Thomas Carlyle Quotes

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Statistics is a science which ought to be honourable, the basis of many most important sciences; but it is not to be carried on by steam, this science, any more than others are; a wise head is requisite for carrying it on.

Thomas Carlyle
The choking, sweltering, deadly, and killing rule of no rule; the consecration of cupidity and braying of folly, and dim stupidity and baseness, in most of the affairs of men. Slopshirts attainable three-halfpence cheaper by the ruin of living bodies and immortal souls.

Thomas Carlyle
Whoso has sixpence is sovereign (to the length of sixpence) over all men; commands cooks to feed him, philosophers to teach him, kings to mount guard over him,to the length of sixpence.

Thomas Carlyle
Goethe's devil is a cultivated personage and acquainted with the modern sciences; sneers at witchcraft and the black art even while employing them, and doubts most things, nay, half disbelieves even his own existence.

Thomas Carlyle
The healthy know not of their health, but only the sick: this is the physician's aphorism, and applicable in a far wider sense than he gives it.

Thomas Carlyle
Well might the ancients make silence a god; for it is the element of all godhood, infinitude, or transcendental greatness,--at once the source and the ocean wherein all such begins and ends.

Thomas Carlyle
We remove mountains, and make seas our smooth highway; nothing can resist us. We war with rude Nature; and, by our resistless engines, come off always victorious, and loaded with spoils.

Thomas Carlyle
Unity, agreement, is always silent or soft-voiced; it is only discord that loudly proclaims itself.

Thomas Carlyle
In a symbol there is concealment and yet revelation: here therefore, by Silence and by Speech acting together, comes a double significance.

Thomas Carlyle
The beginning of all wisdom is to look fixedly on clothes, or even with armed eyesight, till they become transparent.

Thomas Carlyle
Speech that leads not to action, still more that hinders it, is a nuisance on the earth.

Thomas Carlyle
No sooner does a great man depart, and leave his character as public property, than a crowd of little men rushes towards it. There they are gathered together, blinking up to it with such vision as they have, scanning it from afar, hovering round it this way and that, each cunningly endeavoring, by all arts, to catch some reflex of it in the little mirror of himself.

Thomas Carlyle
He who talks much about virtue in the abstract, begins to be suspected; it is shrewdly guessed that where there is great preaching there will be little almsgiving.

Thomas Carlyle
Then sawest thou that this fair Universe, were it in the meanest province thereof, is in very deed the star-domed City of God; that through every star, through every grassblade, and to most through every Living Soul, the glory of a present God still beams.

Thomas Carlyle
Nature admits no lie; most men profess to be aware of this, but few in any measure lay it to heart.

Thomas Carlyle
The grand result of schooling is a mind with just vision to discern, with free force to do: the grand schoolmaster is Practice.

Thomas Carlyle
How were friendship possible? In mutual devotedness to the good and true; otherwise impossible, except as armed neutrality or hollow commercial league. A man, be the heavens ever praised, is sufficient for himself; yet were ten men, united in love, capable of being and of doing what ten thousand singly would fail in. Infinite is the help man can yield to man.

Thomas Carlyle
No good book, or good thing of any sort, shows its best face at first.

Thomas Carlyle
Poetry is the attempt which man makes to render his existence harmonious.

Thomas Carlyle
Margaret Fuller: I accept the Universe. Thomas Carlyle: Gad! she'd better!

Thomas Carlyle
All sorts of Heroes are intrinsically of the same material; that given a great soul, open to the Divine Significance of Life, then there is given a man fit to speak of this, to sing of this, to fight and work for this, in a great, victorious, enduring manner; there is given a Hero, -- the outward shape of whom will depend on the time and the environment he finds himself in.

Thomas Carlyle
What the light of your mind, which is the direct inspiration of the Almighty, pronounces incredible, that, in God's name, leave uncredited. At your peril do not try believing that!

Thomas Carlyle
All true work is sacred. In all true work, were it but true hand work, there is something of divineness. Labor, wide as the earth, has its summit in Heaven.

Thomas Carlyle
To say that we have a clear conscience is to utter a solecism; had we never sinned we should have had no conscience. Were defeat unknown, neither would victory be celebrated by songs of triumph.

Thomas Carlyle
Is not light grander than fire? It is the same element in a state of purity.

Thomas Carlyle
Consider in fact, a body of six hundred and fifty-eight miscellaneous persons, set to consult about "business," with twenty-seven millions, mostly fools, assiduously listening to them, and checking and criticising them. Was there ever, since the world began, will there ever be till the world end, any "business" accomplished in these circumstances?

Thomas Carlyle
What are your Axioms, and Categories, and Systems, and Aphorisms? Words, words.... Be not the slave of Words...

Thomas Carlyle
Before philosophy can teach by Experience, the Philosophy has to be in readiness, the Experience must be gathered and intelligibly recorded.

Thomas Carlyle
A frightful dialect for the stupid, the pedant and dullard sort.

Thomas Carlyle
Whose school-hours are all the days and nights of our existence.

Thomas Carlyle