Top 100 Carlyle Quotes
#1. Laughter is one of the very privileges of reason, being confined to the human species.
Thomas Carlyle
#3. For a while, it felt like I was on top of the universe. I didn't realize that I was about to fall.
Carlyle Labuschagne
#5. It is a thing forever changing, this of Hero-worship: different in each age, difficult to do well in any age. Indeed, the heart of the whole business of the age, one may say, is to do it well.
Thomas Carlyle
#6. My wife was a make-up artist, and she's a total product junkie. Our bathroom is packed full of lotions and potions so I end up trying them out.
Robert Carlyle
#7. I do tend to divide my childhood into darkness and light, and the first seven years were certainly the darkness.
Robert Carlyle
#8. 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.
Thomas Carlyle
#9. The vulgarity of inanimate things requires time to get accustomed to; but living, breathing, bustling, plotting, planning, human vulgarity is a species of moral ipecacuanha, enough to destroy any comfort.
Thomas Carlyle
#10. The goal of yesterday will be our starting-point to-morrow.
Thomas Carlyle
#11. It depends who the director is you know, I mean Ken Loach for instance. I've done up to 32 takes with him.
Robert Carlyle
#12. Poor white trash quoting de Maistre and Carlyle and fancying themselves elite while they scrabbled to survive in a world where they were outstripped economically by the Chinese and intellectually by their own phones.
Ken MacLeod
#13. Talk that does not end in any kind of action is better suppressed altogether.
Thomas Carlyle
#14. There must be a new world if there is to be any world at all! ... These days of universal death must be days of universal new birth, if the ruin is not to be total and final! It is Time to make the dullest man consider; and ask himself, Whence he came? Whither he is bound?
Thomas Carlyle
#16. Man is a tool using animal. Without tools he is nothing, with tools he is all.
Thomas Carlyle
#17. A thinking man is the worst enemy the Prince of Darkness can have; every time such an one announces himself, I doubt not there runs a shudder through the nether empire; and new emissaries are trained with new tactics, to, if possible, entrap and hoodwink and handcuff him.
Thomas Carlyle
#18. The dust of controversy is merely the falsehood flying off.
Thomas Carlyle
#20. And from my character's point-of-view in Ravenous, he had been collected by Robert Carlyle's character, he had become infected by this ravenous, cannibalistic power, and he was making the best of it.
Jeffrey Jones
#21. Neither in tailoring nor in legislating does man proceed by mere accident.
Thomas Carlyle
#22. 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
#24. Whoso has sixpence is sovereign (to the length of sixpence) over all men; commands cooks to feed him, philosophers to teach him, kings to mount guard over him,to the length of sixpence.
Thomas Carlyle
#25. With stupidity and sound digestion, man may front much.
Thomas Carlyle
#27. Man is, properly speaking, based upon hope, he has no other possession but hope; this world of his is emphatically the place of hope.
Thomas Carlyle
#28. He who would write heroic poems should make his whole life a heroic poem.
Thomas Carlyle
#29. For every one hundred men who can stand adversity there is only one who can withstand prosperity.
Thomas Carlyle
#30. 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.
Thomas Carlyle
#31. Of a truth, men are mystically united: a mystic bond of brotherhood makes all men one.
Thomas Carlyle
#32. The mystical bond of brotherhood makes all men brothers.
Thomas Carlyle
#33. They call me 'sweet,' and 'gentle'; and some of the men go the length of calling me 'endearing,' and I laugh in my sleeve and think, 'Oh, Lord! If you but knew what a brimstone of a creature I am behind all this beautiful amiability!'
Jane Welsh Carlyle
#34. What I loved in the man was his health, his unity with himself; all people and all things seemed to find their quite peaceable adjustment with him, not a proud domineering one, as after doubtful contest, but a spontaneous-looking peaceable, even humble one.
Thomas Carlyle
#35. The great silent man! Looking round on the noisy inanity of the world,
words with little meaning, actions with little worth,
one loves to reflect on the great Empire of Silence.
Thomas Carlyle
#36. Biologically, I'm lucky - an angular face and dark colouring which shows up well on camera.
Robert Carlyle
#37. Great men taken up in any way are profitable company. We cannot look, however imperfectly, upon a great man without gaining something by him.
Thomas Carlyle
#38. Deceivingly, Miss Neville, the word vodka means 'little water.' The Russians are masters of the understatement. - Lord Nash
Liz Carlyle
#39. 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
#41. I've always taken my love of children from my father. He was a children magnet. Suddenly, having my first child hit home what my dad went through.
Robert Carlyle
#42. The All of Things is an infinite conjugation of the verb To do .
Thomas Carlyle
#43. There are female dandies as well as clothes-wearing men; and the former are as objectionable as the latter.
Thomas Carlyle
#44. In no time whatever can small critics entirely eradicate out of living men's hearts a certain altogether peculiar collar reverence for Great Men
genuine admiration, loyalty, adora-tion.
Thomas Carlyle
#45. The steam-engine I call fire-demon and great; but it is nothing to the invention of fire.
Thomas Carlyle
#46. As Carlyle put it - All that mankind has done, thought, gained or been - it is lying in matchless preservation in the pages of books.
Napoleon Hill
#47. Metaphysics is the attempt of the mind to rise above the mind.
