Explore Quotes by Jane Welsh Carlyle

Either I am just what God intended me for, or God cannot 'carry out' His intentions, it would seem.

There is never much to be feared for anyone that is born with sense and truth in him, whatever else he may have or want.

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!

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?

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.

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?

It is odd what notions men seem to have of the scantiness of a woman's resources. They do not find it anything out of nature that they should be able to exist by themselves; but a woman must always be borne about on somebody's shoulders, and dandled or chirped to, or it is supposed she will fall into the blackest melancholy!

I rely on the promise, 'God is kind to women, fools, and drunk people.'

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.

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.

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

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!

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

People who are so dreadfully "devoted" to their wives are so apt, from mere habit, to get devoted to other people's wives as well.

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

The only thing that makes one place more attractive to me than another is the quantity of heart I find in it.

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

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.

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.

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