlyle, Thomas
Doubt
Do the duty which lies nearest to you, the second duty will then become clearer.
Carlyle, Thomas
Duty
After all manner of professors have done their best for us, the place we are to get knowledge is in books. The true university of these days is a collection of books.
Carlyle, Thomas
Books - Reading
If a book comes from the heart it will contrive to reach other hearts. All art and author craft are of small account to that.
Carlyle, Thomas
Books - Reading
A person who is gifted sees the essential point and leaves the rest as surplus.
Carlyle, Thomas
Focus
Pin your faith to no ones sleeves, haven t you two eyes of your own.
Carlyle, Thomas
Individuality
History is the distillation of rumor.
Carlyle, Thomas
History and Historians
Stern accuracy in inquiring, bold imagination in describing, these are the cogs on which history soars or flutters and wobbles.
Carlyle, Thomas
History and Historians
What are your historical Facts; still more your biographical? Wilt thou know a man by stringing-together beadrolls of what thou namest Facts?
Carlyle, Thomas
Facts
The greatest of all faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none.
Carlyle, Thomas
Faults
I grow daily to honor facts more and more, and theory less and less. A fact, it seems to me, is a great thing -- a sentence printed, if not by God, then at least by the Devil.
Carlyle, Thomas
Facts
Conclusive facts are inseparable from inconclusive except by a head that already understands and knows.
Carlyle, Thomas
Facts
Men are to be guided only by their self-interests. Good government is a good balancing of these; and, except a keen eye and appetite for self-interest, requires no virtue in any quarter. To both parties it is emphatically a machine: to the discontented, a taxing-machine; to the contented, a machine for securing property. Its duties and its faults are not those of a father, but of an active parish-constable.
Carlyle, Thomas
Government
In the long-run every Government is the exact symbol of its People, with their wisdom and unwisdom; we have to say, Like People like Government.
Carlyle, Thomas
Government
Nothing that was worthy in the past departs; no truth or goodness realized by man ever dies, or can die.
Carlyle, Thomas
Goodness
The first duty of man is to conquer fear; he must get rid of it, he cannot act till then.
Carlyle, Thomas
Fear
The only happiness a brave person ever troubles themselves in asking about, is happiness enough to get their work done.
Carlyle, Thomas
Happiness
The difference between Socrates and Jesus? The great conscious and the immeasurably great unconscious.
Carlyle, Thomas
Greatness
No violent extreme endures.
Carlyle, Thomas
Extremes and Extremists
Cash-payment is not the sole nexus of man with man.
Carlyle, Thomas
Payment
Let each become all that he was created capable of being.
Carlyle, Thomas
Excellence
Genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains.
Carlyle, Thomas
Genius
Society is founded upon cloth.
Carlyle, Thomas
Fashion
Weak eyes are fondest of glittering objects.
Carlyle, Thomas
Eyes
A man without a goal is like a ship without a rudder.
Carlyle, Thomas
Goals
It is not a lucky word, this name impossible; no good comes of those who have it so often in their mouths.
Carlyle, Thomas
Impossibility
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.
Carlyle, Thomas
Happiness
Heroism is the divine relation which, in all times, unites a great man to other men.
Carlyle, Thomas
Heroes and Heroism
The whole past is the procession of the present.
Carlyle, Thomas
History and Historians
The history of the world is but the biography of great men.
Carlyle, Thomas
History and Historians
Make yourself an honest man, and then you may be sure there is one less rascal in the world.
Carlyle, Thomas
Honesty
No great man lives in vain. The history of the world is but the biography of great men.
Carlyle, Thomas
Greatness
To us also, through every star, through every blade of grass, is not God made visible if we will open our minds and our eyes.
Carlyle, Thomas
Faith
If the cut of the costume indicates intellect and talent, then the color indicates temper and heart.
Carlyle, Thomas
Fashion
Painful for a person is rebellious independence, only in loving companionship with his associates does a person feel safe: Only in reverently bowing down before the higher does a person feel exalted.
