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The vulgarity of inanimate things requires time to get accustomed to but living, breathing, bustling, plotting, planning, human vulgarity is a species of moral ipecacuanha, enough to destroy any comfort.

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
Comfort
Inanimate
Moral
Vulgarity
Living
Accustomed
Human
Breathing
Humans
Planning
Enough
Destroy
Things
Requires
Bustling
Time
Species
Plotting

More quotes by Thomas Carlyle

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Authors are the vanguard in the march of mind, the intellectual backwoodsmen, reclaiming from the idle wilderness new territories for the thought and activity of their happier brethren.
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The eye sees what it brings the power to see.
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The battle that never ends is the battle of belief against disbelief
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Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do that with all thy might and leave the issues calmly to God.
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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.]
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Nine-tenths of the miseries and vices of mankind proceed from idleness.
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The situation that has not its duty, its ideal, was never yet occupied by man. Yes, here, in this poor, miserable, hampered, despicable actual, wherein thou even now standest, here or nowhere is thy ideal work it out therefrom, and, working, believe, live, be free. Fool! the ideal is in thyself.
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A vein of poetry exists in the hearts of all men.
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The thing is not only to avoid error, but to attain immense masses of truth.
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Evil and good are everywhere, like shadow and substance inseparable (for men) yet not hostile, only opposed.
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Talk that does not end in any kind of action is better suppressed altogether.
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A man lives by believing something.
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No person is important enough to make me angry.
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No country can find eternal peace and comfort where the vote of Judas Iscariot is as good as the vote of the Saviour of mankind.
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Why did not somebody teach me the constellations, and make me at home in the starry heavens, which are always overhead, and which I don't half know to this day?
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Every day that is born into the world comes like a burst of music and rings the whole day through, and you make of it a dance, a dirge, or a life march, as you will.
Thomas Carlyle
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It is no very good symptom, either of nations or individuals, that they deal much in vaticination. Happy men are full of the present, for its bounty suffices them and wise men also, for its duties engage them. Our grand business undoubtedly is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what clearly lies at hand.
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The insignificant, the empty, is usually the loud and after the manner of a drum, is louder even because of its emptiness.
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History is philosophy teaching by experience.
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When the oak is felled the whole forest echoes with it fall, but a hundred acorns are sown in silence by an unnoticed breeze.
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