Thomas Carlyle Quotes

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What unknown seas of feeling lie in man, and will from time to time break through!

Thomas Carlyle
Death, that is the utmost the crash of the whole solar and stellar system could bring on us.

Thomas Carlyle
I never heard tell of any clever man that came of entirely stupid people.

Thomas Carlyle
It is no very good symptom, either of nations or individuals, that they deal much in vaticination. Happy men are full of the present, for its bounty suffices them; and wise men also, for its duties engage them. Our grand business undoubtedly is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what clearly lies at hand.

Thomas Carlyle
Beautiful it is, and a gleam from the same eternal pole-star visible amid the destinies of men, that all talent, all intellect, is in the first plane moral. What a world were this otherwise!

Thomas Carlyle
There is in man a higher than love of happiness; he can do without happiness, and instead thereof find blessedness.

Thomas Carlyle
Without oblivion, there is no remembrance possible. When both oblivion and memory are wise, when the general soul of man is clear, melodious, true, there may come a modern Iliad as memorial of the Past.

Thomas Carlyle
A heavenly awe overshadowed and encompassed, as it still ought, and must, all earthly business whatsoever.

Thomas Carlyle
Look around you. Your world-hosts are all in mutiny, in confusion, destitution; on the eve of fiery wreck and madness! They will not march farther for you, on the sixpence a day and supply-demand principle; they will not; nor ought they, nor can they. Ye shall reduce them to order, begin reducing them. to order, to just subordination; noble loyalty in return for noble guidance. Their souls are driven nigh mad; let yours be sane and ever saner.

Thomas Carlyle
Metaphysics is the attempt of the mind to rise above the mind.

Thomas Carlyle
The errors of a wise man are literally more instructive than the truths of a fool. The wise man travels in lofty, far-seeing regions; the fool in low-lying, high-fenced lanes; retracing the footsteps of the former, to discover where he diviated, whole provinces of the universe are laid open to us; in the path of the latter, granting even that he has not deviated at all, little is laid open to us but two wheel-ruts and two hedges.

Thomas Carlyle
Scarcely two hundred years back can Fame recollect articulately at all; and there she but maunders and mumbles.

Thomas Carlyle
Alas! while the body stands so broad and brawny, must the soul lie blinded, dwarfed, stupefied, almost annihilated? Alas! this was, too, a breath of God, bestowed in heaven, but on earth never to be unfolded!

Thomas Carlyle
A man with a half volition goes backwards and forwards, and makes no way on the smoothest road; a man with a whole volition advances on the roughest, and will reach his purpose, if there be even a little worthiness in it. The man without a purpose is like a ship without a rudder - a waif, a nothing, a no man. Have a purpose in life and having it, throw such strength of mind and muscle into your work as God has given you.

Thomas Carlyle
Great is wisdom; infinite is the value of wisdom. It cannot be exaggerated; it is the highest achievement of man.

Thomas Carlyle
The insignificant, the empty, is usually the loud; and after the manner of a drum, is louder even because of its emptiness.

Thomas Carlyle
Labor is life: from the inmost heart of the worker rises his God-given force, the sacred celestial life-essence breathed into him by Almighty God!

Thomas Carlyle
The world is an old woman, and mistakes any gilt farthing for a gold coin; whereby being often cheated, she will thenceforth trust nothing but the common copper.

Thomas Carlyle
No hammer in the Horologe of Time peals through the universe when there is a change from Era to Era. Men understand not what is among their hands.

Thomas Carlyle
Woe to him,... who has no court of appeal against the world's judgment.

Thomas Carlyle
Evil, once manfully fronted, ceases to be evil; there is generous battle-hope in place of dead, passive misery; the evil itself has become a kind of good.

Thomas Carlyle
A fundamental mistake to call vehemence and rigidity strength! A man is not strong who takes convulsion-fits; though six men cannot hold him then. He that can walk under the heaviest weight without staggering, he is the strong man... A man who cannot hold his peace, till the time come for speaking and acting, is no right man.

Thomas Carlyle
Freedom is the one purport, wisely aimed at, or unwisely, of all man's struggles, toilings and sufferings, in this earth.

Thomas Carlyle
Hunger whets everything, especially Suspicion and Indignation.

Thomas Carlyle
I grow daily to honor facts more and more, and theory less and less.

Thomas Carlyle
If a man was great while living, he becomes tenfold greater when dead.

Thomas Carlyle
Manhood begins when we have in any way made truce with Necessity; begins even when we have surrendered to Necessity, as the most part only do; but begins joyfully and hopefully only when we have reconciled ourselves to Necessity; and thus, in reality, triumphed over it, and felt that in Necessity we are free.

Thomas Carlyle
A very sea of thought; neither calm nor clear, if you will, yet wherein the toughest pearl-diver may dive to his utmost depth, and return not only with sea-wreck but with true orients.

Thomas Carlyle
We have profoundly forgotten everywhere that Cash-payment is not the sole relation of human beings.

Thomas Carlyle
The philosopher is he to whom the highest has descended, and the lowest has mounted up; who is the equal and kindly brother of all.

Thomas Carlyle