Thomas Carlyle

Bekannte Zitate von Thomas Carlyle

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.

What you see, but can't see over is as good as infinite.

It were a real increase of human happiness, could all young men from the age of nineteen be covered under barrels, or rendered otherwise invisible and there left to follow their lawful studies and callings, till they emerged, sadder and wiser, at the age of twenty-five.

No sadder proof can be given by a man of his own littleness than disbelief in great men.

The work an unknown good man has done is like a vein of water flowing hidden underground, secretly making the ground green.

Men seldom, or rather never for a length of time and deliberately, rebel against anything that does not deserve rebelling against.

In the long-run every Government is the exact symbol of its People, with their wisdom and unwisdom we have to say, Like People like Government.

To reform a world, to reform a nation, no wise man will undertake and all but foolish men know, that the only solid, though a far slower reformation, is what each begins and perfects on himself.

History shows that the majority of people that have done anything great have passed their youth in seclusion.

Man is, properly speaking, based upon hope, he has no other possession but hope this world of his is emphatically the place of hope.

The first duty of man is to conquer fear he must get rid of it, he cannot act till then.

The old cathedrals are good, but the great blue dome that hangs over everything is better.

Men do less than they ought, unless they do all that they can.

History, a distillation of rumour.

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

Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together.

Doubt, of whatever kind, can be ended by action alone.

No great man lives in vain. The history of the world is but the biography of great men.

Good breeding differs, if at all, from high breeding only as it gracefully remembers the rights of others, rather than gracefully insists on its own rights.

He who has health, has hope and he who has hope, has everything.

A loving heart is the beginning of all knowledge.

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

None of us will ever accomplish anything excellent or commanding except when he listens to this whisper which is heard by him alone.

Under all speech that is good for anything there lies a silence that is better, Silence is deep as Eternity speech is shallow as Time.

Clever men are good, but they are not the best.

Foolish men imagine that because judgment for an evil thing is delayed, there is no justice but only accident here below. Judgment for an evil thing is many times delayed some day or two, some century or two, but it is sure as life, it is sure as death.

Sarcasm I now see to be, in general, the language of the devil for which reason I have long since as good as renounced it.

To us also, through every star, through every blade of grass, is not God made visible if we will open our minds and our eyes.

It is a vain hope to make people happy by politics.

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.

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?

I've got a great ambition to die of exhaustion rather than boredom.

Blessed is he who has found his work let him ask no other blessedness.

Humor has justly been regarded as the finest perfection of poetic genius.

There is a great discovery still to be made in literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write.

I grow daily to honour facts more and more, and theory less and less. A fact, it seems to me, is a great thing a sentence printed, if not by God, then at least by the Devil.

There are good and bad times, but our mood changes more often than our fortune.

Work alone is noble.

The three great elements of modern civilization, Gun powder, Printing, and the Protestant religion.

Not brute force but only persuasion and faith are the kings of this world.

A strong mind always hopes, and has always cause to hope.

All great peoples are conservative.

The only happiness a brave person ever troubles themselves in asking about, is happiness enough to get their work done.

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

Old age is not a matter for sorrow. It is matter for thanks if we have left our work done behind us.

I don't pretend to understand the Universe - it's a great deal bigger than I am.

The courage we desire and prize is not the courage to die decently, but to live manfully.

For all right judgment of any man or things it is useful, nay, essential, to see his good qualities before pronouncing on his bad.