卡莱尔名言

CARLYLE, THOMAS QUOTES

(1795-1881),

English essayist, historian, biographer and philosopher

Action

Our grand business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what

lies clearly at hand.

The end of man is action, and not thought, though it be of the noblest.

Nothing ever happens but once in this world. What I do now I do once for all. It

is over and gone, with all its eternity of solemn meaning.

Admiration

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.

Aims

Have a purpose in life, and having it, throw into your work such strength of

mind and muscle as God has given you.

Anarchy

Anarchy is the choking, sweltering, deadly, and killing rule of no rule; the

consecration of cupidity and braying of folly and dim stupidity and baseness,

in most of the affairs of men. Slop-shirts attainable three half-pence cheaper

by the ruin of living bodies and immortal souls.

Appearances

Foolish men mistake transitory semblances for eternal fact, and go astray

more and more.

Appreciation

One of the Godlike things of this world is the veneration done to human worth

by the hearts of men.

Babe

Good Christian people, here is for you an inestimable loan.

—

Take all heed

thereof, and in all carefulness employ it.

—

With high recompense, or else with

heavy penalty, will it one day be required back.

Benevolence

Rare benevolence! the minister of God.

Bible

A noble book! All men's book! It is our first, oldest statement of the

never-ending problem,

—

man's destiny, and God's ways with him here on

earth; and all in such free-flowing outlines,

—

grand in its sincerity; in its

simplicity and its epic melody.

Biography

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 able and wi

lling to furnish the record.

Biography is the most universally pleasant and profitable of all reading.

Books

If a book come from the heart it will contrive to reach other hearts.

—

All art and

authorcraft are of small account to that.

After all manner of professors have done their best for us, the place we are to

get knowledge is in books.

—

The true university of these days is a collection of

books.

Cant

Cant is itself properly a double-distilled lie, the materia prima of the devil,

from which all falsehoods, imbecilities, and abominations body themselves,

and from which no true thing can come.

Change

Today is not yesterday.

—

We ourselves change.

—

How then, can our works

and thoughts, if they are always to be the fittest, continue always the

same.

—

Change, indeed, is painful, yet ever needful; and if memory have its

force and worth, so also has hope.

Cheerfulness

Oh, give us the man who sings at his work.

Wondrous is the strength of cheerfulness, and its power of endurance

—

the

cheerful man will do more in the same time, will do

it better, will persevere in it

longer, than the sad or sullen.

Wondrous is the strength of cheerfulness, altogether past calculation its

powers of endurance. Efforts, to be permanently useful, must be uniformly

joyous,

—

a spirit all sunshine, graceful from very gladness, beautiful because

bright.

Children

Good Christian people, here lies for you an inestimable loan;

—

take all heed

thereof, in all carefulness employ it. With high recompense, or el

se with heavy

penalty, will it one day be required back.

Christ

The difference between Socrates and Jesus Christ? The great Conscious; the

immeasurably great Unconscious.

Conversation

I don't like to talk much with people who always agree with me. It is amusing to

coquette with an echo for a little while, but one soon tires of it.

Custom

Custom doth make dotards of us all.

Dandy

A dandy is a clothes-wearing man,

—

a man whose trade, office, and existence

consist in the wearing of clothes.

—

Every faculty of his soul, spirit, person, and

purse is heroically consecrated to this one object

—

the wearing of clothes

wisely and well; so that as others dress to live, he lives to dress.

The all-importance of clothes has sprung up in the intellect of the dandy,

without effort, like an instinct of genius: he is inspired with cloth

—

a poet of

clothing.

Decision

The block of granite which was an obstacle in the pathway of the weak

becomes a stepping-stone in the pathway of the strong.

Delay

It is one of the illusions, that the present hour is not the critical, decisive

hour.

—

Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year.

—

No

man has learned anything rightly until he knows and feels that every day is

doomsday.

Democracy

Democracy will itself accomplish the salutary universal change from the

delusive to the real, and make a new blessed worl

d of us bye and bye.

