Thomas Carlyle Quotes

Thought, true labor of any kind, highest virtue itself, is it not the daughter of Pain?

Metaphysics is the attempt of the mind to rise above the mind.

Everywhere in life, the true question is not what we gain, but what we do.

No pressure, no diamonds.

Roguery is thought by some to be cunning and laughable: it is neither; it is devilish.

Labor, wide as the earth, has its summit in heaven.

It is part of my creed that the only poetry is history, could we tell it right.

In our wide world there is but one altogether fatal personage, the dunce,--he that speaks irrationally, that sees not, and yet thinks he sees.

In idleness there is a perpetual despair.

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.

The thing is not only to avoid error, but to attain immense masses of truth.

This we take it is the grand characteristic of our age. By our skill in Mechanism, it has come to pass, that in the management ofexternal things we excel all other ages; while in whatever respects the pure moral nature, in true dignity of soul and character, we are perhaps inferior to most civilised ages.

A well-written life is almost as rare as a well-spent one.

Men seldom, or rather never for a length of time and deliberately, rebel against anything that does not deserve rebelling against.

Does not every true man feel that he is himself made higher by doing reverence to what is really above him?

Eternity looks grander and kinder if time grow meaner and more hostile.

Great souls are always loyally submissive, reverent to what is over them: only small mean souls are otherwise.

In a symbol there is concealment and yet revelation: here therefore, by Silence and by Speech acting together, comes a double significance.

The steam-engine I call fire-demon and great; but it is nothing to the invention of fire.

In every object there is inexhaustible meaning.

Silence, the great Empire of Silence: higher than all stars; deeper than the Kingdom of Death! It alone is great; all else is small.

Love is ever the beginning of knowledge as fire is of light.

Blessed be the God's voice; for it is true, and falsehoods have to cease before it!

History is the essence of innumerable biographies.

Without oblivion, there is no remembrance possible. When both oblivion and memory are wise, when the general soul of man is clear, melodious, true, there may come a modern Iliad as memorial of the Past.

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.

A man lives by believing something.

Wonder is the basis of worship.

If what you have done is unjust, you have not succeeded.

The cut of a garment speaks of intellect and talent and the color of temperament and heart.

Wondrous is the strength of cheerfulness, altogether past calculation its powers of endurance.

Taste, if it mean anything but a paltry connoisseurship, must mean a general susceptibility to truth and nobleness, a sense to discern, and a heart to love and reverence all beauty, order, goodness, wheresoever, or in whatsoever forms and accompaniments they are to be seen. This surely implies, as its chief condition, not any given external rank or situation, but a finely-gifted mind, purified into harmony with itself, into keenness and justness of vision; above all, kindled into love and generous admiration.

The person who cannot laugh is not only ready for treason, and deceptions, their whole life is already a treason and deception.

What the light of your mind, which is the direct inspiration of the Almighty, pronounces incredible, that, in God's name, leave uncredited. At your peril do not try believing that!

History is a mighty dramos, enacted upon the theatre of times, with suns for lamps and eternity for a background.

Man's Unhappiness, as I construe, 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 even, as I said, the Shadow of Ourselves.

Is there no God, then, but at best an absentee God, sitting idle, ever since the first Sabbath, at the outside of his Universe?

Let him who gropes painfully in darkness or uncertain light, and prays vehemently that the dawn may ripen into day, lay this precept well to heart: "Do the duty which lies nearest to thee," which thou know to be a duty! Thy second duty will already have become clearer.

Little other than a red tape Talking-machine, and unhappy Bag of Parliamentary Eloquence.

What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books.

Have a purpose in life, and having it, throw into your work such strength of mind and muscle as God has given you.

'Genius' which means transcendent capacity of taking trouble, first of all.

Thought will not work except in silence.

Nature, after all, is still the grand agent in making poets.

The essence of humor is sensibility; warm, tender fellow-feeling with all forms of existence.

To the wisest man, wide as is his vision. Nature remains of quite infinite depth, of quite infinite expansion and all experience thereof limits itself to some few computed centuries and measured square miles.

The aristocracy of feudal parchment has passed away with a mighty rushing, and now, by a natural course, we arrive at aristocracy of the money-bag.

The dust of controversy is merely the falsehood flying off.