Thomas Carlyle Men Quotations [Page 2]

They wrong man greatly who say he is to be seduced by ease. Difficulty, abnegation, martyrdom, death are the allurements that act on the heart of man.

Lives the man that can figure a naked Duke of Windlestraw addressing a naked House of Lords?

They have their belief, these poor Tibet people, that Providence sends down always an Incarnation of Himself into every generation. At bottom some belief in a kind of pope! At bottom still better, a belief that there is a Greatest Man; that he is discoverable; that, once discovered, we ought to treat him with an obedience which knows no bounds. This is the truth of Grand Lamaism; the "discoverability" is the only error here.

The world is a thing that a man must learn to despise, and even to neglect, before he can learn to reverence it, and work in it and for it.

The Highest Being reveals himself in man.

A man protesting against error is on the way towards uniting himself with all men that believe in truth.

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

The modern majesty consists in work. What a man can do is his greatest ornament, and he always consults his dignity by doing it.

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

A noble book! all men's book!

There are female dandies as well as clothes-wearing men; and the former are as objectionable as the latter.

A poor creature who has said or done nothing worth a serious man taking the trouble of remembering.

The choking, sweltering, deadly, and killing rule of no rule; the consecration of cupidity and braying of folly, and dim stupidity and baseness, in most of the affairs of men. Slopshirts attainable three-halfpence cheaper by the ruin of living bodies and immortal souls.

Of a truth, men are mystically united: a mystic bond of brotherhood makes all men one.

There is no life of a man, faithfully recorded, but is a heroic poem of its sort, rhymed or unrhymed.

Alas! we know that ideals can never be completely embodied in practice. Ideals must ever lie a great way off--and we will thankfully content ourselves with any not intolerable approximation thereto! Let no man, as Schiller says, too querulously "measure by a scale of perfection the meager product of reality" in this poor world of ours.

The greatest of all heroes is One--whom we do not name here! Let sacred silence meditate that sacred matter; you will find it the ultimate perfection of a principle extant throughout man's whole history on earth.

How were friendship possible? In mutual devotedness to the good and true; otherwise impossible, except as armed neutrality or hollow commercial league. A man, be the heavens ever praised, is sufficient for himself; yet were ten men, united in love, capable of being and of doing what ten thousand singly would fail in. Infinite is the help man can yield to man.

No nobler feeling than this, of admiration for one higher than himself, dwells in the breast of man. It is to this hour, and at all hours, the vivifying influence in man's life.

Why multiply instances? It is written, the Heavens and the Earth shall fade away like a Vesture; which indeed they are: the Time-vesture of the Eternal. Whatsoever sensibly exists, whatsoever represents Spirit to Spirit, is properly a Clothing, a suit of Raiment, put on for a season, and to be laid off. Thus in this one pregnant subject of CLOTHES, rightly understood, is included all that men have thought, dreamed, done, and been: the whole External Universe and what it holds is but Clothing; and the essence of all Science lies in the PHILOSOPHY OF CLOTHES.

Rich as we are in biography, a well-written life is almost as rare as a well-spent one; and there are certainly many more men whose history deserves to be recorded than persons willing and able to record it.

Tobacco smoke is the one element in which, by our European manners, men can sit silent together without embarrassment, and where no man is bound to speak one word more than he has actually and veritably got to say. Nay, rather every man is admonished and enjoined by the laws of honor, and even of personal ease, to stop short of that point; and at all events to hold his peace and take to his pipe again the instant he has spoken his meaning, if he chance to have any.

Contented saturnine human figures, a dozen or so of them, sitting around a large long table...Perfect equality is to be the rule; no rising or notice taken when anybody enters or leaves. Let the entering man take his place and pipe, without obligatory remarks; if he cannot smoke...let him at least affect to do so, and not ruffle the established stream of things.

Social Science, is not a 'gay science' but rueful, which finds the secret of this universe in 'supply and demand' and reduces the duty of human governors to that of letting men alone. Not a 'gay science', no, a dreary, desolate, and indeed quite abject and distressing one; what we might call, the dismal science

The merit of originality is not novelty; it is sincerity. The believing man is the original man; whatsoever he believes, he believes it for himself, not for another.

Why tell me that a man is a fine speaker, if it is not the truth that he is speaking?

A man's perfection is his work.

Man's Unhappiness... comes of his Greatness; it is because there is an Infinite in him, with which all his cunning he cannot quite bury under the Finite... Try him with half of a Universe, of an Omnipotence, he sets to quarreling with the proprietor of the other half, and declares himself the most maltreated of men. Always there is a black spot in our sunshine: It is... the Shadow of Ourselves.

Democracy will prevail when men believe the vote of Judas as good as that of Jesus Christ.