Carlyle, Thomas
Humility
Ill-health, of body or of mind, is defeat. Health alone is victory. Let all men, if they can manage it, contrive to be healthy!
Carlyle, Thomas
Health
The heart always sees before than the head can see.
Carlyle, Thomas
Heart
He that can work is born to be king of something.
Carlyle, Thomas
Kings
For man is not the creature and product of Mechanism; but, in a far truer sense, its creator and producer.
Carlyle, Thomas
Machinery
Secrecy is the element of all goodness; even virtue, even beauty is mysterious.
Carlyle, Thomas
Mystery
Nothing is more terrible than activity without insight.
Carlyle, Thomas
Insights
Laughter is the cipher key wherewith we decipher the whole man
Carlyle, Thomas
Laughter
We have our little theory on all human and divine things. Poetry, the workings of genius itself, which, in all times, with one or another meaning, has been called Inspiration, and held to be mysterious and inscrutable, is no longer without its scientific exposition. The building of the lofty rhyme is like any other masonry or bricklaying: we have theories of its rise, height, decline and fall -- which latter, it would seem, is now near, among all people.
Carlyle, Thomas
Literary Criticism
Imagination is a poor matter when it has to part company with understanding.
Carlyle, Thomas
Imagination
In private life I never knew anyone interfere with other people s disputes but he heartily repented of it.
Carlyle, Thomas
Life and Living
It is a strange trade that of advocacy. Your intellect, your highest heavenly gift is hung up in the shop window like a loaded pistol for sale.
Carlyle, Thomas
Influence
The real use of gunpowder is to make all men tall.
Carlyle, Thomas
Invention and Inventor
The tragedy of life is not so much what men suffer, but rather what they miss.
Carlyle, Thomas
Life and Living
Life is a little gleam of time between two eternity s.
Carlyle, Thomas
Life and Living
The true university of these days is a collection of books.
Carlyle, Thomas
Libraries
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.
Carlyle, Thomas
Labor
Man is emphatically a proselytizing creature.
Carlyle, Thomas
Humankind
Not our logical faculty, but our imaginative one is king over us. I might say, priest and prophet to lead us to heaven-ward, or magician and wizard to lead us hellward.
Carlyle, Thomas
Imagination
Tell a person they are brave and you help them become so.
Carlyle, Thomas
Leaders and Leadership
The person who cannot laugh is not only ready for treason, and deceptions, their whole life is already a treason and deception.
Carlyle, Thomas
Laughter
The actual well seen is ideal.
Carlyle, Thomas
Ideals and Idealism
Love is not altogether a delirium, yet it has many points in common therewith.
Carlyle, Thomas
Love
For all right judgment of any man or things it is useful, nay, essential, to see his good qualities before pronouncing on his bad.
Carlyle, Thomas
Judgment and Judges
No man who has once heartily and wholly laughed can be altogether irreclaimably bad.
Carlyle, Thomas
Laughter
Isolation is the sum total of wretchedness to a man.
Carlyle, Thomas
Loneliness
The world is a republic of mediocrities, and always was.
Carlyle, Thomas
Mediocrity
True humor springs not more from the head than from the heart. It is not contempt; its essence is love. It issues not in laughter, but in still smiles, which lie far deeper.
Carlyle, Thomas
Humor
Not what I have, but what I do is my kingdom.
Carlyle, Thomas
Materialism
Foolish men imagine that because judgment for an evil thing is delayed, there is no justice; but only accident here below. Judgment for an evil thing is many times delayed some day or two, some century or two, but it is sure as life, it is sure as death.
Carlyle, Thomas
Judgment and Judges
There is a great discovery still to be made in literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write.
Carlyle, Thomas
Literature
Culture is the process by which a person becomes all that they were created capable of being.
Carlyle, Thomas
Potential
Imperfection clings to a person, and if they wait till they are brushed off entirely, they would spin for ever on their axis, advancing nowhere.
Carlyle, Thomas
Perfection
Only the person of worth can recognize the worth in others.
