Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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

More quotes by Thomas Carlyle

Image
We call that fire of the black thunder-cloud electricity, and lecture learnedly about it, and grind the like of it out of glass and silk: but what is it? What made it? Whence comes it? Whither goes it?
Thomas Carlyle
Image
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.
Thomas Carlyle
Image
Speech is too often not the art of concealing thought, but of quite stifling and suspending thought, so that there is none to conceal.
Thomas Carlyle
Image
Science has done much for us but it is a poor science that would hide from us the great deep sacred infinitude of Nescience, on which all science swims as a mere superficial film.
Thomas Carlyle
Image
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.
Thomas Carlyle
Image
Insurrection, never so necessary, is a most sad necessity and governors who wait for that to instruct them are surely getting into the fatalest course.
Thomas Carlyle
Image
A thought once awakened does not again slumber.
Thomas Carlyle
Image
Scarcely two hundred years back can Fame recollect articulately at all and there she but maunders and mumbles.
Thomas Carlyle
Image
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.
Thomas Carlyle
Image
It is meritorious to insist on forms religion and all else naturally clothes itself in forms. Everywhere the formed world is the only habitable one.
Thomas Carlyle
Image
The goal of yesterday will be our starting-point to-morrow.
Thomas Carlyle
Image
Evil and good are everywhere, like shadow and substance inseparable (for men) yet not hostile, only opposed.
Thomas Carlyle
Image
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.
Thomas Carlyle
Image
Terror itself, when once grown transcendental, becomes a kind of courage as frost sufficiently intense, according to the poet Milton, will burn.
Thomas Carlyle
Image
The All of Things is an infinite conjugation of the verb To do .
Thomas Carlyle
Image
Success in life, in anything, depends upon the number of persons that one can make himself agreeable to.
Thomas Carlyle
Image
A poor creature who has said or done nothing worth a serious man taking the trouble of remembering.
Thomas Carlyle
Image
Force, force, everywhere force we ourselves a mysterious force in the centre of that. There is not a leaf rotting on the highway but has Force in it: how else could it rot? [As used in his time, by the word force, Carlyle means energy.]
Thomas Carlyle
Image
Professors of the Dismal Science, I perceive the length of your tether is now pretty well run and I must request you to talk a little lower in the future.
Thomas Carlyle
Image
There is but one temple in this Universe: The Body. We speak to God whenever we lay our hands upon it.
Thomas Carlyle