Thomas Carlyle
#49. 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
#50. Battles, in these ages, are transacted by mechanism; with the slightest possible development of human individuality or spontaneity; men now even die, and kill one another, in an artificial manner.
Thomas Carlyle
#51. I've discovered why you fascinate - you keep the mystery and as Carlyle noted, Wonder is the basis of worship ...
John Geddes
#52. I want to keep audiences off balance, so they don't know who I am or how to take me. If I duck and weave, as Frank Bruno might say, I'll have a longer shelf life.
Robert Carlyle
#54. I think I have a natural, if I can say that, got a kind of natural ability in comedy.
Robert Carlyle
#57. Every poet ... finds himself born in the midst of prose. He has to struggle from the littleness and obstruction of an actual world into the freedom and infinitude of an ideal.
Thomas Carlyle
#58. Enjoying things which are pleasant; that is not the evil; it is the reducing of our moral self to slavery by them that is.
Thomas Carlyle
#59. 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.
Thomas Carlyle
#60. A great man shows his greatness by the way he treats little men.
Thomas Carlyle
#61. We observe with confidence that the truly strong mind, view it as intellect or morality, or under any other aspect, is nowise the mind acquainted with its strength; that here the sign of health is unconsciousness.
Thomas Carlyle
#62. He who takes not counsel of the Unseen and Silent, from him will never come real visibility and speech.
Thomas Carlyle
#63. 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.
Thomas Carlyle
#64. The eye of the intellect "sees in all objects what it brought with it the means of seeing."
Thomas Carlyle
#65. Most of the time, you find that the smaller the budget, the more the project is about something substantive.
Robert Carlyle
#66. 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
#67. The script will point you in certain directions and I go the opposite if I can. I try do do one thing and tell a different story with my eyes. I believe what's more interesting is always what's not being said.
Robert Carlyle
#68. Time is the silent, never-resting thing ... rolling, rushing on, swift, silent, like an all-embracing oceantide, on which we and all the universe swim.
Thomas Carlyle
#69. If Jesus Christ were to come today, people would not even crucify him. They would ask him to dinner, and hear what he had to say, and make fun of it.
Thomas Carlyle
#70. Language is called the garment of thought: however, it should rather be, language is the flesh-garment, the body, of thought.
Thomas Carlyle
#73. Feel it in thy heart and then say whether it is of God!
Thomas Carlyle
#74. Perhaps the greatest lesson [Huxley] learned from reading Carlyle was that real religion, that emotive feeling for Truth and Beauty, could flourish in the absence of an idolatrous theology.
Adrian Desmond
#75. Evil and good are everywhere, like shadow and substance; inseparable (for men) yet not hostile, only opposed.
Thomas Carlyle
#76. Parliament will train you to talk; and above all things to hear, with patience, unlimited quantities of foolish talk.
Thomas Carlyle
#77. Work earnestly at anything, you will by degrees learn to work at all things.
Thomas Carlyle
#78. My dad was rubbish at all other aspects of his financial life, but he's pretty good at paying the rent.
Robert Carlyle
#79. 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
#81. If those gentlemen would let me alone I should be much obliged to them. I would say, as Shakespeare would say ... Sweet Friend, for Jesus sake forbear.
Thomas Carlyle
#82. Nakedness, hunger, distress of all kinds, death itself have been cheerfully suffered, when the heart was right. It is the feeling of injustice that is insupportable to all men.
Thomas Carlyle
#83. Such I hold to be the genuine use of Gunpowder: that it makes all men tall.
Thomas Carlyle
#84. A lie should be trampled on and extinguished wherever found. I am for fumigating the atmosphere when I suspect that falsehood, like pestilence, breathes around me.
Thomas Carlyle
#85. Democracy means despair of finding any heroes to govern you, and contented putting up with the want of them.
Thomas Carlyle
#86. One feels as if it could never, never be less. And yet all griefs, when there is no bitterness in them, are soothed down by time.
Jane Welsh Carlyle
#88. The Bible is the truest utterance that ever came by alphabetic letters from the soul of man, through which, as through a window divinely opened, all men can look into the stillness of eternity, and discern in glimpses their far-distant, long-forgotten home.
Thomas Carlyle
#89. I should say sincerity, a deep, great, genuine sincerity, is the first characteristic of all men in any way heroic.
Thomas Carlyle
#90. Experience takes dreadfully high school-wages, but he teaches like no other.
Thomas Carlyle
#91. No man sees far, most see no farther than their noses.
Thomas Carlyle
#92. you come to understand that history might be, as Thomas Carlyle put it, "a distillation of rumor," or, as Napoleon said, "a set of lies generally agreed upon
James Alexander Thom
#93. I had a lifelong quarrel with God, but in the end we made up.
Thomas Carlyle
#94. Nature, after all, is still the grand agent in making poets.
Thomas Carlyle
#95. 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
#96. Work is the grand cure of all the maladies and miseries that ever beset mankind.
Thomas Carlyle
#98. Not a hundredth part of the thoughts in my head have ever been or ever will be spoken or written - as long as I keep my senses, at least.
Jane Welsh Carlyle
#99. Imperfection clings to a person, and if they wait till they are brushed off entirely, they would spin for ever on their axis, advancing nowhere.
Thomas Carlyle
#100. Imagination is a poor matter when it has to part company with understanding.
Thomas Carlyle
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