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Fame, we may understand, is no sure test of merit, but only a probability of such: it is an accident, not a property, of a man like light, it can give little or nothing, but at most may show what is given.

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
Like
Sure
Show
Probability
Understand
Accident
Given
Merit
Light
Test
Give
Tests
Little
Property
Nothing
Fame

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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.
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Let a man try faithfully, manfully to be right he will grow daily more and more right. It is at bottom the condition on which all men have to cultivate themselves.
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All evil is like a nightmare the instant you stir under it, the evil is gone.
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In every object there is inexhaustible meaning the eye sees in it what the eye brings means of seeing.
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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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Every poet, be his outward lot what it may, finds himself born in the midst of prose h e has to struggle from the littleness and obstruction of an actual world into the freedom and infinitude of an ideal.
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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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In a symbol there is concealment and yet revelation: here therefore, by Silence and by Speech acting together, comes a double significance.
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Nine-tenths of the miseries and vices of mankind proceed from idleness.
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To the vulgar eye, few things are wonderful that are not distant
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At worst, is not this an unjust world, full of nothing but beasts of prey, four-footed or two-footed?
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Thought once awakened does not again slumber unfolds itself into a System of Thought grows, in man after man, generation after generation, - till its full stature is reached, and such System of Thought can grow no farther, but must give place to another.
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A well-written life is almost as rare as a well-spent one.
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Unity, agreement, is always silent or soft-voiced it is only discord that loudly proclaims itself.
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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.
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A heavenly awe overshadowed and encompassed, as it still ought, and must, all earthly business whatsoever.
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Lives the man that can figure a naked Duke of Windlestraw addressing a naked House of Lords?
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The tragedy of life is not so much what men suffer, but rather what they miss.
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It is the heart always that sees, before the head can see.
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Let one who wants to move and convince others, first be convinced and moved themselves. If a person speaks with genuine earnestness the thoughts, the emotion and the actual condition of their own heart, others will listen because we all are knit together by the tie of sympathy.
Thomas Carlyle