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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 man.
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
May
Merit
Men
Accidents
Test
Tests
Property
Fame
Sure
Probability
Understand
Accident
More quotes by Thomas Carlyle
A very sea of thought neither calm nor clear, if you will, yet wherein the toughest pearl-diver may dive to his utmost depth, and return not only with sea-wreck but with true orients.
Thomas Carlyle
Eternity looks grander and kinder if time grow meaner and more hostile.
Thomas Carlyle
A battle is a terrible conjugation of the verb to kill: I kill, thou killest, he kills, we kill, they kill, all kill.
Thomas Carlyle
Instead of saying that man is the creature of circumstance, it would be nearer the mark to say that man is the architect of circumstance.
Thomas Carlyle
The depth of our despair measures what capability and height of claim we have to hope.
Thomas Carlyle
So much of truth, only under an ancient obsolete vesture, but the spirit of it still true, do I find in the Paganism of old nations. Nature is still divine, the revelation of the workings of God the Hero is still worshipable: this, under poor cramped incipient forms, is what all Pagan religions have struggled, as they could, to set forth.
Thomas Carlyle
God Almighty never created a man half as wise as he looks.
Thomas Carlyle
May blessings be upon the head of Cadmus, the Phoenicians, or whoever it was that invented books.
Thomas Carlyle
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
Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together that at length they may emerge, full-formed and majestic, into the daylight of Life, which they are thenceforth to rule.
Thomas Carlyle
If what you have done is unjust, you have not succeeded.
Thomas Carlyle
Show me the man you honor I know by that symptom, better than by any other, what kind of man you yourself are. For you show me there what your ideal of manhood is what kind of man you long inexpressibly to be.
Thomas Carlyle
A witty statesman said, you might prove anything by figures.
Thomas Carlyle
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
To the mean eye all things are trivial, as certainly as to the jaundiced they are yellow.
Thomas Carlyle
A noble book! all men's book!
Thomas Carlyle
The cut of a garment speaks of intellect and talent and the color of temperament and heart.
Thomas Carlyle
Adversity is the diamond dust Heaven polishes its jewels with.
Thomas Carlyle
Speech that leads not to action, still more that hinders it, is a nuisance on the earth.
Thomas Carlyle
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