Quotes from Thomas Carlyle

Battles, in these ages, are transacted by mechanism; with the slightest possible development of human individuality or spontaneity; men now even die, and kill one another, in an artificial manner.

We remove mountains, and make seas our smooth highway; nothing can resist us. We war with rude Nature; and, by our resistless engines, come off always victorious, and loaded with spoils.

I do not believe in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.

The beginning of all wisdom is to look fixedly on clothes, or even with armed eyesight, till they become transparent.

Once the mind has been expanded by a big idea, it will never go back to its original state.

For, if a good speaker, never so eloquent, does not see into the fact, and is not speaking the truth of that - is there a more horrid kind of object in creation?

Silence is as deep as eternity, speech a shallow as time.

The spiritual is the parent of the practical.

He that has a secret should not only hide it, but hide that he has it to hide.

Of all acts of man repentance is the most divine. The greatest of all faults is to be conscious of none.

Man is a tool-using animal. Without tools he is nothing, with tools he is all.

The real use of gunpowder is to make all men tall.

The mystical bond of brotherhood makes all men brothers.

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.

Make yourself an honest man, and then you may be sure there is one less rascal in the world.

One monster there is in the world, the idle man.

It is through symbols that man consciously or unconsciously lives, works and has his being.

A man without a goal is like a ship without a rudder.

Wise man was he who counselled that speculation should have free course, and look fearlessly towards all the thirty-two points of the compass, whithersoever and howsoever it listed.

If a man was great while living, he becomes tenfold greater when dead.

Great is wisdom; infinite is the value of wisdom. It cannot be exaggerated; it is the highest achievement of man.

The difference between Socrates and Jesus? The great conscious and the immeasurably great unconscious.

Imagination is a poor matter when it has to part company with understanding.

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.