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A sad spectacle. If they be inhabited, what a scope for misery and folly. If they be not inhabited, what a waste of space.
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
Inhabited
Spectacle
Scope
Folly
Sadness
Misery
Waste
Space
More quotes by Thomas Carlyle
History shows that the majority of people that have done anything great have passed their youth in seclusion.
Thomas Carlyle
The highest ensign that men ever met and embraced under, the Cross itself, had no meaning save an accidental extrinsic one.
Thomas Carlyle
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
If time is precious, no book that will not improve by repeated readings deserves to be read at all.
Thomas Carlyle
Cease to brag to me of America, and its model institutions and constitutions. America, too, will have to strain its energies, crack its sinews, and all but break its heart, as the rest of us have had to do, in thousand-fold wrestle with the Pythons, and mud-demons, before it can become a babitation for the gods.
Thomas Carlyle
No person is important enough to make me angry.
Thomas Carlyle
The authentic insight and experience of any human soul, were it but insight and experience in hewing of wood and drawing of water, is real knowledge, a real possession and acquirement.
Thomas Carlyle
Biography is the only true history.
Thomas Carlyle
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.
Thomas Carlyle
Wonderful Force of Public Opinion! We must act and walk in all points as it prescribes follow the traffic it bids us, realize the sum of money, the degree of influence it expects of us, or we shall be lightly esteemed certain mouthfuls of articulate wind will be blown at us, and this what mortal courage can front?
Thomas Carlyle
The stifled hum of midnight, when traffic has lain down to rest, and the chariot wheels of Vanity, still rolling here and there through distant streets, are bearing her to halls roofed in and lighted to the due pitch for her and only vice and misery, to prowl or to moan like night birds, are abroad.
Thomas Carlyle
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
Rare benevolence, the minister of God.
Thomas Carlyle
Lives the man that can figure a naked Duke of Windlestraw addressing a naked House of Lords?
Thomas Carlyle
Obedience is our universal duty and destiny wherein whoso will not bend must break too early and too thoroughly we cannot be trained to know that would, in this world of ours, is a mere zero to should, and for most part as the smallest of fractions even to shall.
Thomas Carlyle
Rich as we are in biography, a well-written life is almost as rare as a well-spent one and there are certainly many more men whose history deserves to be recorded than persons willing and able to record it.
Thomas Carlyle
It is part of my creed that the only poetry is history, could we tell it right.
Thomas Carlyle
Rest is for the dead.
Thomas Carlyle
What you see, but can't see over is as good as infinite.
Thomas Carlyle
The times are very bad. Very well, you are there to make them better.
Thomas Carlyle
