Thomas Carlyle Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thomas Carlyle
Hunger whets everything, especially Suspicion and Indignation.

Thomas Carlyle
Great is wisdom; infinite is the value of wisdom. It cannot be exaggerated; it is the highest achievement of man.

Thomas Carlyle
The insignificant, the empty, is usually the loud; and after the manner of a drum, is louder even because of its emptiness.

Thomas Carlyle
Labor is life: from the inmost heart of the worker rises his God-given force, the sacred celestial life-essence breathed into him by Almighty God!

Thomas Carlyle
The world is an old woman, and mistakes any gilt farthing for a gold coin; whereby being often cheated, she will thenceforth trust nothing but the common copper.

Thomas Carlyle
No hammer in the Horologe of Time peals through the universe when there is a change from Era to Era. Men understand not what is among their hands.

Thomas Carlyle
Woe to him,... who has no court of appeal against the world's judgment.

Thomas Carlyle
Evil, once manfully fronted, ceases to be evil; there is generous battle-hope in place of dead, passive misery; the evil itself has become a kind of good.

Thomas Carlyle
A fundamental mistake to call vehemence and rigidity strength! A man is not strong who takes convulsion-fits; though six men cannot hold him then. He that can walk under the heaviest weight without staggering, he is the strong man... A man who cannot hold his peace, till the time come for speaking and acting, is no right man.

Thomas Carlyle
Freedom is the one purport, wisely aimed at, or unwisely, of all man's struggles, toilings and sufferings, in this earth.

Thomas Carlyle
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
We have profoundly forgotten everywhere that Cash-payment is not the sole relation of human beings.

Thomas Carlyle
The philosopher is he to whom the highest has descended, and the lowest has mounted up; who is the equal and kindly brother of all.

Thomas Carlyle
A very sea of thought; neither calm nor clear, if you will, yet wherein the toughest pearl-diver may dive to his utmost depth, and return not only with sea-wreck but with true orients.

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