Thomas Carlyle
226 quotes
Biography
"Love is not altogether a delirium, yet it has many points in common therewith."
"Humor has justly been regarded as the finest perfection of poetic genius."
"A loving heart is the beginning of all knowledge."
"What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books."
"All that mankind has done, thought, gained, or been; it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books."
"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."
"My books are friends that never fail me."(Letter to his mother, Margaret A. Carlyle; 17 March 1817)"
"If time is precious, no book that will not improve by repeated readings deserves to be read at all."
"There needs not a great soul to make a hero; there needs a god-created soul which will be true to its origin; that will be a great soul!"
"(Quoted by Thomas Carlyle) The rude man requires only to see something going on. The man of more refinement must be made to feel. The man of complete refinement must be made to reflect."
"By nature man hates change; seldom will he quit his old home till it has actually fallen around his ears."
"This world, after all our science and sciences, is still a miracle; wonderful, inscrutable, magical and more, to whosoever will think of it."
"Do not be embarrassed by your mistakes. Nothing can teach us better than our understanding of them. This is one of the best ways of self-education."
"Instead of saying that man is the creature of circumstance, it would be nearer the mark to say that man is the architect of circumstance."
"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."
"Speech is human, silence is divine, yet also brutish and dead: therefore we must learn both arts."
"A man's honest, earnest opinion is the most precious of all he possesses: let him communicate this, if he is to communicate anything. There is, doubtless a time to speak, and a time to keep silence; yet Fontenelle's celebrated aphorism, I might have my hand full of truth, and would open only my little finger, may be practiced to excess, and the little finger itself kept closed. That reserve, and knowing silence, long so universal among us, is less the fruit of active benevolence, of philosophic tolerance, than of indifference and weak conviction. Honest Scepticism, honest Atheism, is better than that withered lifeless Dilettantism and amateur Eclecticism, which merely toys with all opinions; or than that wicked Machiavelism, which in thought denying every thing, except that Power is Power, in words, for its own wise purposes, loudly believes every thing: of both which miserable habitudes the day, even in England, is wellnigh over."
"It is now almost my sole rule of life to clear myself of cants and formulas, as of poisonous Nessus shirts."
"The Public is an old woman. Let her maunder and mumble."
"I must say, it [the Koran] is as toilsome reading as I ever undertook. A wearisome confused jumble, crude, incondite; endless iterations, long-windedness, entanglement; most crude, incondite; — insupportable stupidity, in short! Nothing but a sense of duty could carry any European through the Koran ... It is the confused ferment of a great rude human soul; rude, untutored, that cannot even read; but fervent, earnest, struggling vehemently to utter itself in words ... We said "stupid:" yet natural stupidity is by no means the character of Mahomet's Book; it is natural uncultivation rather. The man has not studied speaking; in the haste and pressure of continual fighting, has not time to mature himself into fit speech ... The man was an uncultured semi-barbarous Son of Nature, much of the Bedouin still clinging to him: we must take him for that. But for a wretched Simulacrum, a hungry Impostor without eyes or heart ... we will not and cannot take him. Sincerity, in all senses, seems to me the merit of the Koran; what had rendered it precious to the wild Arab men ... Curiously, through these incondite masses of tradition, vituperation, complaint, ejaculation in the Koran, a vein of true direct insight, of what we might almost call poetry, is found straggling."
"He that works and does some Poem, not he that merely says one, is worthy of the name of Poet."
""Genius" (which means transcendent capacity of taking trouble, first of all)."
"Happy the people whose annals are blank in history books!"
"The unspeakable Turk"
"This great maxim of Philosophy he had gathered by the teaching of nature alone: That man was created to work, not to speculate, or feel, or dream."