Quotes from Thomas Carlyle

It is a mathematical fact that the casting of this pebble from my hand alters the centre of gravity of the universe.

Great men taken up in any way are profitable company. We cannot look, however imperfectly, upon a great man without gaining something by him.

The barrenest of all mortals is the sentimentalist

The greatest of faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none.

We looked out on Life, with its strange scaffolding

Not what I Have," continues he, "but what I Do is my Kingdom.

The Poet who could merely sit on a chair, and compose stanzas, would never make a stanza worth much. He could not sing the Heroic warrior, unless he himself were at least a Heroic warrior too.

To men in their sleep there is nothing granted in this world.

Such I hold to be the genuine use of Gunpowder: that it makes all men tall.

Speech is of Time, Silence is of Eternity.

OH, Heaven,it is mysterious,it is awful to consider that we not only carry a future Ghost within us. but are,in very deed, GHOSTS !

Strange enough how creatures of the human-kind shut their eyes to plainest facts; and by the mere inertia of Oblivion and Stupidity, live at ease in the midst of Wonders and Terrors. But indeed man is, and was always, a blockhead and dullard; much readier to feel and digest, than to think and consider.

Fool! The Ideal is in thyself, the impediment too is in thyself: thy Condition is but the stuff thou art to shape that same Ideal out of: what matters whether such stuff be of this sort or that, so the Form thou give it be heroic, be poetic? O thou that pinest in the imprisonment of the Actual, and criest bitterly to the gods for a kingdom wherein to rule and create, know this of a truth: the thing thou seekest is already with thee, 'here or nowhere,' couldst thou only see!

Keine zauberwirkende Rune ist wunderbarer als ein Buch. Bücher sind das auserlesene Besitztum der Menschen.

The suffering man ought really to consume his own smoke; there is no good in emitting smoke till you have made it into fire.

The block of granite which was an obstacle in the pathway of the weak, became a stepping-stone in the pathway of the strong.

Great Men, taken up in any way, are profitable company.

The greatest university is a collection of books.

All things that have been in this world, all things that are or will be in it, have to vanish: we have our sad farewell to give them.

Books are a triviality. Life alone is great.

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

No magic Rune is stranger than a Book. All that Mankind has done, thought, gained or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of Books. They are the chosen possession of men.

Surely of all 'rights of man', this right of the ignorant man to be guided by the wiser, to be, gently or forcibly, held in the true course by him, is the indisputablest.

Whatever opinion may be formed of the extent of his dissipation in Dumfries, one fact is unquestionable, that his powers remained unimpaired to the last; it was there he produced his finest lyrics, and they are the finest, as well as the purest, that ever delighted mankind.