The weakest living creature, by concentrating his powers on a single object, can accomplish something. The strongest, by dispensing his over many, may fail to accomplish anything. The drop, by continually falling, bores its passage through the hardest rock. The hasty torrent rushes over it with hideous uproar, and leaves no trace behind.
Thomas CarlyleHe that works and does some Poem, not he that merely says one, is worthy of the name of Poet.
Thomas CarlyleSkepticism, 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.
Thomas CarlyleIt is the first of all problems for a man to find out what kind of work he is to do in this universe.
Thomas CarlyleOur grand business undoubtedly is, not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand.
Thomas CarlyleNo man at bottom means injustice; it is always for some obscure distorted image of a right that he contends: an obscure image diffracted, exaggerated, in the wonderfulest way by natural dimness and selfishness; getting tenfold more diffracted by exasperation of contest, till at length it become all but irrecognis-able.
Thomas CarlyleIn the true Literary Man there is thus ever, acknowledged or not by the world, a sacredness: he is the light of the world; the world's Priest; -- guiding it, like a sacred Pillar of Fire, in its dark pilgrimage through the waste of Time.
Thomas CarlyleYou can make even a parrot into a learned political economist - all he must learn are the two words "supply" and "demand."
Thomas CarlyleTobacco smoke is the one element in which, by our European manners, men can sit silent together without embarrassment, and where no man is bound to speak one word more than he has actually and veritably got to say. Nay, rather every man is admonished and enjoined by the laws of honor, and even of personal ease, to stop short of that point; and at all events to hold his peace and take to his pipe again the instant he has spoken his meaning, if he chance to have any.
Thomas CarlyleThere is always hope in a man that actually and earnestly works: in Idleness alone is there perpetual despair.
Thomas CarlyleThere is no heroic poem in the world but is at bottom a biography, the life of a man.
Thomas CarlyleThat there should one man die ignorant who had capacity for knowledge, this I call a tragedy.
Thomas CarlyleNo man lives without jostling and being jostled; in all ways he has to elbow himself through the world, giving and receiving offence.
Thomas CarlyleScience 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.
Thomas CarlyleWhy did not somebody teach me the constellations, and make me at home in the starry heavens, which are always overhead, and which I don't half know to this day?
Thomas CarlyleThat great mystery of TIME, were there no other; 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.
Thomas CarlyleSuperstition! that horrid incubus which dwelt in darkness, shunning the light, with all its racks, and poison chalices, and foul sleeping draughts, is passing away without return. Religion cannot pass away. The burning of a little straw may hide the stars of the sky; but the stars are there and will reappear.
Thomas CarlyleThe choking, sweltering, deadly, and killing rule of no rule; the consecration of cupidity and braying of folly, and dim stupidity and baseness, in most of the affairs of men. Slopshirts attainable three-halfpence cheaper by the ruin of living bodies and immortal souls.
Thomas CarlyleGovernment is emphatically a machine: to the discontented a taxing machine, to the contented a machine for securing property.
Thomas CarlyleClean undeniable right, clear undeniable might: either of these once ascertained puts an end to battle. All battle is a confused experiment to ascertain one and both of these.
Thomas CarlyleRightly viewed no meanest object is insignificant; all objects are as windows through which the philosophic eye looks into infinitude itself.
Thomas CarlyleThe true epic of our times is not "Arm's and the Man," but "Tools and the Man"--an infinitely wider kind of epic.
Thomas CarlyleA man's religion consists, not of the many things he is in doubt of and tries to believe, but of the few he is assured of and has no need of effort for believing.
Thomas CarlyleI should say sincerity, a deep, great, genuine sincerity, is the first characteristic of all men in any way heroic.
Thomas CarlyleEvery poet, be his outward lot what it may, finds himself born in the midst of prose; h e has to struggle from the littleness and obstruction of an actual world into the freedom and infinitude of an ideal.
Thomas CarlyleLaws, written, if not on stone tables, yet on the azure of infinitude, in the inner heart of God's creation, certain as life, certain as death, are there, and thou shalt not disobey them.
Thomas CarlyleThere must be a new world if there is to be any world at all!... These days of universal death must be days of universal new birth, if the ruin is not to be total and final! It is Time to make the dullest man consider; and ask himself, Whence he came? Whither he is bound?
Thomas CarlyleHabit and imitation--there is nothing more perennial in us than these two. They are the source of all working, and all apprenticeship, of all practice, and all learning, in this world.
Thomas CarlyleThe great silent man! Looking round on the noisy inanity of the world,--words with little meaning, actions with little worth,--one loves to reflect on the great Empire of Silence.
Thomas CarlyleA poor creature who has said or done nothing worth a serious man taking the trouble of remembering.
Thomas CarlyleMen 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.
Thomas Carlyle