Duty

Do the duty which lieth nearest to thee! Thy second duty will already have

become clearer.

Men do less than they ought, unless they do all that they can.

Our grand business is not to see what lies dimly in the distance, but to do what

lies clearly at hand.

Economy

There are but two ways of paying a debt; increase of industry in raising

income, or increase of thrift in laying out.

Eternity

Eternity looks grander and kinder if time grows meaner and more hostile.

Experience

Experience takes dreadfully high school-wages, but he teaches like no other.

Fame

Fame is no sure test of merit, but only a probability of such, it is an accident,

not a property of man.

Faults

The greatest of faults is to be conscious of none.

Gold

Midas longed for gold.

—

He got it, so that whatever he touched became gold,

and he, with his long ears, was little the better for it.

Gossip

In private life I never knew any one interfere with other people's disputes but

that he heartily repented of it.

Government

It seems to me a great truth, that human things cannot stand on selfishness,

mechanical utilities, economics, and law courts; that if there be not a religious

element in the relations of men, such relations are miserable, and doom

ed to

ruin.

Greatness

Great men are the commissioned guides of mankind, who rule their fellows

because they are wiser.

Habit

Habit is the deepest law of human nature.

Hardship

He who has battled with poverty and hard toil will be found stronger and more

expert than he who could stay at home from the battle, concealed among the

provision wagons, or unwatchfulty abiding by the stuff.

Health

With stupidity and sound digestion man may fret much; but what in these dull

unimaginative days are the terrors of conscience to the

diseases of the liver.

History

Biography is the only true history.

History is the first distinct product of man's spiritual nature, his earliest

expression of what can be called thought.

Honesty

Make yourself an honest man, and then you may be sure there is one rascal

less in the world.

Hope

Man is, properly speaking, based upon hope; he has no other possession but

hope; this world of his is emphatically the place of hope.

Humor

True humor springs not more from the head than from the heart.

—

It is not

contempt; its essence is love.

—

It issues not in laughter, but in still smiles,

which lie far deeper.

Idleness

In idleness there is perpetual despair.

Impossibility

It is not a lucky word, this same

have it so often in their mouth.

Infidelity

There is but one thing without honor, smitten with eter

nal barrenness, inability

to do or to be,

—

insincerity, unbelief. He who believes no thing, who believes

only the shows of things, is not in relation with nature and fact at all.

Influence

Not one false man but does unaccountable mischief.

Insensibility

There is a calm, viscous insensibility which will baffle even the gods, and

calmly say, Try all your lightnings here, and see wh

ether I cannot quench

them.

Intellect

The eye of the intellect sees in all objects what it brought with it the means of

seeing.

Judgment

Foolish men imagine that because judgment for an evil thing is delayed, there

is no justice, but only accident here below. Judgment for an evil thing is many

times delayed some day or two, some century or two, but it is sure a life, it is

sure as death!

Knowledge

Properly, there is no other knowledge but that which is got by working; the rest

is yet all a hypothesis of knowledge; a thing to be argued of in schools; a hing

floating in the clouds, in endless logic-vortices, till we try and fix it.

Knowledge conquered by labor becomes a possession,

—

a property entirely

our own. A greater vividness and permanency of impression is secured, and

facts thus acquired become registered in the mind i

n a way that mere imparted

information can never produce.

Labor

Blessed is the man that has found his work.

—

One monster there is in the

world, the idle man.

The true epic of our times is not

an infinitely wider kind of epic

.

There is a perennial nobleness and even sacredness in work.

—

Were he ever

so benighted and forgetful of his high calling, there is always hope in a man

who actually and earnestly works.

Labor is life; from the inmost heart of the worker rises his God

-given force, the

sacred celestial life-essence breathed into him by Almighty God!

Laughter

No man who has once heartily and wholly laughed can be altogether and

irreclaimably depraved.

A laugh, to be joyous, must flow from a joyous heart, for without kindness

there can be no true joy.

How much lies in laughter: the cipher key, wherewith we decipher the whole

man!