Thomas Carlyle Quotes

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All work is as seed sown; it grows and spreads, and sows itself anew.

Thomas Carlyle
What, in the devil's name, is the use of respectability, with never so many gigs and silver spoons, if thou inwardly art the pitifulness of all men?

Thomas Carlyle
O reader, to what shifts is poor Society reduced, struggling to give still some account of herself, in epochs when Cash Payment has become the sole nexus of man to men!

Thomas Carlyle
I here, on the very threshold, protest against it in reference to Paganism, and to all other isms by which man has ever for a length of time striven to walk in this world. They have all had a truth in them, or men would not have taken them up. Quackery and dupery do abound; in religions, above all in the more advanced decaying stages of religions, they have fearfully abounded: but quackery was never the originating influence in such things; it was not the health and life of such things, but their disease, the sure precursor of their being about to die! Let us never forget this.

Thomas Carlyle
Cobden is an inspired bagman, who believes in a calico millennium.

Thomas Carlyle
In a valiant suffering for others, not in a slothful making others suffer for us, did nobleness ever lie.

Thomas Carlyle
No lie you can speak or act but it will come, after longer or shorter circulation, like a Bill drawn on Nature's Reality, and be presented there for payment, — with the answer, No effects.

Thomas Carlyle
History is the essence of innumerable biographies.

Thomas Carlyle
Democracy is, by the nature of it, a self-canceling business; and it gives in the long run a net result of zero.

Thomas Carlyle
Such souls are, in these days, getting somewhat out of humour with the world. Your very Byron, in these days, is at least driven mad; flatly refuses fealty to the world. The world with its injustices, its golden brutalities, and dull yellow guineas, is a disgust to such souls: the ray of Heaven that is in them does at least pre-doom them to be very miserable here. Yes:—and yet all misery is faculty misdirected, strength that has not yet found its way. The black whirlwind is mother of the lightning. No smoke, in any sense, but can become flame and radiance! Such soul, once graduated in Heaven's stern University, steps out superior to your guinea.

Thomas Carlyle
He was…a man of an immense head and great jaws like a crocodile's, cast in a mold designed for prodigious work.

Thomas Carlyle
"A fair day's wages for a fair day's work": it is as just a demand as governed men ever made of governing. It is the everlasting right of man.

Thomas Carlyle
Alas! the fearful Unbelief is unbelief in yourself.

Thomas Carlyle
A gifted noble people; a people of wild strong feelings, and of iron restraint over these: the characteristic of noble-mindedness, of genius.

Thomas Carlyle
But leaving this, let us remark one thing which is very plain: That whatever be the uses and duties, real or supposed, of a Secretary in Parliament, his faculty to accomplish these is a point entirely unconnected with his ability to get elected into Parliament, and has no relation or proportion to it, and no concern with it whatever.

Thomas Carlyle
On the dust of our heroic ancestors we too sit ballot-boxing, saying to one another, It is well, it is well! By inheritance of their noble struggles, we have been permitted to sit slothful so long. By noble toil, not by shallow laughter and vain talk, they made this English Existence from a savage forest into an arable inhabitable field for us; and we, idly dreaming it would grow spontaneous crops forever,—find it now in too questionable a state.

Thomas Carlyle
It is always a genial laughter. Not at mere weakness, at misery or poverty; never. No man who can laugh, what we call laughing, will laugh at these things. It is some poor character only desiring to laugh, and have the credit of wit, that does so. Laughter means sympathy.

Thomas Carlyle
I came hither [Craigenputtoch] solely with the design to simplify my way of life and to secure the independence through which I could be enabled to remain true to myself.

Thomas Carlyle
In every phenomenon the beginning remains always the most notable moment.

Thomas Carlyle
Great souls are always loyally submissive, reverent to what is over them.

Thomas Carlyle
Alas! such is the miseducation of these days, it is only among those that are called the uneducated classes — those educated by experience — that you can look for a Man. Even among these, such a sight is growing daily rarer. My father, in several respects, has not, that I can think of, left his fellow. Perhaps among Scottish peasants what Samuel Johnson was among English authors. I have a sacred pride in my peasant father, and would not exchange him, even now, for any king known to me. Gold and the guinea stamp — the Man and the clothes of the man. Let me thank God for that greatest of blessings, and strive to live worthily of it.

Thomas Carlyle
Surely of all 'rights of man', this right of the ignorant man to be guided by the wiser, to be, gently or forcibly, held in the true course by him, is the indisputablest.

Thomas Carlyle
Genius is 'the inspired gift of God.' It is the clearer presence of God Most High in a man. Dim, potential in all men; in this man it has become clear, actual.

Thomas Carlyle
Grave talk and grave humor with the doers of the craft. Building, walling, is an operation that beyond most other manual ones requires incessant consideration — even new invention. I have heard good judges say that he excelled in it all persons they had seen.

Thomas Carlyle
To reconcile Despotism with Freedom:—well, is that such a mystery? Do you not already know the way? It is to make your Despotism just. Rigorous as Destiny; but just too, as Destiny and its Laws. The Laws of God: all men obey these, and have no 'Freedom' at all but in obeying them. The way is already known, part of the way;—and courage and some qualities are needed for walking on it!

Thomas Carlyle
Sarcasm I now see to be, in general, the language of the Devil; for which reason I have, long since, as good as renounced it.

Thomas Carlyle
Burns's Brother Gilbert, a man of much sense and worth, has told me that Robert, in his young days, in spite of their hardship, was usually the gayest of speech; a fellow of infinite frolic, laughter, sense and heart; far pleasanter to hear there, stript cutting peats in the bog, or such like, than he ever afterwards knew him. I can well believe it. This basis of mirth, a primal element of sunshine and joyfulness, coupled with his other deep and earnest qualities, is one of the most attractive characteristics of Burns. A large fund of Hope dwells in him; spite of his tragical history, he is not a mourning man. He shakes his sorrows gallantly aside; bounds forth victorious over them.

Thomas Carlyle
He who takes not counsel of the Unseen and Silent, from him will never come real visibility and speech.

Thomas Carlyle
Great men are the inspired (speaking and acting) texts of that divine Book of Revelations, whereof a chapter is completed from epoch to epoch, and by some named History.

Thomas Carlyle
I plead guilty to valuing such a man beyond all other sorts of men. Smooth-shaven Respectabilities not a few one finds, that are not good for much. Small thanks to a man for keeping his hands clean, who would not touch the work but with gloves on!

Thomas Carlyle