Thomas Carlyle Quotes

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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
High Air-castles are cunningly built of Words, the Words well bedded also in good Logic-mortar; wherein, however, no Knowledge will come to lodge.

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

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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Conclusive facts are inseparable from inconclusive except by a head that already understands and knows.

Thomas Carlyle
The most unhappy of all men is the man who cannot tell what he is going to do, who has got no work cut-out for him in the world, and does not go into it. For work is the grand cure of all the maladies and miseries that ever beset mankind,honest work, which you intend getting done.

Thomas Carlyle
A background of wrath, which can be stirred up to the murderous infernal pitch, does lie in every man.

Thomas Carlyle
Obedience is our universal duty and destiny; wherein whoso will not bend must break; too early and too thoroughly we cannot be trained to know that "would," in this world of ours, is a mere zero to "should," and for most part as the smallest of fractions even to "shall.

Thomas Carlyle
Thou fool! Nature alone is antique, and the oldest art a mushroom; that idle crag thou sittest on is six thousand years of age.

Thomas Carlyle
The moment of discovery, "spontaneous illumination..." The infinite is made to blend itself with the finite, to stand visible, as it were, attainable there.

Thomas Carlyle
Piety does not mean that a man should make a sour face about things, and refuse to enjoy in moderation what his Maker has given.

Thomas Carlyle
[Nature] is a Volume written in celestial hieroglyphs, in a true Sacred-writing; of which even Prophets are happy that they can read here a line and there a line.

Thomas Carlyle
In the poorest cottage are Books: is one Book, wherein for several thousands of years the spirit of man has found light, and nourishment, and an interpreting response to whatever is Deepest in him.

Thomas Carlyle
A thinking man is the worst enemy the Prince of Darkness can have; every time such an one announces himself, I doubt not there runs a shudder through the nether empire; and new emissaries are trained with new tactics, to, if possible, entrap and hoodwink and handcuff him.

Thomas Carlyle
A man's honest, earnest opinion is the most precious of all he possesses: let him communicate this if he is to communicate anything.

Thomas Carlyle
Speak not at all, in any wise, till you have somewhat to speak; care not for the reward of your speaking, but simply and with undivided mind for the truth of your speaking.

Thomas Carlyle