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Everywhere in life, the true question is not what we gain, but what we do.

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
Gain
Gains
Everywhere
Question
Action
True
Life

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The mystical bond of brotherhood makes all men brothers.
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In a different time, in a different place, it is always some other side of our common human nature that has been developing itself. The actual truth is the sum of all these.
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Heroes have gone out quacks have come in the reign of quacks has not ended with the nineteenth century. The sceptre is held with a firmer grasp the empire has a wider boundary. We are all the slaves of quackery in one shape or another. Indeed, one portion of our being is always playing the successful quack to the other.
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Courtesy is the due of man to man not of suit-of-clothes to suit-of-clothes.
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Not on morality, but on cookery, let us build our stronghold: there brandishing our frying-pan, as censer, let us offer sweet incense to the Devil, and live at ease on the fat things he has provided for his elect!
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Life is a series of lessons that have to be understood.
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Earnestness alone makes life eternity.
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The first duty of man is to conquer fear he must get rid of it, he cannot act till then.
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No country can find eternal peace and comfort where the vote of Judas Iscariot is as good as the vote of the Saviour of mankind.
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Shakespeare says, we are creatures that look before and after the more surprising that we do not look around a little, and see what is passing under our very eyes.
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The eye sees what it brings the power to see.
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Rightly viewed no meanest object is insignificant all objects are as windows through which the philosophic eye looks into infinitude itself.
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All human things do require to have an ideal in them to have some soul in them.
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Laws themselves, political Constitutions, are not our Life but only the house wherein our Life is led.
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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.
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Superstition! that horrid incubus which dwelt in darkness, shunning the light, with all its racks, and poison chalices, and foul sleeping draughts, is passing away without return. Religion cannot pass away. The burning of a little straw may hide the stars of the sky but the stars are there and will reappear.
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The difference between Socrates and Jesus? The great conscious and the immeasurably great unconscious.
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Language is called the garment of thought: however, it should rather be, language is the flesh-garment, the body, of thought.
Thomas Carlyle
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In our wide world there is but one altogether fatal personage, the dunce,--he that speaks irrationally, that sees not, and yet thinks he sees.
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Rare benevolence, the minister of God.
Thomas Carlyle