Thomas Carlyle Quotes

I came hither [Craigenputtoch] solely with the design to simplify my way of life and to secure the independence through which I could be enabled to remain true to myself.

With union grounded on falsehood and ordering us to speak and act lies, we will not have anything to do. Peace? A brutal lethargy is peaceable; the noisome is peaceable. We hope for a living peace, not a dead one!

Rest is for the dead.

True humor springs not more from the head than from the heart. It is not contempt; its essence is love. It issues not in laughter, but in still smiles, which lie far deeper.

Except by name, Jean Paul Friedrich Richter is little known out of Germany. The only thing connected with him, we think, that has reached this country is his saying,-imported by Madame de Staël, and thankfully pocketed by most newspaper critics,-"Providence has given to the French the empire of the land; to the English that of the sea; to the Germans that of-the air!" Richter: German humorist & prose writer.

All that mankind has done, thought or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books.

Weak eyes are fondest of glittering objects.

It is the heart always that sees, before the head can see.

Show me the man you honor; I know by that symptom, better than by any other, what kind of man you yourself are. For you show me there what your ideal of manhood is; what kind of man you long inexpressibly to be.

A man lives by believing something: not by debating and arguing about many things.

The eye sees what it brings the power to see.

Teach a parrot the terms 'supply and demand' and you've got an economist.

Make yourself an honest man, and then you may be sure there is one less rascal in the world.

Happy the People whose Annals are blank in History Books!

What is all Knowledge too but recorded Experience, and a product of History; of which, therefore, Reasoning and Belief, no less than Action and Passion, are essential materials?

And there are Ben [Jonson] and William Shakespeare in wit-combat, sure enough; Ben bearing down like a mighty Spanish war-ship, fraught with all learning and artillery; Shakespeare whisking away from him - whisking right through him, athwart the big bulk and timbers of him; like a miraculous Celestial Light-ship, woven all of sheet-lightning and sunbeams!

The times are very bad. Very well, you are there to make them better.

Show me the person you honor, for I know better by that the kind of person you are. For you show me what your idea of humanity is.

We call it a Society; and go about professing openly the totalest separation, isolation. Our life is not a mutual helpfulness; but rather, cloaked under due laws-of-war, named fair competition and so forth, it is a mutual hostility.

History, as it lies at the root of all science, is also the first distinct product of man's spiritual nature, his earliest expression of what may be called thought.

Wealth of a man is the number of things which he loves and blesses which he is loved and blessed by.

No mortal has a right to wag his tongue, much less to wag his pen, without saying something.

Friendship, in the old heroic sense of that term, no longer exists. It is in reality no longer expected or recognized as a virtue among men.

There are remedies for all things but death.

Experience takes dreadfully high school-wages, but he teaches like no other.

All work of man is as the swimmer's: a vast ocean threatens to devour him; if he front it not bravely, it will keep its word.

If a man was great while living, he becomes tenfold greater when dead.

The tragedy of life is not so much what men suffer, but rather what they miss.

There is something in man which your science cannot satisfy.

Our works are the mirror wherein the spirit first sees its natural lineaments. Hence, too, the folly of that impossible precept, Know theyself; till it be translated into this partially possible one, know what thou canst work at.

Not on morality, but on cookery, let us build our stronghold: there brandishing our frying-pan, as censer, let us offer sweet incense to the Devil, and live at ease on the fat things he has provided for his elect!

The mathematics of high achievement

The eye of the intellect "sees in all objects what it brought with it the means of seeing."

Cash-payment never was, or could except for a few years be, the union-bond of man to man. Cash never yet paid one man fully his deserts to another; nor could it, nor can it, now or henceforth to the end of the world.

The past is all holy to us; the dead are all holy; even they that were wicked when alive.

Do the duty which lies nearest to you, the second duty will then become clearer.

A battle is a terrible conjugation of the verb to kill: I kill, thou killest, he kills, we kill, they kill, all kill.

He who would write heroic poems should make his whole life a heroic poem.

How indestructibly the good grows, and propagates itself, even among the weedy entanglements of evil.

Conclusive facts are inseparable from inconclusive except by a head that already understands and knows.

A person with half volition goes backwards and forwards, but makes no progress on even the smoothest of roads.

There can be no acting or doing of any kind till it be recognized that there is a thing to be done; the thing once recognized, doing in a thousand shapes becomes possible.

A person who is gifted sees the essential point and leaves the rest as surplus.

In a different time, in a different place, it is always some other side of our common human nature that has been developing itself. The actual truth is the sum of all these.

When we can drain the Ocean into mill-ponds, and bottle up the Force of Gravity, to be sold by retail, in gas jars; then may we hope to comprehend the infinitudes of man's soul under formulas of Profit and Loss; and rule over this too, as over a patent engine, by checks, and valves, and balances.

The true eye for talent presupposes the true reverence for it.

Poetry, therefore, we will call Musical Thought.

He who has health, has hope; and he who has hope, has everything.