Carlyle, Thomas
Potential
Every new opinion, at its starting, is precisely in a minority of one.
Carlyle, Thomas
Opinions
A man perfects himself by working. Foul jungles are cleared away, fair seed-fields rise instead, and stately cities; and with the man himself first ceases to be a jungle, and foul unwholesome desert thereby. The man is now a man.
Carlyle, Thomas
Work
We were wise indeed, could we discern truly the signs of our own time; and by knowledge of its wants and advantages, wisely adjust our own position in it. Let us, instead of gazing idly into the obscure distance, look calmly around us, for a little, on the perplexed scene where we stand. Perhaps, on a more serious inspection, something of its perplexity will disappear, some of its distinctive characters and deeper tendencies more clearly reveal themselves; whereby our own relations to it, our own true aims and endeavors in it, may also become clearer.
Carlyle, Thomas
Present
Our main business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what clearly lies at hand.
Carlyle, Thomas
Present
A person usually has two reasons for doing something: a good reason and the real reason.
Carlyle, Thomas
Reason
In a symbol there is concealment and yet revelation: here therefore, by silence and by speech acting together, comes a double significance. In the symbol proper, what we can call a symbol, there is ever, more or less distinctly and directly, some embodiment and revelation of the Infinite; the Infinite is made to blend itself with the Finite, to stand visible, and as it were, attainable there. By symbols, accordingly, is man guided and commanded, made happy, made wretched.
Carlyle, Thomas
Symbols
Popular opinion is the greatest lie in the world.
Carlyle, Thomas
Popularity
Permanence, perseverance and persistence in spite of all obstacle s, discouragement s, and impossibilities: It is this, that in all things distinguishes the strong soul from the weak.
Carlyle, Thomas
Perseverance
Every noble work is at first impossible.
Carlyle, Thomas
Work
Our works are the mirror wherein the spirit first sees its natural lineaments, Hence, too, the folly of that impossible precept, Know thyself; till it be translated into this partially possible one, know what thou canst work at.
Carlyle, Thomas
Work
Work alone is noble.
Carlyle, Thomas
Work
Little other than a red tape Talking-machine, and unhappy Bag of Parliamentary Eloquence.
Carlyle, Thomas
Politicians and Politics
Let one who wants to move and convince others, first be convinced and moved themselves. If a person speaks with genuine earnestness the thoughts, the emotion and the actual condition of their own heart, others will listen because we all are knit together by the tie of sympathy.
Carlyle, Thomas
Persuasion
It is a vain hope to make people happy by politics.
Carlyle, Thomas
Politicians and Politics
The past is all holy to us; the dead are all holy; even they that were wicked when alive.
Carlyle, Thomas
Past
Man is a tool-using animal. Without tools he is nothing, with tools he is all.
Carlyle, Thomas
Tools
Not brute force but only persuasion and faith are the kings of this world.
Carlyle, Thomas
Persuasion
For suffering and enduring there is no remedy, but striving and doing.
Carlyle, Thomas
Suffering
For the superior morality, of which we hear so much, we too would desire to be thankful: at the same time, it were but blindness to deny that this superior morality is properly rather an inferior criminality, produced not by greater love of Virtue, but by greater perfection of Police; and of that far subtler and stronger Police, called Public Opinion.
Carlyle, Thomas
Morality
If you look deep enough you will see music; the heart of nature being everywhere music.
Carlyle, Thomas
Music
One is hardly sensible of fatigue while he marches to music.
Carlyle, Thomas
Music
Song is the heroics of speech.
Carlyle, Thomas
Music
Cash-payment never was, or could except for a few years be, the union-bond of man to man. Cash never yet paid one man fully his deserts to another; nor could it, nor can it, now or henceforth to the end of the world.
Carlyle, Thomas
Money
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.
Carlyle, Thomas
Music
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.
Carlyle, Thomas
Motivation
Reform is not pleasant, but grievous; no person can reform themselves without suffering and hard work, how much less a nation.
