Thomas Carlyle Quotes

An increase in light gives an increase in darkness.

Memory is man's greatest friend and worst enemy.

A book is a mirror: if an ape looks into it an apostle is hardly likely to look out.

Duality is not a story. Duality is just a complexity.

Shadow owes its birth to light.

To attempt seeing Truth without knowing Falsehood. It is the attempt to see the Light without knowing the Darkness. It cannot be.

So what is discord at one level of your being is harmony at another level.

The way that I live is in between the dual experiences of the tragedy mask and the comedy mask. I feel that I write best and think best in between those two masks.

I like people who have the capacity to forget. I think that to forget is a good thing. Forgetting is good. But sometimes I cannot. For me, I cannot.

It is better to sit in appreciative contemplation of a world in which beauty is eternally supported on a foundation of ugliness: cut out the support, and beauty will sink from sight.

The stream of thought flows on; but most of its segments fall into the bottomless abyss of oblivion. Of some, no memory survives the instant of their passage. Of others, it is confined to a few moments, hours or days. Others, again, leave vestiges which are indestructible, and by means of which they may be recalled as long as life endures.

There are sometimes beauties in a character which would never have appeared but for a defect, and defects which would never have appeared but for a beauty.

...the darkness does not lift but becomes yet heavier as I think how little we can hold in mind, how everything is constantly lapsing into oblivion with every extinguished life, how the world is, as it were, draining itself, in that the history of countless places and objects which themselves have no power or memory is never heard, never described or passed on.

The memory of everything is very soon overwhelmed in time.

Good and bad; shade and sunlight, there's but a hair's breath between them. It's all one in the end.

The pen will never be able to move fast enough to write down every word discovered in the space of memory. Some things have been lost forever, other things will perhaps be remembered again, and still other things have been lost and found and lost again. There is no way to be sure of any this.

Memory is a strange Bell—Jubilee, and Knell.

One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious.

What were the glories of the sun, if we knew not the gloom of darkness?

In our endeavors to recall to memory something long forgotten, we often find ourselves upon the very verge of remembrance, without being able, in the end, to remember.

The light can be a curtain as well as the darkness.

Of what significance are the things you can forget.

It is lost, lovely child, somewhere in the ragbag that I laughingly refer to as my memory.

Illiterate him, I say, quite from your memory.

The names are the first things to go, after the breath has gone, and the beating of the heart. We keep our memories longer than our names.