Thomas Carlyle Quotes

Give us, O give us the man who sings at his work! Be his occupation what it may, he is equal to any of those who follow the same pursuit in silent sullenness. He will do more in the same time . . . he will do it better . . . he will persevere longer. One is scarcely sensible to fatigue while he marches to music. The very stars are said to make harmony as they revolve in their spheres.

When the oak is felled the whole forest echoes with it fall, but a hundred acorns are sown in silence by an unnoticed breeze.

We call that fire of the black thunder-cloud "electricity," and lecture learnedly about it, and grind the like of it out of glass and silk: but what is it? What made it? Whence comes it? Whither goes it?

The fine arts once divorcing themselves from truth are quite certain to fall mad, if they do not die.

For all right judgment of any man or things it is useful, nay, essential, to see his good qualities before pronouncing on his bad.

Every man is my superior in that I may learn from him.

Prayer is and remains always a native and deepest impulse of the soul of man.

The end of Man is an Action, and not a Thought, though it were the noblest?

History is the distillation of rumour.

Reform is not pleasant, but grievous; no person can reform themselves without suffering and hard work, how much less a nation.

A witty statesman said, you might prove anything by figures.

We observe with confidence that the truly strong mind, view it as intellect or morality, or under any other aspect, is nowise the mind acquainted with its strength; that here the sign of health is unconsciousness.

Cease to brag to me of America, and its model institutions and constitutions. America, too, will have to strain its energies, crack its sinews, and all but break its heart, as the rest of us have had to do, in thousand-fold wrestle with the Pythons, and mud-demons, before it can become a babitation for the gods.

I don't pretend to understand the Universe - it's a great deal bigger than I am.

Thought is the parent of the deed.

The glory of a workman, still more of a master workman, that he does his work well, ought to be his most precious possession; like the honor of a soldier, dearer to him than life.

The greatest mistake is to imagine that we never err.

A man's perfection is his work.

A dandy is a clothes-wearing man--a man whose trade, office, and existence consist in the wearing of clothes. Every faculty of his soul, spirit, person and purse is heroically consecrated to this one object--the wearing of clothes, wisely and well; so that, as others dress to live, he lives to dress.

In a symbol there is concealment and yet revelation: here therefore, by silence and by speech acting together, comes a double significance. In the symbol proper, what we can call a symbol, there is ever, more or less distinctly and directly, some embodiment and revelation of the Infinite; the Infinite is made to blend itself with the Finite, to stand visible, and as it were, attainable there. By symbols, accordingly, is man guided and commanded, made happy, made wretched.

In a certain sense all men are historians.

The grand result of schooling is a mind with just vision to discern, with free force to do: the grand schoolmaster is Practice.

To us also, through every star, through every blade of grass, is not God made visible if we will open our minds and our eyes.

What is philosophy but a continual battle against custom?

The first duty of man is to conquer fear; he must get rid of it, he cannot act till then.

If those gentlemen would let me alone I should be much obliged to them. I would say, as Shakespeare would say... Sweet Friend, for Jesus sake forbear.

I call that [Book of Job], apart from all theories about it, one of the grandest things ever written with pen.

The eternal stars shine out again, so soon as it is dark enough.

The sincere alone can recognize sincerity.

Music is well said to be the speech of angels.

Hunger whets everything, especially Suspicion and Indignation.

No person was every rightly understood until they had been first regarded with a certain feeling, not of tolerance, but of sympathy.

The world is a thing that a man must learn to despise, and even to neglect, before he can learn to reverence it, and work in it and for it.

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

A man perfects himself by working.

Happy season of childhood! Kind Nature, that art to all a bountiful mother; that visitest the poor man's hut With auroral radiance; and for thy nursling hast provided a soft swathing of love and infinite hope wherein he waxes and slumbers, danced round by sweetest dreams!

To me the Universe was all void of Life, of Purpose, of Volition, even of Hostility; it was one huge, dead, immeasurable Steam-engine, rolling on, in its dead indifference, to grind me limb from limb. Oh vast gloomy, solitary Golgotha, and Mill of Death! Why was the living banished thither companionless, conscious? Why, if there is no Devil; nay, unless the Devil is your God?

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.

The first duty of man is that of subduing fear.

The old cathedrals are good, but the great blue dome that hangs over everything is better.

Conviction never so excellent, is worthless until it coverts itself into conduct.

Youth is to all the glad season of life; but often only by what it hopes, not by what it attains, or what it escapes.

The Bible is the truest utterance that ever came by alphabetic letters from the soul of man, through which, as through a window divinely opened, all men can look into the stillness of eternity, and discern in glimpses their far-distant, long-forgotten home.

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.

The difference between Socrates and Jesus? The great conscious and the immeasurably great unconscious.

To say that we have a clear conscience is to utter a solecism; had we never sinned we should have had no conscience. Were defeat unknown, neither would victory be celebrated by songs of triumph.

Man is a tool-using animal. Without tools he is nothing, with tools he is all.

Terror itself, when once grown transcendental, becomes a kind of courage; as frost sufficiently intense, according to the poet Milton, will burn.