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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
Men
Accidents
Test
Tests
Property
Fame
Sure
Probability
Understand
Accident
May
Merit

More quotes by Thomas Carlyle

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Rest is for the dead.
Thomas Carlyle
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It is part of my creed that the only poetry is history, could we tell it right.
Thomas Carlyle
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What are your Axioms, and Categories, and Systems, and Aphorisms? Words, words.... Be not the slave of Words.
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A mind that has seen, and suffered, and done, speaks to us of what it has tried and conquered.
Thomas Carlyle
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The great silent man! Looking round on the noisy inanity of the world,--words with little meaning, actions with little worth,--one loves to reflect on the great Empire of Silence.
Thomas Carlyle
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The public is anold woman.Let her maunderand mumble.
Thomas Carlyle
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Trust not the heart of that man for whom old clothes are not venerable.
Thomas Carlyle
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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.
Thomas Carlyle
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What unknown seas of feeling lie in man, and will from time to time break through!
Thomas Carlyle
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A background of wrath, which can be stirred up to the murderous infernal pitch, does lie in every man.
Thomas Carlyle
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No nobler feeling than this, of admiration for one higher than himself, dwells in the breast of man. It is to this hour, and at all hours, the vivifying influence in man's life.
Thomas Carlyle
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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.
Thomas Carlyle
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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.
Thomas Carlyle
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How great a Possibility, how small a realized Result.
Thomas Carlyle
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There can be no acting or doing of any kind till it be recognized that there is a thing to be done the thing once recognized, doing in a thousand shapes becomes possible.
Thomas Carlyle
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A pygmy standing on the outward crust of this small planet, his far-reaching spirit stretches outward to the infinite, and there alone finds rest.
Thomas Carlyle
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I want to meet my God awake.
Thomas Carlyle
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persons, with big wigs many of them and austere aspect, whom I take to be Professors of the Dismal Science… Coining “Dismal Science” as a nickname for Political Economy
Thomas Carlyle
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The true Sovereign of the world, who moulds the world like soft wax, according to his pleasure, is he who lovingly sees into the world.
Thomas Carlyle
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Out of the lowest depths there is a path to the loftiest heights.
Thomas Carlyle