Thomas Carlyle
127 quotations
One is hardly sensible of fatigue while he marches to music.
Song is the heroics of speech.
Secrecy is the element of all goodness; even virtue, even beauty is mysterious.
Every new opinion, at its starting, is precisely in a minority of one.
The past is all holy to us; the dead are all holy; even they that were wicked when alive.
Cash-payment is not the sole nexus of man with man.
Not brute force but only persuasion and faith are the kings of this world.
Little other than a red tape Talking-machine, and unhappy Bag of Parliamentary Eloquence.
It is a vain hope to make people happy by politics.
Popular opinion is the greatest lie in the world.
Culture is the process by which a person becomes all that they were created capable of being.
Only the person of worth can recognize the worth in others.
Our main business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what clearly lies at hand.
There is often more spiritual force in a proverb than in whole philosophical systems.
The purpose of man is in action not thought.
Reality, if rightly interpreted, is grander than fiction.
A person usually has two reasons for doing something: a good reason and the real reason.
No age seemed the age of romance to itself.
Science must have originated in the feeling that something was wrong.
The barrenest of all mortals is the sentimentalist.
Silence is more eloquent than words.
Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves.
Silence is as deep as eternity, speech a shallow as time.
Speech is of time, silence is of eternity.
The first sin in our universe was Lucifer's self conceit.