Top 100 Thomas Carlyle Quotes
#2. 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.
Thomas Carlyle
#3. Of a truth, men are mystically united: a mystic bond of brotherhood makes all men one.
Thomas Carlyle
#4. The mystical bond of brotherhood makes all men brothers.
Thomas Carlyle
#5. To each is given a certain inward talent, a certain outward environment or fortune; to each by wisest combination of these two, a certain maximum capacity.
Thomas Carlyle
#6. Be a pattern to others, and then all will go well; for as a whole city is affected by the licentious passions and vices of great men, so it is likewise reformed by their moderation.
Thomas Carlyle
#8. Innumerable are the illusions and legerdemain-tricks of custom: but of all of these, perhaps the cleverest is her knack of persuading us that the miraculous, by simple repetition, ceases to be miraculous.
Thomas Carlyle
#10. We have chosen Mahomet not as the most eminent Prophet; but as the one we are freest to speak of. He is by no means the truest of Prophets; but I do esteem him a true one.
Thomas Carlyle
#12. I should say sincerity, a deep, great, genuine sincerity, is the first characteristic of all men in any way heroic.
Thomas Carlyle
#13. The dead are all holy, even they that were base and wicked while alive. Their baseness and wickedness was not they, was but the heavy and unmanageable environment that lay round them.
Thomas Carlyle
#15. The end of man is action, and not thought, though it be of the noblest.
Thomas Carlyle
#16. Speech is too often not the art of concealing thought, but of quite stifling and suspending thought, so that there is none to conceal.
Thomas Carlyle
#17. What is all knowledge except recorded experience, and a product of history?
Thomas Carlyle
#19. Nothing is more terrible than activity without insight.
Thomas Carlyle
#21. Man makes circumstances, and spiritually as well as economically, is the artificer of his own fortune.
Thomas Carlyle
#22. Biography is the most universally pleasant and profitable of all reading.
Thomas Carlyle
#23. The merit of originality is not novelty, it is sincerity. The believing man is the original man.
Thomas Carlyle
#24. Silence, the great Empire of Silence: higher than all stars; deeper than the Kingdom of Death! It alone is great; all else is small.
Thomas Carlyle
#25. Hero-worship exists, has existed, and will forever exist, universally, among mankind.
Thomas Carlyle
#26. No great man lives in vain. The history of the world is but the biography of great men.
Thomas Carlyle
#28. A person with half volition goes backwards and forwards, but makes no progress on even the smoothest of roads.
Thomas Carlyle
#30. A false man found a religion? Why, a false man cannot build a brick house!
Thomas Carlyle
#31. Secrecy is the element of all goodness; even virtue, even beauty is mysterious.
Thomas Carlyle
#32. A word spoken in season, at the right moment; is the mother of ages.
Thomas Carlyle
#33. 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.
Thomas Carlyle
#34. The nobleness of silence. The highest melody dwells only in silence,
the sphere melody, the melody of health.
Thomas Carlyle
#35. Authors are the vanguard in the march of mind, the intellectual backwoodsmen, reclaiming from the idle wilderness new territories for the thought and activity of their happier brethren.
Thomas Carlyle
#37. If a book comes from the heart, it will contrive to reach other hearts; all art and author-craft are of small amount to that.
Thomas Carlyle
#38. Sarcasm I now see to be, in general, the language of the devil; for which reason I have long since as good as renounced it.
Thomas Carlyle
#39. Great men are the commissioned guides of mankind, who rule their fellows because they are wiser.
Thomas Carlyle
#40. Do the duty which lies nearest to you, the second duty will then become clearer.
Thomas Carlyle
#41. A Dandy is a clothes-wearing Man, a Man whose trade, office and existence consists in the wearing of clothes.
Thomas Carlyle
#42. All work, even cotton-spinning, is noble; work is alone noble.
Thomas Carlyle
#44. Have not I myself known five hundred living soldiers sabred into crows' meat for a piece of glazed cotton, which they call their flag; which had you sold it at any market-cross, would not have brought above three groschen?
Thomas Carlyle
#45. The greatest event for the world is the arrival of a new and wise person.
Thomas Carlyle
#46. Might and right do differ frightfully from hour to hour, but then centuries to try it in, they are found to be identical.
Thomas Carlyle
#47. Skepticism ... is not intellectual only it is moral also, a chronic atrophy and disease of the whole soul.
Thomas Carlyle
#48. Fancy that thou deservest to be hangedthou wilt feel it happiness to be only shot: fancy that thou deservest to be hanged ina hair halter, it will be a luxury to die in hemp.
