Thomas Carlyle - Sartor Resartus (1833)

63 Sourced Quotes

View all Thomas Carlyle Quotes
That monstrous tuberosity of civilised life, the capital of England.

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
Ever, as before, does Madness remain a mysterious-terrific, altogether infernal boiling-up of the Nether Chaotic Deep, through this fair-painted Vision of Creation, which swims thereon, which we name the Real.

Thomas Carlyle
How we clutch at shadows as if they were substances; and sleep deepest while fancying ourselves most awake!

Thomas Carlyle
Man is a Tool-using Animal.... Nowhere do you find him without Tools; without Tools he is nothing, with Tools he is all.

Thomas Carlyle
That there should one Man die ignorant who had capacity for Knowledge, this I call a tragedy.

Thomas Carlyle
The highest ensign that men ever met and embraced under, the Cross itself, had no meaning save an accidental extrinsic one.

Thomas Carlyle
Philosophy complains that Custom has hoodwinked us, from the first; that we do everything by Custom, even Believe by it; that our very Axioms, let us boast of Free-thinking as we may, are oftenest simply such Beliefs as we have never heard questioned. Nay, what is Philosophy throughout but a continual battle against Custom; an ever-renewed effort to transcend the sphere of blind Custom, and so become Transcendental?

Thomas Carlyle
What you see, yet can not see over, is as good as infinite.

Thomas Carlyle
No man who has once heartily and wholly laughed can be altogether irreclaimably bad.

Thomas Carlyle
Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together.

Thomas Carlyle
As there is no danger of our becoming, any of us, Mahometans (i.e. Muslim), I mean to say all the good of him I justly can...

Thomas Carlyle
But deepest of all illusory Appearances, for hiding Wonder, as for many other ends, are your two grand fundamental world-enveloping Appearances, SPACE and TIME. These, as spun and woven for us from before Birth itself, to clothe our celestial ME for dwelling here, and yet to blind it, — lie all-embracing, as the universal canvas, or warp and woof, whereby all minor Illusions, in this Phantasm Existence, weave and paint themselves. In vain, while here on Earth, shall you endeavor to strip them off; you can, at best, but rend them asunder for moments, and look through.

Thomas Carlyle
Councillors of state sit plotting, and playing their high chess-game, whereof the pawns are men.

Thomas Carlyle
The Ideal is in thyself, the impediments too is in thyself.

Thomas Carlyle
Innumerable are the illusions and legerdemain-tricks of Custom: but of all these, perhaps the cleverest is her knack of persuading us that the Miraculous, by simple repetition, ceases to be Miraculous.

Thomas Carlyle
What you see, but can't see over is as good as infinite.

Thomas Carlyle
O thou who art able to write a Book, which once in the two centuries or oftener there is a man gifted to do, envy not him whom they name City-builder, and inexpressibly pity him whom they name Conqueror or City-burner! Thou too art a Conqueror and Victor; but of the true sort, namely over the Devil: thou too hast built what will outlast all marble and metal, and be a wonder-bringing City of the Mind, a Temple and Seminary and Prophetic Mount, whereto all kindreds of the Earth will pilgrim.

Thomas Carlyle
Love is not altogether a delirium…yet has it many points in common therewith.

Thomas Carlyle
For is not a Symbol ever, to him who has eyes for it, some dimmer or clearer revelation of the God-like?

Thomas Carlyle
Hero-worship exists, has existed, and will forever exist, universally among mankind.

Thomas Carlyle
Man's Unhappiness... comes of his Greatness; it is because there is an Infinite in him, with which all his cunning he cannot quite bury under the Finite... Try him with half of a Universe, of an Omnipotence, he sets to quarreling with the proprietor of the other half, and declares himself the most maltreated of men. Always there is a black spot in our sunshine: It is... the Shadow of Ourselves.

Thomas Carlyle
Man is, properly speaking, based upon hope, he has no other possession but hope; this world of his is emphatically the place of hope.

Thomas Carlyle
Man's unhappiness, as I construe, comes of his greatness; it is because there is an Infinite in him, which with all his cunning he cannot quite bury under the Finite.

Thomas Carlyle
He who first shortened the labor of copyists by device of movable types was disbanding hired armies, and cashiering most kings and senates, and creating a whole new democratic world: he had invented the art of printing.

Thomas Carlyle
To know, to get into the truth of anything, is ever a mystic art, of which the best logic's can but babble on the surface.

Thomas Carlyle
Good breeding differs, if at all, from high breeding only as it gracefully remembers the rights of others, rather than gracefully insists on its own rights.

Thomas Carlyle
Speech is too often not the art of concealing thought, but of quite stifling and suspending thought, so that there is none to conceal.

Thomas Carlyle
Language is called the garment of thought: however, it should rather be, language is the flesh-garment, the body, of thought.

Thomas Carlyle
The Book had in a high degree excited us to self-activity, which is the best effect of any book.

Thomas Carlyle