Skepticism, as I said, is not intellectual only; it is moral also; a chronic atrophy and disease of the whole soul. A man lives by believing something; not by debating and arguing about many things. A sad case for him when all that he can manage to believe is something he can button in his pocket, and with one or the other organ eat and digest! Lower than that he will not get.

All men, if they work not as in the great taskmaster's eye, will work wrong, and work unhappily for themselves and for you.

Laughter is the cipher key wherewith we decipher the whole man

It is the feeling of injustice that is insupportable to all men.

In a certain sense all men are historians.

One of the Godlike things of this world is the veneration done to human worth by the hearts of men.

Cash-payment never was, or could except for a few years be, the union-bond of man to man. Cash never yet paid one man fully his deserts to another; nor could it, nor can it, now or henceforth to the end of the world.

The Bible is the truest utterance that ever came by alphabetic letters from the soul of man, through which, as through a window divinely opened, all men can look into the stillness of eternity, and discern in glimpses their far-distant, long-forgotten home.

With stupidity and sound digestion, man may front much.

Even in the meanest sorts of labor, the whole soul of a man is composed into a kind of real harmony the instant he sets himself to work.

Over the times thou hast no power. . . . Solely over one man thou hast quite absolute power. Him redeem and make honest.

Wealth of a man is the number of things which he loves and blesses which he is loved and blessed by.

There is no heroic poem in the world but is at bottom a biography, the life of a man.

Poetry is the attempt which man makes to render his existence harmonious.

It's a man's sincerity and depth of vision that makes him a poet.

Piety does not mean that a man should make a sour face about things, and refuse to enjoy in moderation what his Maker has given.

Man, it is not thy works, which are mortal, infinitely little, and the greatest no greater than the least, but only the spirit thou workest in, that can have worth or continuance.

Evil and good are everywhere, like shadow and substance; inseparable (for men) yet not hostile, only opposed.

With respect to duels, indeed, I have my own ideas. Few things in this so surprising world strike me with more surprise. Two little visual spectra of men, hovering with insecure enough cohesion in the midst of the unfathomable, and to dissolve therein, at any rate, very soon, make pause at the distance of twelve paces asunder; whirl around, and simultaneously by the cunningest mechanism, explode one another into dissolution; and, offhand, become air, and non-extant--the little spitfires!

A man ought to inquire and find out what he really and truly has an appetite for; what suits his constitution; and that, doctors tell him, is the very thing he ought to have in general. And so with books.

No man is born without ambitious worldly desires.

If there be not a religious element in the relations of men, such relations are miserable and doomed to ruin.

Happy season of virtuous youth, when shame is still an impassable barrier, and the sacred air-cities of hope have not shrunk into the mean clay hamlets of reality; and man, by his nature, is yet infinite and free.

There is in man a higher than love of happiness; he can do without happiness, and instead thereof find blessedness.

A true delineation of the smallest man is capable of interesting the greatest man.

A man--be the heavens ever praised!--is sufficient for himself.

All work of man is as the swimmer's: a vast ocean threatens to devour him; if he front it not bravely, it will keep its word.

Man is a tool-using animal.

The situation that has not its duty, its ideal, was never yet occupied by man. Yes, here, in this poor, miserable, hampered, despicable actual, wherein thou even now standest, here or nowhere is thy ideal; work it out therefrom, and, working, believe, live, be free. Fool! the ideal is in thyself.

I too acknowledge the all-out omnipotence of early culture and nature; hereby we have either a doddered dwarf-bush, or a high-towering, wide-shadowing tree! either a sick yellow cabbage, or an edible luxuriant green one. Of a truth, it is the duty of all men, especially of all philosophers, to note down with accuracy the characteristic circumstances of their education,--what furthered, what hindered, what in any way modified it.

Friend, hast thou considered the "rugged, all-nourishing earth," as Sophocles well names her; how she feeds the sparrow on the housetop, much more her darling man?

A dandy is a clothes-wearing man--a man whose trade, office, and existence consist in the wearing of clothes. Every faculty of his soul, spirit, person and purse is heroically consecrated to this one object--the wearing of clothes, wisely and well; so that, as others dress to live, he lives to dress.

The highest ensign that men ever met and embraced under, the Cross itself, had no meaning save an accidental extrinsic one.

Show me the man you honor; I know by that symptom, better than by any other, what kind of man you yourself are. For you show me there what your ideal of manhood is; what kind of man you long inexpressibly to be.

Neither let mistakes and wrong directions - of which every man, in his studies and elsewhere, falls into many - discourage you. There is precious instruction to be got by finding that we are wrong. Let a man try faithfully, manfully to be right, he will grow daily more and more right. It is, at bottom, the condition which all men have to cultivate themselves. Our very walking is an incessant falling - a falling and a catching of ourselves before we come actually to the pavement! - it is emblematic of all things a man does.