Thomas Carlyle
#49. How, without clothes, could we possess the master organ, soul's seat and true pineal gland of the body social
I mean a purse?
Thomas Carlyle
#51. To be true is manly, chivalrous, Christian; to be false is mean, cowardly, devilish.
Thomas Carlyle
#52. What an enormous magnifier is tradition! How a thing grows in the human memory and in the human imagination, when love, worship, and all that lies in the human heart, is there to encourage it
Thomas Carlyle
#54. Any the smallest alteration of my silent daily habits produces anarchy in me
Thomas Carlyle
#56. Dinners are defined as 'the ultimate act of communion;' men that can have communion in nothing else, can sympathetically eat together, can still rise into some glow of brotherhood over food and wine.
Thomas Carlyle
#57. Experience is the best of school masters, only the school fees are heavy.
Thomas Carlyle
#58. Every human being has a right to hear what other wise human beings have spoken to him. It is one of the Rights of Men; a very cruel injustice if you deny it to a man!
Thomas Carlyle
#60. Universal history, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here.
Thomas Carlyle
#61. 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! ...
Thomas Carlyle
#63. 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.
Thomas Carlyle
#64. The highest ensign that men ever met and embraced under, the Cross itself, had no meaning save an accidental extrinsic one.
Thomas Carlyle
#65. 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.
Thomas Carlyle
#66. Men seldom, or rather never for a length of time and deliberately, rebel against anything that does not deserve rebelling against.
Thomas Carlyle
#67. One of the Godlike things of this world is the veneration done to human worth by the hearts of men.
Thomas Carlyle
#69. We have profoundly forgotten everywhere that Cash-payment is not the sole relation of human beings.
Thomas Carlyle
#70. It is a strange trade that of advocacy. Your intellect, your highest heavenly gift is hung up in the shop window like a loaded pistol for sale.
Thomas Carlyle
#71. An everlasting lodestar, that beams the brighter in the heavens the darker here on earth grows the night.
Thomas Carlyle
#72. The graceful minuet-dance of fancy must give place to the toilsome, thorny pilgrimage of understanding. On the transition from the age of romance to that of science.
Thomas Carlyle
#73. The word of Mohammad is a voice direct from nature's own heart - all else is wind in comparison.
Thomas Carlyle
#74. It is in general more profitable to reckon up our defeats than to boast of our attainments.
Thomas Carlyle
#75. Speech is human, silence is divine, yet also brutish and dead: therefore we must learn both arts.
Thomas Carlyle
#77. 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.
Thomas Carlyle
#78. Youth is to all the glad season of life; but often only by what it hopes, not by what it attains, or what it escapes.
Thomas Carlyle
#79. The thing is not only to avoid error, but to attain immense masses of truth.
Thomas Carlyle
#80. The times are very bad. Very well, you are there to make them better.
Thomas Carlyle
#81. What is philosophy but a continual battle against custom?
Thomas Carlyle
#82. There is no heroic poem in the world but is at bottom a biography, the life of a man.
Thomas Carlyle
#84. Woe to him, ... who has no court of appeal against the world's judgment.
Thomas Carlyle
#86. A strong mind always hopes, and has always cause to hope.
Thomas Carlyle
#87. Piety does not mean that a man should make a sour face about things, and refuse to enjoy in moderation what his Maker has given.
Thomas Carlyle
#88. In a controversy, the instant we feel anger we have already ceased striving for the truth, and have begun striving for ourselves.
Thomas Carlyle
#89. Let one who wants to move and convince others, first be convinced and moved themselves. If a person speaks with genuine earnestness the thoughts, the emotion and the actual condition of their own heart, others will listen because we all are knit together by the tie of sympathy.
Thomas Carlyle
#90. Out of the lowest depths there is a path to the loftiest heights.
Thomas Carlyle
#91. 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.
Thomas Carlyle
#92. If time is precious, no book that will not improve by repeated readings deserves to be read at all.
Thomas Carlyle
#93. 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.
Thomas Carlyle
#95. In every man's writings, the character of the writer must lie recorded.
Thomas Carlyle
#96. Such is the world. Understand it, despise it, love it; cheerfully hold on thy way through it, with thy eye on highest loadstars!
Thomas Carlyle
#97. All human things do require to have an ideal in them; to have some soul in them.
Thomas Carlyle
#99. Eternity looks grander and kinder if time grow meaner and more hostile.
Thomas Carlyle
#100. 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.
Thomas Carlyle
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