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Imperfection clings to a person, and if they wait till they are brushed off entirely, they would spin for ever on their axis, advancing nowhere.

Thomas Carlyle

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Thomas Carlyle
Age: 85 †
Born: 1795
Born: December 4
Died: 1881
Died: February 5
Essayist
Historian
Linguist
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Mathematician
Novelist
Philosopher
Teacher
Translator
Writer
Philosopher of Chelsea
Perfection
Axes
Wait
Spin
Advancing
Waiting
Imperfection
Action
Nowhere
Persons
Entirely
Brushed
Person
Till
Axis
Ever
Motivation
Clings
Would

More quotes by Thomas Carlyle

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Genuine Work alone, what thou workest faithfully, that is eternal, as the Almighty Founder and World-Builder himself.
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The graceful minuet-dance of fancy must give place to the toilsome, thorny pilgrimage of understanding. On the transition from the age of romance to that of science.
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With union grounded on falsehood and ordering us to speak and act lies, we will not have anything to do. Peace? A brutal lethargy is peaceable the noisome is peaceable. We hope for a living peace, not a dead one!
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When new turns of behavior cease to appear in the life of the individual, its behavior ceases to be intelligent.
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What a wretched thing is all fame! A renown of the highest sort endures, say, for two thousand years. And then? Why, then, a fathomless eternity swallows it. Work for eternity not the meagre rhetorical eternity of the periodical critics, but for the real eternity wherein dwelleth the Divine.
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Government is emphatically a machine: to the discontented a taxing machine, to the contented a machine for securing property.
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Reform is not pleasant, but grievous no person can reform themselves without suffering and hard work, how much less a nation.
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Time is the silent, never-resting thing ... rolling, rushing on, swift, silent, like an all-embracing oceantide, on which we and all the universe swim.
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Obedience is our universal duty and destiny wherein whoso will not bend must break too early and too thoroughly we cannot be trained to know that would, in this world of ours, is a mere zero to should, and for most part as the smallest of fractions even to shall.
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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.
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The difference between Socrates and Jesus? The great conscious and the immeasurably great unconscious.
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A word spoken in season, at the right moment is the mother of ages.
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Midas-eared Mammonism, double-barrelled Dilettantism, and their thousand adjuncts and corollaries, are not the Law by which God Almighty has appointed this His universe to go.
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Happy season of childhood! Kind Nature, that art to all a bountiful mother that visitest the poor man's hut With auroral radiance and for thy nursling hast provided a soft swathing of love and infinite hope wherein he waxes and slumbers, danced round by sweetest dreams!
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In idleness there is a perpetual despair.
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The world is an old woman, and mistakes any gilt farthing for a gold coin whereby being often cheated, she will thenceforth trust nothing but the common copper.
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Thou fool! Nature alone is antique, and the oldest art a mushroom that idle crag thou sittest on is six thousand years of age.
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Eternity looks grander and kinder if time grow meaner and more hostile.
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The greatest mistake is to imagine that we never err.
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Biography is the only true history.
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