27 Jane Welsh Carlyle Quotes

Jane Welsh Carlyle quotes

1. If they had said that the sun or the moon had gone out of the heavens, it could not have struck me with the idea of a more awful and dreary blank in creation than the words: 'Byron is dead!'

2. A positive engagement to marry a certain person at a certain time, at all haps and hazards, I have always considered the most ridiculous thing on earth.

3. In spite of the honestest efforts to annihilate my I-ity, or merge it in what the world doubtless considers my better half, I still find myself a self-subsisting, and, alas! self-seeking me.

4. Oh Lord! If you but knew what a brimstone of a creature I am behind all this beautiful amiability!

5. Instead of boiling up individuals into the species, I would draw a chalk circle round every individuality, and preach to it to keep within that, and preserve and cultivate its identity.

6. I can see that the Lady has a genius for ruling, whilst I have a genius for not being ruled.

7. The surest way to get a thing in this life is to be prepared for doing without it, to the exclusion even of hope.

8. Not a hundredth part of the thoughts in my head have ever been or ever will be spoken or written - as long as I keep my senses, at least.

9. The triumphal-procession-air which, in our manners and customs, is given to marriage at the outset - that singing of Te Deum before the battle has begun.

1. There is nothing like a good bit of pain for taking the conceit out of one.

2. The habits of study in which I have been brought up have done much to support me. I never allow myself to be one moment unoccupied.

3. Does not a man physically tremble under the mere look of a wild beast or fellow-man that is stronger than himself? Does not a woman redden all over when she feels her lover's eyes on her? How then should one doubt the mysterious power of one individual over another?

4. A fashionable wife! Oh! Never will I be anything so heartless! I have pictured for myself a far higher destiny than this. - Will it ever be more than a picture?

5. Men may be rivals, opponents in their fortunes, and yet be friends in their hearts and fair towards each other's worth; but woman, the instant she is rivaled, becomes unjust.

6. Blessed be the inventor of photography! I set him above even the inventor of chloroform! It has given more positive pleasure to poor suffering humanity than anything else that has ''cast up'' in my time or is like to -- this art by which even the ''poor'' can possess themselves of tolerable likenesses of their absent dear ones. And mustn't it be acting favorably on the morality of the country?

7. It is much to be wished that one had a post that knew what it was doing again; and lawmakers that knew what they were doing. If I were the Government, I should feel rather ashamed of making regulations one month and unmaking them the next.

8. I wonder that among all the evils deprecated in the Liturgy, no one thought of inserting flitting. Is there any worse thing? Oh no, no!

9. Never does one feel oneself so utterly helpless as in trying to speak comfort for great bereavement.

10. Who knows but I shall grow reasonable at last, descend from my ideal heaven to the real earth, marry, and - Oh Plato! - make a pudding?

11. Time is the only comforter for the loss of a mother.

12. I do think there is much truth in the Young German idea that marriage is a shockingly immoral institution, as well as what we have long known it for - an extremely disagreeable one.

13. Teaching, I find, is not the most amusing thing on earth; in fact, with a stupid lump for a Pupil, it is about the most irksome.

14. When one has been threatened with a great injustice, one accepts a smaller as a favour.

15. If I have an antipathy for any class of people, it is for fine ladies. I almost match my Husband's detestation of partridge-shooting gentlemen.

16. I am not at all the sort of person you and I took me for.

17. The longer one lives in this hard world motherless, the more a mother's loss makes itself felt.

18. It is sad and wrong to be so dependent for the life of my life on any human being as I am on you; but I cannot by any force of logic cure myself at this date, when it has become second nature.