Thomas Carlyle Quotes

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

The secret of business is to know something that nobody else knows. The greatest of faults, I should say is to be conscious of none.

This is the eternal law of Nature for a man, my beneficent Exeter-Hall friends; this, that he shall be permitted, encouraged, and if need be, compelled to do what work the Maker of him has intended by the making of him for this world! Not that he should eat pumpkin with never such felicity in the West India Islands is, or can be, the blessedness of our Black friend; but that he should do useful work there, according as the gifts have been bestowed on him for that.

All destruction, by violent revolution or however it be, is but new creation on a wider scale.

We are not altogether here to tolerate. We are here to resist, to control and vanquish withal.

The press is the fourth estate of the realm.

No good book or good thing of any kind shows it best face at first. No the most common quality of in a true work of art that has excellence and depth, is that at first sight it produces a certain disappointment.

Nature alone is antique, and the oldest art a mushroom.

The greatest event for the world is the arrival of a new and wise person.

If Jesus Christ were to come today, people would not even crucify him. They would ask him to dinner, and hear what he had to say, and make fun of it.

A collection of books is the best of all universities.

One must verify or expel his doubts, and convert them into the certainty of Yes or NO.

Nature is the time-vesture of God that reveals Him to the wise, and hides him from the foolish.

Experience is the best of school masters, only the school fees are heavy.

My whinstone house my castle is, I have my own four walls.

The genuine essence of truth never dies.

He who talks much about virtue in the abstract, begins to be suspected; it is shrewdly guessed that where there is great preaching there will be little almsgiving.

Enjoying things which are pleasant; that is not the evil; it is the reducing of our moral self to slavery by them that is.

Silence is as deep as eternity, speech a shallow as time.

Secrecy is the element of all goodness; even virtue, even beauty is mysterious.

The meaning of song goes deep. Who in logical words can explain the effect music has on us? A kind of inarticulate, unfathomable speech, which leads us to the edge of the infinite, and lets us for a moment gaze into that!

Speech is of time, silence is of eternity.

All true work is sacred.

The civil authority, or that part of it which remained faithful to their trust and true to the ends of the covenant, did, in answer to their consciences, turn out a tyrant, in a way which the Christians in aftertimes will mention with honor, and all tyrants in the world look at with fear.

To the vulgar eye, few things are wonderful that are not distant

A word spoken in season, at the right moment; is the mother of ages.

The Builder of this Universe was wise, He plann'd all souls, all systems, planets, particles: The Plan He shap'd all Worlds and Æons by, Was-Heavens!-was thy small Nine-and-thirty Articles!

Fame, we may understand, is no sure test of merit, but only a probability of such: it is an accident, not a property, of a man; like light, it can give little or nothing, but at most may show what is given.

The greatest of all heroes is One--whom we do not name here! Let sacred silence meditate that sacred matter; you will find it the ultimate perfection of a principle extant throughout man's whole history on earth.

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

We have chosen Mahomet not as the most eminent Prophet; but as the one we are freest to speak of. He is by no means the truest of Prophets; but I do esteem him a true one.

The man of life upright has a guiltless heart, free from all dishonest deeds or thought of vanity.

They have their belief, these poor Tibet people, that Providence sends down always an Incarnation of Himself into every generation. At bottom some belief in a kind of Pope! At bottom still better, a belief that there is a Greatest Man; that he is discoverable; that, once discovered, we ought to treat him with an obedience which knows no bounds. This is the truth of Grand Lamaism; the "discoverability" is the only error here.

Lord Bacon could as easily have created the planets as he could have written Hamlet.

Authors are the vanguard in the march of mind, the intellectual backwoodsmen, reclaiming from the idle wilderness new territories for the thought and activity of their happier brethren.

He that has a secret should not only hide it, but hide that he has it to hide.

We arc the miracle of miracles, the great inscrutable mystery of God.

O thou that pinest in the imprisonment of the Actual, and criest bitterly to the gods for a kingdom wherein to rule and create, know this for a truth: the thing thou seekest is already here, "here or nowhere," couldst thou only see.

The nobleness of silence. The highest melody dwells only in silence,--the sphere melody, the melody of health.

Laissez-faire, supply and demand-one begins to be weary of all that. Leave all to egotism, to ravenous greed of money, of pleasure, of applause-it is the gospel of despair.

The real use of gunpowder is to make all men tall.

Virtue is like health: the harmony of the whole man.

In every phenomenon the beginning remains always the most notable moment.

Also, what mountains of dead ashes, wreck and burnt bones, does assiduous pedantry dig up from the past time and name it History.

The wise man is but a clever infant, spelling letters from a hieroglyphical prophetic book, the lexicon of which lies in eternity.

Great men are the commissioned guides of mankind, who rule their fellows because they are wiser.

No iron chain, or outward force of any kind, could ever compel the soul of man to believe or to disbelieve: it is his own indefeasible light, that judgment of his; he will reign and believe there by the grace of God alone!

Wonderful Force of Public Opinion! We must act and walk in all points as it prescribes; follow the traffic it bids us, realize the sum of money, the degree of influence it expects of us, or we shall be lightly esteemed; certain mouthfuls of articulate wind will be blown at us, and this what mortal courage can front?