Thomas Carlyle Quotes

617 Sourced Quotes

Why did not somebody teach me the constellations, and make me at home in the starry heavens, which are always overhead, and which I don't half know to this day?

Thomas Carlyle
Superstition! that horrid incubus which dwelt in darkness, shunning the light, with all its racks, and poison chalices, and foul sleeping draughts, is passing away without return. Religion cannot pass away. The burning of a little straw may hide the stars of the sky; but the stars are there and will reappear.

Thomas Carlyle
There is a perennial nobleness, and even sacredness, in work. Were he never so benighted, forgetful of his high calling, there is always hope in a man that actually and earnestly works: in idleness alone there is perpetual despair.

Thomas Carlyle
In our wide world there is but one altogether fatal personage, the dunce,--he that speaks irrationally, that sees not, and yet thinks he sees.

Thomas Carlyle
To believe practically that the poor and luckless are here only as a nusiance to be abraded and abated, and in some permissable manner made away with, and swept out of sight, is not an amiable faith.

Thomas Carlyle
With union grounded on falsehood and ordering us to speak and act lies, we will not have anything to do. Peace? A brutal lethargy is peaceable; the noisome is peaceable. We hope for a living peace, not a dead one!

Thomas Carlyle
How indestructibly the good grows, and propagates itself, even among the weedy entanglements of evil.

Thomas Carlyle
Faith is loyalty to some inspired teacher, some spiritual hero.

Thomas Carlyle
Teaching school is but another word for sure and not very slow destruction.

Thomas Carlyle
To the mean eye all things are trivial, as certainly as to the jaundiced they are yellow.

Thomas Carlyle
Heroes, it would seem, exist always and a certain worship of them.

Thomas Carlyle
Lives the man that can figure a naked Duke of Windlestraw addressing a naked House of Lords?

Thomas Carlyle
I think Scandinavian Paganism, to us here, is more interesting than any other. It is, for one thing, the latest; it continued in these regions of Europe till the eleventh century; 800 years ago the Norwegians were still worshipers of Odin. It is interesting also as the creed of our fathers; the men whose blood still runs in our veins, whom doubtless we still resemble in so many ways.

Thomas Carlyle
Nature, which is the Time-vesture of God, and reveals Him to the wise, hides Him from the foolish.

Thomas Carlyle
To the vulgar eye, few things are wonderful that are not distant

Thomas Carlyle
The Orator persuades and carries all with him, he knows not how; the Rhetorician can prove that he ought to have persuaded and carried all with him.

Thomas Carlyle
A mind that has seen, and suffered, and done, speaks to us of what it has tried and conquered.

Thomas Carlyle
At worst, is not this an unjust world, full of nothing but beasts of prey, four-footed or two-footed?

Thomas Carlyle
Such is the world. Understand it, despise it, love it; cheerfully hold on thy way through it, with thy eye on highest loadstars!

Thomas Carlyle
In the huge mass of evil as it rolls and swells, there is ever some good working toward deliverance and triumph.

Thomas Carlyle
Man's earthly interests,'are all hooked and buttoned together, and held up, by Clothes.

Thomas Carlyle
The steam-engine I call fire-demon and great; but it is nothing to the invention of fire.

Thomas Carlyle
Are not our greatest men as good as lost? The men that walk daily among us, warming us, feeding us, walk shrouded in darkness, mere mythic men.

Thomas Carlyle
The Great Man's sincerity is of the kind he cannot speak of, is not conscious of: nay, I suppose, he is conscious rather of insincerity; for what man can walk accurately by the law of truth for one day? No, the Great Man does not boast himself sincere, far from that; perhaps does not ask himself if he is so: I would say rather, his sincerity does not depend on himself; he cannot help being sincere!

Thomas Carlyle
The infinite, absolute character of Virtue has passed into a finite, conditional one; it is no longer a worship of the Beautiful and Good; but a calculation of the Profitable.

Thomas Carlyle
The true Sovereign of the world, who moulds the world like soft wax, according to his pleasure, is he who lovingly sees into the world.

Thomas Carlyle
How, without clothes, could we possess the master organ, soul's seat and true pineal gland of the body social--I mean a purse?

Thomas Carlyle
He is wise who can instruct us and assist us in the business of virtuous living.

Thomas Carlyle
Great is journalism. Is not every able editor a ruler of the world, being the persuader of it?

Thomas Carlyle
There is a majesty and mystery in nature, take her as you will. The essence of poetry comes breathing to a mind that feels from every province of her empire.

Thomas Carlyle