Carlyle, Thomas
Reform
No good book or good thing of any kind shows it best face at first. No the most common quality of in a true work of art that has excellence and depth, is that at first sight it produces a certain disappointment.
Carlyle, Thomas
Quality
Silence is more eloquent than words.
Carlyle, Thomas
Silence
It were a real increase of human happiness, could all young men from the age of nineteen be covered under barrels, or rendered otherwise invisible; and there left to follow their lawful studies and callings, till they emerged, sadder and wiser, at the age of twenty-five.
Carlyle, Thomas
Students
The purpose of man is in action not thought.
Carlyle, Thomas
Purpose
No age seemed the age of romance to itself.
Carlyle, Thomas
Romance and Romanticism
Men s hearts ought not to be set against one another, but set with one another, and all against evil only.
Carlyle, Thomas
Unity
To reform a world, to reform a nation, no wise man will undertake; and all but foolish men know, that the only solid, though a far slower reformation, is what each begins and perfects on himself.
Carlyle, Thomas
Reform
All men, if they work not as in the great taskmaster s eye, will work wrong, and work unhappily for themselves and for you.
Carlyle, Thomas
Responsibility
If time is precious, no book that will not improve by repeated reading deserves to be read at all.
Carlyle, Thomas
Time and Time Management
Science must have originated in the feeling that something was wrong.
Carlyle, Thomas
Science and Scientists
The illimitable, silent, never-resting thing called Time, rolling, rushing on, swift, silent, like an all-embracing ocean-tide, on which we and all the universe swim like exhalations, like apparitions which are, and then are not: this is forever very literally a miracle; a thing to strike us dumb, for we have no word to speak about it.
Carlyle, Thomas
Time and Time Management
I don t pretend to understand the Universe -- it s a great deal bigger than I am.
Carlyle, Thomas
Universe
History shows that the majority of people that have done anything great have passed their youth in seclusion.
Carlyle, Thomas
Solitude
Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves.
Carlyle, Thomas
Silence
The man without a purpose is like a ship without a rudder -- waif, a nothing, a no man. Have a purpose in life, and, having it, throw such strength of mind and muscle into your work as God has given you.
Carlyle, Thomas
Purpose
When we can drain the Ocean into mill-ponds, and bottle up the Force of Gravity, to be sold by retail, in gas jars; then may we hope to comprehend the infinitudes of man s soul under formulas of Profit and Loss; and rule over this too, as over a patent engine, by checks, and valves, and balances.
Carlyle, Thomas
Technology
Speech is human, silence is divine, yet also brutish and dead: therefore we must learn both arts.
Carlyle, Thomas
Speech
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.
Carlyle, Thomas
Sarcasm
The merit of originality is not novelty; it is sincerity.
Carlyle, Thomas
Sincerity
The spiritual is the parent of the practical.
Carlyle, Thomas
Spirit and Spirituality
No ghost was every seen by two pair of eyes.
Carlyle, Thomas
Spirit and Spirituality
Silence is as deep as eternity, speech a shallow as time.
Carlyle, Thomas
Silence
No person was every rightly understood until they had been first regarded with a certain feeling, not of tolerance, but of sympathy.
Carlyle, Thomas
Understanding
Reality, if rightly interpreted, is grander than fiction.
Carlyle, Thomas
Reality
The cut of a garment speaks of intellect and talent and the color of temperament and heart.
Carlyle, Thomas
Temperament
The barrenest of all mortals is the sentimentalist.
Carlyle, Thomas
Sentiment
Under all speech that is good for anything there lies a silence that is better. Silence is deep as Eternity; speech is shallow as Time.
Carlyle, Thomas
Silence
Skepticism, as I said, is not intellectual only; it is moral also; a chronic atrophy and disease of the whole soul. A man lives by believing something; not by debating and arguing about many things. A sad case for him when all that he can manage to believe is something he can button in his pocket, and with one or the other organ eat and digest! Lower than that he will not get.
Carlyle, Thomas
Skepticism
When the oak is felled the whole forest echoes with it fall, but a hundred acorns are sown in silence by an unnoticed breeze.
