Thomas Carlyle Quotes

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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
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
Shakespeare says, we are creatures that look before and after; the more surprising that we do not look around a little, and see what is passing under our very eyes.

Thomas Carlyle
It is in general more profitable to reckon up our defeats than to boast of our attainments.

Thomas Carlyle
Is not cant the materia prima of the devil, from which all falsehoods, imbecilities, abominations, body themselves, from which no true thing can come? For cant is itself the properly a double-distilled lie, the second power of a lie.

Thomas Carlyle
The true Church of England, at this moment, lies in the Editors of the newspapers.

Thomas Carlyle
Considering the multitude of mortals that handle the pen in these days, and can mostly spell, and write without glaring violations of grammar, the question naturally arises: How is it, then, that no work proceeds from them, bearing any stamp of authenticity and permanence; of worth for more than one day?

Thomas Carlyle
A man ought to inquire and find out what he really and truly has an appetite for; what suits his constitution; and that, doctors tell him, is the very thing he ought to have in general. And so with books.

Thomas Carlyle
Courtesy is the due of man to man; not of suit-of-clothes to suit-of-clothes.

Thomas Carlyle
Once turn to practice, error and truth will no longer consort together.

Thomas Carlyle
No mortal has a right to wag his tongue, much less to wag his pen, without saying something.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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