Thomas Carlyle Quotes

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It is a fact which escapes no one, that, generally speaking, whoso is acquainted with his worth has but a little stock to cultivate acquaintance with.

Thomas Carlyle
Only perhaps in the United States, which alone of countries can do without governing,every man being at least able to live, and move off into the wilderness, let Congress jargon as it will,can such a form of so-called Government continue for any length of time to torment men with the semblance, when the indispensable substance is not there.

Thomas Carlyle
Self-contemplation... is infallibly the symptom of disease.

Thomas Carlyle
Love not pleasure; love God. This is the Everlasting Yea, wherein all contradiction is solved...

Thomas Carlyle
All human things do require to have an ideal in them; to have some soul in them.

Thomas Carlyle
All human souls, never so bedarkened, love light; light once kindled spreads till all is luminous.

Thomas Carlyle
Dinners are defined as 'the ultimate act of communion;' men that can have communion in nothing else, can sympathetically eat together, can still rise into some glow of brotherhood over food and wine.

Thomas Carlyle
Wise man was he who counselled that speculation should have free course, and look fearlessly towards all the thirty-two points of the compass, whithersoever and howsoever it listed.

Thomas Carlyle
Oblivion is the dark page, whereon Memory writes her light-beam characters, and makes them legible; were it all light, nothing could be read there, any more than if it were all darkness.

Thomas Carlyle
Perfect ignorance is quiet, perfect knowledge is quiet; not so the transition from the former to the latter.

Thomas Carlyle
Friend, hast thou considered the "rugged, all-nourishing earth," as Sophocles well names her; how she feeds the sparrow on the housetop, much more her darling man?

Thomas Carlyle
Histories are as perfect as the Historian is wise, and is gifted with an eye and a soul.

Thomas Carlyle
No man at bottom means injustice; it is always for some obscure distorted image of a right that he contends: an obscure image diffracted, exaggerated, in the wonderfulest way by natural dimness and selfishness; getting tenfold more diffracted by exasperation of contest, till at length it become all but irrecognis-able.

Thomas Carlyle
Canopus shining-down over the desert, with its blue diamond brightness (that wild, blue, spirit-like brightness far brighter than we ever witness here), would pierce into the heart of the wild Ishmaelitish man, whom it was guiding through the solitary waste there.

Thomas Carlyle
Show me the man you honor; I know by that symptom, better than by any other, what kind of man you yourself are. For you show me there what your ideal of manhood is; what kind of man you long inexpressibly to be.

Thomas Carlyle
Generations are as the days of toilsome mankind; death and birth are the vesper and the matin bells that summon mankind to sleep and to rise refreshed for new advancement. What the father has made, the son can make and enjoy; but has also work of his own appointed him. Thus all things wax and roll onwards: arts, establishments, opinions, nothing is ever completed, but ever completing.

Thomas Carlyle
To each is given a certain inward talent, a certain outward environment or fortune; to each by wisest combination of these two, a certain maximum capacity.

Thomas Carlyle
We have not the love of greatness, but the love of the love of greatness.

Thomas Carlyle
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
Money, in truth, can do much, but it cannot do all. We must know the province of it, and confine it there, and even spurn it back when it wishes to get farther.

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
For man is not the creature and product of Mechanism; but, in a far truer sense, its creator and producer.

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

Thomas Carlyle
A man protesting against error is on the way towards uniting himself with all men that believe in truth.

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

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