Carlyle, Thomas
Silence
Thought is the parent of the deed.
Carlyle, Thomas
Thoughts and Thinking
Wonderful Force of Public Opinion! We must act and walk in all points as it prescribes; follow the traffic it bids us, realize the sum of money, the degree of influence it expects of us, or we shall be lightly esteemed; certain mouthfuls of articulate wind will be blown at us, and this what mortal courage can front?
Carlyle, Thomas
Public Opinion
We call it a Society; and go about professing openly the totalest separation, isolation. Our life is not a mutual helpfulness; but rather, cloaked under due laws-of-war, named fair competition and so forth, it is a mutual hostility.
Carlyle, Thomas
Society
The soul gives unity to what it looks at with love.
Carlyle, Thomas
Soul
There is often more spiritual force in a proverb than in whole philosophical systems.
Carlyle, Thomas
Proverbs
If an eloquent speaker speak not the truth, is there a more horrid kind of object in creation?
Carlyle, Thomas
Speakers and Speaking
If what you have done is unjust, you have not succeeded.
Carlyle, Thomas
Success
Of all acts of man repentance is the most divine. The greatest of all faults is to be conscious of none.
Carlyle, Thomas
Repentance
Man s unhappiness, as I construe, comes of his greatness; it is because there is an Infinite in him, which with all his cunning he cannot quite bury under the Finite.
Carlyle, Thomas
Unhappiness
Speech is of time, silence is of eternity.
Carlyle, Thomas
Silence
A man willing to work, and unable to find work, is perhaps the saddest sight that fortune s inequality exhibits under this sun.
Carlyle, Thomas
Unemployment
The first sin in our universe was Lucifer s self conceit.
Carlyle, Thomas
Sin
Thought once awakened does not again slumber; unfolds itself into a System of Thought; grows, in man after man, generation after generation, --till its full stature is reached, and such System of Thought can grow no farther, but must give place to another.
Carlyle, Thomas
Thoughts and Thinking
The hell of these days is the fear of not getting along, especially of not making money.
Carlyle, Thomas
Hell
The condition of the most passionate enthusiast is to be preferred over the individual who, because of the fear of making a mistake, won t in the end affirm or deny anything.
Carlyle, Thomas
Enthusiasm
Show me the person you honor, for I know better by that the kind of person you are. For you show me what your idea of humanity is.
Carlyle, Thomas
Association
A man lives by believing something: not by debating and arguing about many things.
Carlyle, Thomas
Argument
Action hangs, as it were, dissolved in speech, in thoughts whereof speech is the shadow; and precipitates itself therefrom. The kind of speech in a man betokens the kind of action you will get from him.
Carlyle, Thomas
Action
The end of man is action, and not thought, though it be of the noblest.
Carlyle, Thomas
Action
I call the book of Job, apart from all theories about it, one of the grandest things ever written with the pen.
Carlyle, Thomas
Bible
All great peoples are conservative.
Carlyle, Thomas
Conservatives
It is the unseen and the spiritual in people that determines the outward and the actual.
Carlyle, Thomas
Behavior
In every phenomenon the beginning remains always the most notable moment.
Carlyle, Thomas
Beginning
All evil is like a nightmare; the instant you stir under it, the evil is gone.
Carlyle, Thomas
Evil
The king is the man who can.
Carlyle, Thomas
Ability
Everywhere in life, the true question is not what we gain, but what we do.
Carlyle, Thomas
Action
In a controversy the instant we feel anger we have already ceased striving for the truth, and have begun striving for ourselves.
Carlyle, Thomas
Anger
Narrative is linear, but action has breadth and depth as well as height and is solid.
Carlyle, Thomas
Action
The archenemy is the arch stupid!
Carlyle, Thomas
Conflict
Our grand business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand.
Carlyle, Thomas
Action
No man lives without jostling and being jostled; in all ways he has to elbow himself through the world, giving and receiving offence.
Carlyle, Thomas
Action
The courage we desire and prize is not the courage to die decently, but to live manfully.
