Thomas Carlyle Quotes

The scandalous bronze-lacquer age of hungry animalisms, spiritual impotences, and mendacities, will have to run its course, till the pit follow it.

But the whim we have of happiness is somewhat thus. By certain valuations, and averages, of our own striking, we come upon some sort of average terrestrial lot; this we fancy belongs to us by nature, and of indefeasible rights. It is simple payment of our wages, of our deserts; requires neither thanks nor complaint. Foolish soul! What act of legislature was there that thou shouldst be happy? A little while ago thou hadst no right to be at all.

When Pococke inquired of Grotius, where the proof was of that story of the pigeon, trained to pick peas from Mahomet's (Muhammad's) ear, and pass for an angel dictating to him? Grotius answered that there was no proof!

Science must have originated in the feeling that something was wrong.

After all manner of professors have done their best for us, the place we are to get knowledge is in books.

Not brute force but only persuasion and faith are the kings of this world.

How were friendship possible? In mutual devotedness to the good and true; otherwise impossible, except as armed neutrality or hollow commercial league. A man, be the heavens ever praised, is sufficient for himself; yet were ten men, united in love, capable of being and of doing what ten thousand singly would fail in. Infinite is the help man can yield to man.

The lies (Western slander) which well-meaning zeal has heaped round this man (Muhammad) are disgraceful to ourselves only.

It's a man's sincerity and depth of vision that makes him a poet.

Of all your troubles, great and small, the greatest are the ones that don't happen at all.

There is a perennial nobleness, and even sacredness, in work. Were he never so benighted, forgetful of his high calling, there is always hope in a man that actually and earnestly works: in idleness alone there is perpetual despair.

No iron chain, or outward force of any kind, can ever compel the soul of a person to believe or to disbelieve.

Pain was not given thee merely to be miserable under; learn from it, turn it to account.

There is a great discovery still to be made in literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write.

Everywhere the human soul stands between a hemisphere of light and another of darkness on the confines of two everlasting empires, - Necessity and Free Will.

Without kindness there can be no true joy.

No person is important enough to make me angry.

There is precious instruction to be got by finding we were wrong.

All great peoples are conservative.

Nothing that was worthy in the past departs; no truth or goodness realized by man ever dies, or can die.

There are female dandies as well as clothes-wearing men; and the former are as objectionable as the latter.

Neither in tailoring nor in legislating does man proceed by mere accident.

To reform a world, to reform a nation, no wise man will undertake; and all but foolish men know, that the only solid, though a far slower reformation, is what each begins and perfects on himself.

I have no patience whatever with these gorilla damnifications of humanity.

Goethe's devil is a cultivated personage and acquainted with the modern sciences; sneers at witchcraft and the black art even while employing them, and doubts most things, nay, half disbelieves even his own existence.

The crash of the whole solar and stellar systems could only kill you once.

Oblivion is the dark page, whereon Memory writes her light-beam characters, and makes them legible; were it all light, nothing could be read there, any more than if it were all darkness.

He who cannot withal keep his mind to himself cannot practice any considerable thing whatsoever.

O Time! Time! how it brings forth and devours! And the roaring flood of existence rushes on forever similar, forever changing!

The best effect of any book is that it excites the reader to self activity.

Democracy will itself accomplish the salutary universal change from delusive to real, and make a new blessed world of us by and by.

God Almighty never created a man half as wise as he looks.

Tell a person they are brave and you help them become so.

Let a man try faithfully, manfully to be right; he will grow daily more and more right. It is at bottom the condition on which all men have to cultivate themselves.

The whole past is the procession of the present.

The merit of originality is not novelty; it is sincerity. The believing man is the original man; whatsoever he believes, he believes it for himself, not for another.

If you are ever in doubt as to whether to kiss a pretty girl, always give her the benefit of the doubt.

My books are friends that never fail me.

Thou fool! Nature alone is antique, and the oldest art a mushroom; that idle crag thou sittest on is six thousand years of age.

Look around you. Your world-hosts are all in mutiny, in confusion, destitution; on the eve of fiery wreck and madness! They will not march farther for you, on the sixpence a day and supply-demand principle; they will not; nor ought they, nor can they. Ye shall reduce them to order, begin reducing them. to order, to just subordination; noble loyalty in return for noble guidance. Their souls are driven nigh mad; let yours be sane and ever saner.

All work is as seed sown; it grows and spreads, and sows itself anew.

Pin thy faith to no man's sleeve. Hast thou not two eyes of thy own?

Of all the things which man can do or make here below, by far the most momentous, wonderful, and worthy are the things we call books.

Burke said there were Three Estates in Parliament; but, in the Reporter's gallery yonder, there sat a fourth estate more important far than they all.

There are depths in man that go to the lowest hell, and heights that reach the highest heaven, for are not both heaven and hell made out of him, everlasting miracle and mystery that he is.

The great law of culture is, Let each become all that he was created capable of being; expand, if possible, to his full growth; resisting all impediments, casting off all foreign, especially all noxious adhesions, and show himself at length in his own shape and stature be these what they may.

We have profoundly forgotten everywhere that Cash-payment is not the sole relation of human beings.

War is a quarrel between two thieves too cowardly to fight their own battle; therefore they take boys from one village and another village, stick them into uniforms, equip them with guns, and let them loose like wild beasts against one other.