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By nature man hates change seldom will he quit his old home till it has actually fallen around his ears.

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
Actually
Hate
Hates
Nature
Quit
Around
Seldom
Change
Quitting
Home
Fallen
Men
Till
Ears

More quotes by Thomas Carlyle

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The barrenest of all mortals is the sentimentalist.
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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.
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The lightning spark of thought generated in the solitary mind awakens its likeness in another mind.
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If those gentlemen would let me alone I should be much obliged to them. I would say, as Shakespeare would say... Sweet Friend, for Jesus sake forbear.
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When we can drain the Ocean into mill-ponds, and bottle up the Force of Gravity, to be sold by retail, in gas jars then may we hope to comprehend the infinitudes of man's soul under formulas of Profit and Loss and rule over this too, as over a patent engine, by checks, and valves, and balances.
Thomas Carlyle
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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
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What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books.
Thomas Carlyle
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It is in general more profitable to reckon up our defeats than to boast of our attainments.
Thomas Carlyle
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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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A man must indeed be a hero to appear such in the eyes of his valet.
Thomas Carlyle
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It is a mathematical fact that the casting of this pebble from my hand alters the centre of gravity of the universe.
Thomas Carlyle
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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.
Thomas Carlyle
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Conviction is worthless unless it is converted into conduct.
Thomas Carlyle
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Parliament will train you to talk and above all things to hear, with patience, unlimited quantities of foolish talk.
Thomas Carlyle
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The meaning of song goes deep. Who in logical words can explain the effect music has on us? A kind of inarticulate, unfathomable speech, which leads us to the edge of the infinite, and lets us for a moment gaze into that!
Thomas Carlyle
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A person who is gifted sees the essential point and leaves the rest as surplus.
Thomas Carlyle
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A poor creature who has said or done nothing worth a serious man taking the trouble of remembering.
Thomas Carlyle
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We call it a Society and go about professing openly the totalest separation, isolation. Our life is not a mutual helpfulness but rather, cloaked under due laws-of-war, named fair competition and so forth, it is a mutual hostility.
Thomas Carlyle
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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
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This world, after all our science and sciences, is still a miracle wonderful, inscrutable, magical and more, to whosoever will think of it.
Thomas Carlyle