Speak not at all, in any wise, till you have somewhat to speak; care not for the reward of your speaking, but simply and with undivided mind for the truth of your speaking.
He is wise who can instruct us and assist us in the business of virtuous living.
Nay, in every epoch of the world, the great event, parent of all others, is it not the arrival of a Thinker in the world?
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.
Providence has given to the French the empire of the land, to the English that of the sea, to the Germans that of – the air!
We do everything by custom, even believe by it; our very axioms, let us boast of free-thinking as we may, are oftenest simply such beliefs as we have never heard questioned.
Little other than a red tape Talking-machine, and unhappy Bag of Parliamentary Eloquence.
The graceful minuet-dance of fancy must give place to the toilsome, thorny pilgrimage of understanding. On the transition from the age of romance to that of science.
Statistics is a science which ought to be honourable, the basis of many most important sciences; but it is not to be carried on by steam, this science, any more than others are; a wise head is requisite for carrying it on.
Not what you possess but what you do with what you have, determines your true worth.
Nature is the time-vesture of God that reveals Him to the wise, and hides him from the foolish.
High Air-castles are cunningly built of Words, the Words well bedded also in good Logic-mortar; wherein, however, no Knowledge will come to lodge.
Intellect is not speaking and logicising; it is seeing and ascertaining.
Well at ease are the Sleepers for whom Existence is a shallow Dream.
The greatest of faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none.
Not what I Have,” continues he, “but what I Do is my Kingdom.
Whatever opinion may be formed of the extent of his dissipation in Dumfries, one fact is unquestionable, that his powers remained unimpaired to the last; it was there he produced his finest lyrics, and they are the finest, as well as the purest, that ever delighted mankind.
Fool! The Ideal is in thyself, the impediment too is in thyself: thy Condition is but the stuff thou art to shape that same Ideal out of: what matters whether such stuff be of this sort or that, so the Form thou give it be heroic, be poetic? O thou that pinest in the imprisonment of the Actual, and criest bitterly to the gods for a kingdom wherein to rule and create, know this of a truth: the thing thou seekest is already with thee, ‘here or nowhere,’ couldst thou only see!
Carlyle thought little of these Essays. “Wretched lives” is his best word for them when he is bilious and the world is all gloom; but when in another place he confesses that he was seldom happier than when writing them, we may take his condemnation as he did his bile, “with a drop of oil and a grain of salt.
All things that have been in this world, all things that are or will be in it, have to vanish: we have our sad farewell to give them.