Thomas Carlyle Quotes

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

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

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
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
But see! a wandering Night-moth enters, Allured by taper gleaming bright. What passions in her small heart whirling, Hopes boundless, adoration, dread; At length her tiny pinions twirling, She darts, and — puff! — the moth is dead.

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

Thomas Carlyle
Wealth has more and more increased, and at the same time gathered itself more and more into masses, strangely altering the old relations, and increasing the distance between the rich and the poor.

Thomas Carlyle
What are your historical Facts still more your biographical Wilt thou know a man by stringing-together beadrolls of what thou namest Facts

Thomas Carlyle
Neither in tailoring nor in legislating does man proceed by mere accident.

Thomas Carlyle
The leafy blossoming present time springs from the whole past, remembered and unrememberable.

Thomas Carlyle
Midas-eared Mammonism, double-barrelled Dilettantism, and their thousand adjuncts and corollaries, are not the Law by which God Almighty has appointed this His universe to go.

Thomas Carlyle
Does not every true man feel that he is himself made higher by doing reverence to what is really above him?

Thomas Carlyle
Work is the grand cure of all the maladies and miseries that ever beset mankind.

Thomas Carlyle
Our very walking is an incessant falling; a falling and a catching of ourselves before we come actually to the pavement. It is emblematic of all things a man does.

Thomas Carlyle
Did not the Boy Alexander weep because he had not two Planets to conquer; or a whole Solar System; or after that, a whole universe?

Thomas Carlyle
Man always worships something; always he sees the Infinite shadowed forth in something finite; and indeed can and must so see it in any finite thing, once tempt him well to fix his eyes thereon.

Thomas Carlyle
Let a man try faithfully, manfully to be right, he will daily grow more and more right. It is at the bottom of the condition on which all men have to cultivate themselves.

Thomas Carlyle