Thomas Carlyle Quotes

Is man’s civilization only a wrappage, through which the savage nature of him can still burst, infernal as ever?

Contented saturnine human figures, a dozen or so of them, sitting around a large long table...Perfect equality is to be the rule; no rising or notice taken when anybody enters or leaves. Let the entering man take his place and pipe, without obligatory remarks; if he cannot smoke...let him at least affect to do so, and not ruffle the established stream of things.

Just in the ratio knowledge increases, faith decreases.

There is but one temple in this Universe: The Body. We speak to God whenever we lay our hands upon it.

Evil, once manfully fronted, ceases to be evil; there is generous battle-hope in place of dead, passive misery; the evil itself has become a kind of good.

At worst, is not this an unjust world, full of nothing but beasts of prey, four-footed or two-footed?

No nobler feeling than this, of admiration for one higher than himself, dwells in the breast of man. It is to this hour, and at all hours, the vivifying influence in man's life.

Clever men are good, but they are not the best.

It is a vain hope to make people happy by politics.

The beginning of all wisdom is to look fixedly on clothes, or even with armed eyesight, till they become transparent.

Once turn to practice, error and truth will no longer consort together.

A great man shows his greatness by the way he treats little men.

Nothing builds self-esteem and self-confidence like accomplishment.

Originality is a thing we constantly clamour for, and constantly quarrel with.

Fame, we may understand, is no sure test of merit, but only a probability of such; it is an accident, not a property of man.

The most unhappy of all men is the man who cannot tell what he is going to do, who has got no work cut-out for him in the world, and does not go into it. For work is the grand cure of all the maladies and miseries that ever beset mankind,honest work, which you intend getting done.

It is now almost my sole rule of life to clear myself of cants and formulas, as of poisonous Nessus shirts.

Stop a moment, cease your work, and look around you.

Of all acts of man repentance is the most divine. The greatest of all faults is to be conscious of none.

Know what thou canst work at, and work at it like a Hercules.

Statistics is a science which ought to be honourable, the basis of many most important sciences; but it is not to be carried on by steam, this science, any more than others are; a wise head is requisite for carrying it on.

Philosophy dwells aloft in the Temple of Science, the divinity of its inmost shrine; her dictates descend among men, but she herself descends not : whoso would behold her must climb with long and laborious effort, nay, still linger in the forecourt, till manifold trial have proved him worthy of admission into the interior solemnities.

Happy season of virtuous youth, when shame is still an impassable barrier, and the sacred air-cities of hope have not shrunk into the mean clay hamlets of reality; and man, by his nature, is yet infinite and free.

Rest is a fine medicine. Let your stomachs rest, ye dyspeptics; let your brain rest, you wearied and worried people of business; let your limbs rest, ye children of toil!

The world is a republic of mediocrities, and always was.

For, strictly considered, 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?

As there is no danger of our becoming, any of us, Mahometans (i.e. Muslim), I mean to say all the good of him I justly can.

Caution is the lower story of prudence.

Blessed is he who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness.

Speech is silver, silence is golden.

See deep enough, and you see musically.

Not our Logical, Mensurative faculty, but our Imaginative one is King over us; I might say, Priest and Prophet to lead us heavenward; or Magician and Wizard to lead us hellward.

For every one hundred men who can stand adversity there is only one who can withstand prosperity.

These Arabs, the man Mahomet, and that one century, - is it not as if a spark had fallen, one spark, on a world of what proves explosive powder, blazes heaven-high from Delhi to Granada! I said, the Great man was always as lightning out of Heaven; the rest of men waited for him like fuel, and then they too would flame.

There is so much data available to us, but most data won't help us succeed.

Money, in truth, can do much, but it cannot do all. We must know the province of it, and confine it there, and even spurn it back when it wishes to get farther.

There needs not a great soul to make a hero; there needs a god-created soul which will be true to its origin; that will be a great soul!

Neither had Watt of the Steam engine a heroic origin, any kindred with the princes of this world. The princes of this world were shooting their partridges... While this man with blackened fingers, with grim brow, was searching out, in his workshop, the Fire-secret.

No sooner does a great man depart, and leave his character as public property, than a crowd of little men rushes towards it. There they are gathered together, blinking up to it with such vision as they have, scanning it from afar, hovering round it this way and that, each cunningly endeavoring, by all arts, to catch some reflex of it in the little mirror of himself.

The Orator persuades and carries all with him, he knows not how; the Rhetorician can prove that he ought to have persuaded and carried all with him.

What is nature? Art thou not the living government of God? O Heaven, is it in very deed He then that ever speaks through thee, that lives and loves in thee, that lives and loves in me?

Instead of saying that man is the creature of circumstance, it would be nearer the mark to say that man is the architect of circumstance.

The all importance of clothes has sprung up in the intellect of the dandy without effort, like an instinct of genius; he is inspired with clothes, a poet of clothes.

In private life I never knew anyone interfere with other people's disputes but he heartily repented of it.

A pygmy standing on the outward crust of this small planet, his far-reaching spirit stretches outward to the infinite, and there alone finds rest.

Woe to him that claims obedience when it is not due; woe to him that refuses it when it is.

Even in the meanest sorts of labor, the whole soul of a man is composed into a kind of real harmony the instant he sets himself to work.

No conquest can ever become permanent which does not show itself beneficial to the conquered as well as to the conquerors.