Thomas Carlyle Quotes

In every object there is inexhaustible meaning; the eye sees in it what the eye brings means of seeing.

A man without a goal is like a ship without a rudder.

Pin your faith to no ones sleeves, haven't you two eyes of your own.

The first purpose of clothes... was not warmth or decency, but ornament.... Among wild people, we find tattooing and painting even prior to clothes. The first spiritual want of a barbarous man is decoration; as indeed we still see among the barbarous classes in civilized countries.

May blessings be upon the head of Cadmus, the Phoenicians, or whoever it was that invented books.

All that a university or final highest school. can do for us is still but what the first school began doing--teach us to read. We learn to read in various languages, in various sciences; we learn the alphabet and letters of all manner of books. But the place where we are to get knowledge, even theoretic knowledge, is the books themselves. It depends on what we read, after all manner of professors have done their best for us. The true university of these days is a collection of books.

He who has no vision of eternity has no hold on time.

Society is founded upon Cloth.

There is no life of a man, faithfully recorded, but is a heroic poem of its sort, rhymed or unrhymed.

The outer passes away; the innermost is the same yesterday, today, and forever.

There is a majesty and mystery in nature, take her as you will. The essence of poetry comes breathing to a mind that feels from every province of her empire.

If there be not a religious element in the relations of men, such relations are miserable and doomed to ruin.

Be not a slave of words.

If Hero means sincere man, why may not every one of us be a Hero?

Laughter is one of the very privileges of reason, being confined to the human species.

Is not light grander than fire?

It is a fact which escapes no one, that, generally speaking, whoso is acquainted with his worth has but a little stock to cultivate acquaintance with.

Man makes circumstances, and spiritually as well as economically, is the artificer of his own fortune.

Man is emphatically a proselytizing creature.

The king is the man who can.

Habit is the deepest law of human nature

Nothing stops the man who desires to achieve. Every obstacle is simply a course to develop his achievement muscle. It's a strengthening of his powers of accomplishment.

Of our thinking it is but the upper surface that we shape into articulate thought; underneath the region of argument and conscious discourse lies the region of meditation.

The universe is but one vast Symbol of God.

Beautiful it is, and a gleam from the same eternal pole-star visible amid the destinies of men, that all talent, all intellect, is in the first plane moral. What a world were this otherwise!

All sorts of Heroes are intrinsically of the same material; that given a great soul, open to the Divine Significance of Life, then there is given a man fit to speak of this, to sing of this, to fight and work for this, in a great, victorious, enduring manner; there is given a Hero, -- the outward shape of whom will depend on the time and the environment he finds himself in.

Stern accuracy in inquiring, bold imagination in describing, these are the cogs on which history soars or flutters and wobbles.

All reform except a moral one will prove unavailing.

Worship is transcendent wonder.

Courtesy is the due of man to man; not of suit-of-clothes to suit-of-clothes.

Doubt, of whatever kind, can be ended by action alone.

What a wretched thing is all fame! A renown of the highest sort endures, say, for two thousand years. And then? Why, then, a fathomless eternity swallows it. Work for eternity; not the meagre rhetorical eternity of the periodical critics, but for the real eternity wherein dwelleth the Divine.

It is a mathematical fact that the casting of this pebble from my hand alters the centre of gravity of the universe.

Adversity is the diamond dust Heaven polishes its jewels with.

Action hangs, as it were, dissolved in speech, in thoughts whereof speech is the shadow; and precipitates itself therefrom. The kind of speech in a man betokens the kind of action you will get from him.

Work is the grand cure of all the maladies and miseries that ever beset mankind.

Earnestness alone makes life eternity.

In the huge mass of evil as it rolls and swells, there is ever some good working toward deliverance and triumph.

Unity, agreement, is always silent or soft-voiced; it is only discord that loudly proclaims itself.

Man's unhappiness, as I construe, comes of his greatness; it is because there is an Infinite in him, which with all his cunning he cannot quite bury under the Finite.

Skepticism . . . is not intellectual only it is moral also, a chronic atrophy and disease of the whole soul.

A person with a clear purpose will make progress, even on the roughest road. A person with no purpose will make no progress, even on the smoothest road.

Whose school-hours are all the days and nights of our existence.

Let each become all that he was created capable of being.

The barrenest of all mortals is the sentimentalist.

Love is the only game that is not called on account of darkness.

The world is an old woman, and mistakes any gilt farthing for a gold coin; whereby being often cheated, she will thenceforth trust nothing but the common copper.

He who could foresee affairs three days in advance would be rich for thousands of years.