Quote

No good book or good thing of any kind shows it best face at first. No the most common quality of in a true work of art that has excellence and depth, is that at first sight it produces a certain disappointment.

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
Firsts
Face
Book
Common
Produces
First
Faces
Disappointment
Thing
Art
Excellence
Work
Shows
Depth
Kind
True
Sight
Good
Certain
Produce
Best
Quality

More quotes by Thomas Carlyle

Image
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
Image
A noble book! all men's book!
Thomas Carlyle
Image
Adversity is the diamond dust Heaven polishes its jewels with.
Thomas Carlyle
Image
What is nature? Art thou not the living government of God? O Heaven, is it in very deed He then that ever speaks through thee, that lives and loves in thee, that lives and loves in me?
Thomas Carlyle
Image
No good book, or good thing of any sort, shows its best face at first.
Thomas Carlyle
Image
If what you have done is unjust, you have not succeeded.
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
A judicious man looks at Statistics, not to get knowledge, but to save himself from having ignorance foisted 'on him.
Thomas Carlyle
Image
No man at bottom means injustice it is always for some obscure distorted image of a right that he contends: an obscure image diffracted, exaggerated, in the wonderfulest way by natural dimness and selfishness getting tenfold more diffracted by exasperation of contest, till at length it become all but irrecognis-able.
Thomas Carlyle
Image
The Ideal is in thyself, the impediments too is in thyself.
Thomas Carlyle
Image
He that can work is born to be king of something.
Thomas Carlyle
Image
By nature man hates change seldom will he quit his old home till it has actually fallen around his ears.
Thomas Carlyle
Image
Narrative is linear, but action has breadth and depth as well as height and is solid.
Thomas Carlyle
Image
Naps are a way of traveling painlessly through time into the future.
Thomas Carlyle
Image
The difference between Socrates and Jesus? The great conscious and the immeasurably great unconscious.
Thomas Carlyle
Image
A fair day's wage for a fair day's work: it is as just a demand as governed men ever made of governing. It is the everlasting right of man.
Thomas Carlyle
Image
Thought will not work except in silence.
Thomas Carlyle
Image
All great peoples are conservative.
Thomas Carlyle
Image
The secret of business is to know something that nobody else knows. The greatest of faults, I should say is to be conscious of none.
Thomas Carlyle
Image
Of a truth, men are mystically united: a mystic bond of brotherhood makes all men one.
Thomas Carlyle