Carlyle, Thomas
Courage
Old age is not a matter for sorrow. It is matter for thanks if we have left our work done behind us.
Carlyle, Thomas
Age and Aging
Conviction never so excellent, is worthless until it coverts itself into conduct.
Carlyle, Thomas
Belief
No iron chain, or outward force of any kind, can ever compel the soul of a person to believe or to disbelieve.
Carlyle, Thomas
Belief
The battle that never ends is the battle of belief against unbelief.
Carlyle, Thomas
Belief
The most fearful unbelief is unbelief in your self.
Carlyle, Thomas
Belief
Adversity is sometimes hard upon a man; but for one man who can stand prosperity, there are a hundred that will stand adversity.
Carlyle, Thomas
Adversity
The outer passes away; the innermost is the same yesterday, today, and forever.
Carlyle, Thomas
Age and Aging
Talk that does not end in any kind of action is better suppressed altogether.
Carlyle, Thomas
Advice
What you see, but can t see over is as good as infinite.
Carlyle, Thomas
Ability
By nature man hates change; seldom will he quit his old home till it has actually fallen around his ears.
Carlyle, Thomas
Change
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.
Carlyle, Thomas
Change
Today is not yesterday: we ourselves change; how can our works and thoughts, if they are always to be the fittest, continue always the same? Change, indeed is painful; yet ever needful; and if memory have its force and worth, so also has hope.
Carlyle, Thomas
Change
Not on morality, but on cookery, let us build our stronghold: there brandishing our frying-pan, as censer, let us offer sweet incense to the Devil, and live at ease on the fat things he has provided for his elect!
Carlyle, Thomas
Cooking
A well-written life is almost as rare as a well-spent one.
Carlyle, Thomas
Biography
History is the essence of innumerable biographies.
Carlyle, Thomas
Biography
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.
Carlyle, Thomas
Biography
No sooner does a great man depart, and leave his character as public property, than a crowd of little men rushes towards it. There they are gathered together, blinking up to it with such vision as they have, scanning it from afar, hovering round it this way and that, each cunningly endeavoring, by all arts, to catch some reflex of it in the little mirror of himself.
Carlyle, Thomas
Biography
Fame, we may understand, is no sure test of merit, but only a probability of such; it is an accident, not a property of man.
Carlyle, Thomas
Fame
Real good breeding, as the people have it here, is one of the finest things now going in the world. The careful avoidance of all discussion, the swift hopping from topic to topic, does not agree with me; but the graceful style they do it with is beyond that of minuets!
Carlyle, Thomas
Upper Class
Virtue is like health: the harmony of the whole man.
Carlyle, Thomas
Virtue
Good breeding differs, if at all, from high breeding only as it gracefully remembers the rights of others, rather than gracefully insists on its own rights.
Carlyle, Thomas
Upbringing
No conquest can ever become permanent which does not show itself beneficial to the conquered as well as to the conquerors.
Carlyle, Thomas
Victory
Variety is the condition of harmony.
Carlyle, Thomas
Variety
Great men are the commissioned guides of mankind, who rule their fellows because they are wiser.
Carlyle, Thomas
Wisdom
Writing is a dreadful labor, yet not so dreadful as Idleness.
Carlyle, Thomas
Writers and Writing
A fair day s wages for a fair day s work.
Carlyle, Thomas
Wages
The greatest event for the world is the arrival of a new and wise person.
Carlyle, Thomas
Wisdom
Wonder is the basis of worship.
Carlyle, Thomas
Wonder
Worship is transcendent wonder.
Carlyle, Thomas
Worship
No man sees far, most see no farther than their noses.
Carlyle, Thomas
Vision
I have seen gleams in the face and eyes of the man that have let you look into a higher country.
Carlyle, Thomas
Vision
Youth is to all the glad season of life; but often only by what it hopes, not by what it attains, or what it escapes.
Carlyle, Thomas
Youth
It is the first of all problems for a man to find out what kind of work he is to do in this universe.
Carlyle, Thomas
Vocation