Are not our greatest men as good as lost? The men that walk daily among us, warming us, feeding us, walk shrouded in darkness, mere mythic men.

A false man found a religion? Why, a false man cannot build a brick house!

Of all God's creatures, Man alone is poor.

The first duty of man is that of subduing fear.

There must be a new world if there is to be any world at all!... These days of universal death must be days of universal new birth, if the ruin is not to be total and final! It is Time to make the dullest man consider; and ask himself, Whence he came? Whither he is bound?

Man makes circumstances, and spiritually as well as economically, is the artificer of his own fortune.

Money will buy money's worth; but the thing men call fame, what is it?

Not one false man but doth uncountable evil.

What this country needs is a man who knows God other than by heresay.

To the wisest man, wide as is his vision. Nature remains of quite infinite depth, of quite infinite expansion and all experience thereof limits itself to some few computed centuries and measured square miles.

Poverty, we may say, surrounds a man with ready-made barriers, which if they do mournfully gall and hamper, do at least prescribe for him, and force on him, a sort of course and goal; a safe and beaten, though a circuitous, course. A great part of his guidance is secure against fatal error, is withdrawn from his control. The rich, again, has his whole life to guide, without goal or barrier, save of his own choosing, and, tempted, is too likely to guide it ill.

I think Scandinavian Paganism, to us here, is more interesting than any other. It is, for one thing, the latest; it continued in these regions of Europe till the eleventh century; 800 years ago the Norwegians were still worshipers of Odin. It is interesting also as the creed of our fathers; the men whose blood still runs in our veins, whom doubtless we still resemble in so many ways.

Every man has a coward and hero in his soul.

There are depths in man that go to the lowest hell, and heights that reach the highest heaven, for are not both heaven and hell made out of him, everlasting miracle and mystery that he is.

The end of man is action.

There is a perennial nobleness, and even sacredness, in work. Were he never so benighted, forgetful of his high calling, there is always hope in a man that actually and earnestly works: in idleness alone there is perpetual despair.

Does it ever give thee pause that men used to have a soul? Not by hearsay alone, or as a figure of speech, but as a thruth that they knew and acted upon. Verily it was another world then, but yet it is a pity we have lost the tidings of our souls. We shall have to go in search of them again or worse in all ways shall befall us.

Freedom is the one purport, wisely aimed at, or unwisely, of all man's struggles, toilings and sufferings, in this earth.

A judicious man uses statistics, not to get knowledge, but to save himself from having ignorance foisted upon him.

A vein of poetry exists in the hearts of all men.

A thinking man is the worst enemy the Prince of Darkness can have; every time such an one announces himself, I doubt not there runs a shudder through the nether empire; and new emissaries are trained with new tactics, to, if possible, entrap and hoodwink and handcuff him.

Neither had Watt of the Steam engine a heroic origin, any kindred with the princes of this world. The princes of this world were shooting their partridges... While this man with blackened fingers, with grim brow, was searching out, in his workshop, the Fire-secret.

Cash-payment is not the sole nexus of man with man.

Philosophy dwells aloft in the Temple of Science, the divinity of its inmost shrine; her dictates descend among men, but she herself descends not : whoso would behold her must climb with long and laborious effort, nay, still linger in the forecourt, till manifold trial have proved him worthy of admission into the interior solemnities.

The king is the man who can.

Give us, O give us the man who sings at his work! Be his occupation what it may, he is equal to any of those who follow the same pursuit in silent sullenness. He will do more in the same time . . . he will do it better . . . he will persevere longer. One is scarcely sensible to fatigue while he marches to music. The very stars are said to make harmony as they revolve in their spheres.

What are your historical Facts still more your biographical Wilt thou know a man by stringing-together beadrolls of what thou namest Facts

Great men are the commissioned guides of mankind, who rule their fellows because they are wiser.

A man perfects himself by working.

Every human being has a right to hear what other wise human beings have spoken to him. It is one of the Rights of Men; a very cruel injustice if you deny it to a man!

A man's religion consists, not of the many things he is in doubt of and tries to believe, but of the few he is assured of and has no need of effort for believing.

A stammering man is never a worthless one. Physiology can tell you why. It is an excess of sensibility to the presence of his fellow creature, that makes him stammer.

This London City, with all of its houses, palaces, steam-engines, cathedrals, and huge immeasurable traffic an tumult, what is it but a Thought, but millions of Thoughts made into One-a huge immeasurable Spirit of a Thought, embodied in brick, in iron, smoke, dust, Palaces, Parliaments, Hackney Coaches, Katherine Docks, and the rest of it! Not a brick was made but some man had to think of the making of that brick.

Men's hearts ought not to be set against one another, but set with one another and all against evil only.

Of all the things which man can do or make here below, by far the most momentous, wonderful, and worthy are the things we call books.

Virtue is like health: the harmony of the whole man.