Thomas Carlyle Quotes

I want to meet my God awake.

Talk that does not end in any kind of action is better suppressed altogether.

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

Men's hearts ought not to be set against one another, but set with one another and all against evil only.

Heroes, it would seem, exist always and a certain worship of them.

Money will buy money's worth; but the thing men call fame, what is it?

If an eloquent speaker speak not the truth, is there a more horrid kind of object in creation?

We are to take no counsel with flesh and blood; give ear to no vain cavils, vain sorrows and wishes; to know that we know nothing, that the worst and cruelest to our eyes is not what it seems, that we have to receive whatsoever befalls us as sent from God above, and say, "It is good and wise,--God is great! Though He slay me, yet I trust in Him." Islam means, in its way, denial of self. This is yet the highest wisdom that heaven has revealed to our earth.

By nature man hates change; seldom will he quit his old home till it has actually fallen around his ears.

A laugh, to be joyous, must flow from a joyous heart, for without kindness, there can be no true joy.

The three great elements of modern civilization, Gun powder, Printing, and the Protestant religion.

The depth of our despair measures what capability and height of claim we have to hope.

Men do less than they ought, unless they do all they can.

Nothing ever happens but once in all this world. What I do now I do once for all. It is over and gone, with all its eternity of solemn meaning.

All work, even cotton-spinning, is noble; work is alone noble.

Why tell me that a man is a fine speaker, if it is not the truth that he is speaking?

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

Culture is the process by which a person becomes all that they were created capable of being.

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

Look to be treated by others as you have treated others.

Alas! we know that ideals can never be completely embodied in practice. Ideals must ever lie a great way off--and we will thankfully content ourselves with any not intolerable approximation thereto! Let no man, as Schiller says, too querulously "measure by a scale of perfection the meager product of reality" in this poor world of ours.

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

Force, force, everywhere force; we ourselves a mysterious force in the centre of that. "There is not a leaf rotting on the highway but has Force in it: how else could it rot?" [As used in his time, by the word force, Carlyle means energy.]

Every human being has a right to hear what other wise human beings have spoken to him. It is one of the Rights of Men; a very cruel injustice if you deny it to a man!

History after all is the true poetry.

Cherish what is dearest while you have it near you, and wait not till it is far away. Blind and deaf that we are; oh, think, if thou yet love anybody living, wait not till death sweep down the paltry little dust clouds and dissonances of the moment, and all be made at last so mournfully clear and beautiful, when it is too late.

The mystery of a person, indeed, is ever divine to him that has a sense for the godlike.

The courage we desire and prize is not the courage to die decently, but to live manfully.

Coining "Dismal Science" as a nickname for Political Economy

A vein of poetry exists in the hearts of all men.

Does it ever give thee pause that men used to have a soul? Not by hearsay alone, or as a figure of speech, but as a thruth that they knew and acted upon. Verily it was another world then, but yet it is a pity we have lost the tidings of our souls. We shall have to go in search of them again or worse in all ways shall befall us.

The merit of originality is not novelty; it is sincerity.

The modern majesty consists in work. What a man can do is his greatest ornament, and he always consults his dignity by doing it.

One monster there is in the world, the idle man.

Time is the silent, never-resting thing ... rolling, rushing on, swift, silent, like an all-embracing oceantide, on which we and all the universe swim.

When new turns of behavior cease to appear in the life of the individual, its behavior ceases to be intelligent.

Biography is the only true history.

The first sin in our universe was Lucifer's self conceit.

Writing is a dreadful labor, yet not so dreadful as Idleness.

Old age is not a matter for sorrow. It is matter for thanks if we have left our work done behind us.

Acorns are planted silently by some unnoticed breeze.

It is not to taste sweet things; but to do noble and true things, and vindicate himself under God's heaven as a God-made man, that the poorest son of Adam dimly longs. Show him the way of doing that, the dullest day-drudge kindles into a hero. They wrong man greatly who say he is to be seduced by ease. Difficulty, abnegation, martyrdom, death, are the allurements that act on the heart of man. Kindle the inner genial life of him, you have a flame that burns up all lower considerations.

Just in ratio as knowledge increases, faith diminishes.

One seems to believe almost all that they believe; and when they stop short and call it a Religion, and you pass on, and call it only a reminiscence of one, should you not part with the kiss of peace?

Eyes bright, with many tears, behind them.

A man protesting against error is on the way towards uniting himself with all men that believe in truth.

The deadliest sin were the consciousness of no sin

Custom doth make dotards of us all.