Top 100 Quotes About Thomas Carlyle: Famous Quotes & Sayings About Thomas Carlyle

#1. 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

#2. The greatest of faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none. - historian and essayist Thomas Carlyle

Carol Tavris

#3. The man without a purpose is like a ship without a rudder. - Thomas Carlyle For

Michael Hyatt

#4. (Quoted by Thomas Carlyle) The rude man requires only to see something going on. The man of more refinement must be made to feel. The man of complete refinement must be made to reflect.

Thomas Carlyle

#5. The ideal is within you, and the obstacle to reaching this ideal is also within you. You already possess all the material from which to create your ideal self. - THOMAS CARLYLE

Leo Tolstoy

#6. This need to know things at the level of basic experience, and the reluctance to be fobbed off by the official story or the popular rumor, was a part of the "infinite capacity for taking pains" that Thomas Carlyle once described as the constituent of genius.

Christopher Hitchens

#7. Our grand business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand. Thomas Carlyle

Bohdi Sanders

#8. Of all the acts of man, repentance is the most divine. The greatest of all faults ... is to be conscious of none. (Thomas Carlyle)

Thomas Carlyle

#9. The English historian Thomas Carlyle defined a person's religion as the set of values evident in his or her actions, regardless of what the individual would claim to believe when asked.

Terryl L. Givens

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

Thomas Carlyle

#11. Is not light grander than fire?

Thomas Carlyle

#12. A fair day's wages for a fair day's work.

Thomas Carlyle

#13. 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

#14. 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

#15. 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

#16. The goal of yesterday will be our starting-point to-morrow.

Thomas Carlyle

#17. Talk that does not end in any kind of action is better suppressed altogether.

Thomas Carlyle

#18. 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

#19. Man is a tool using animal. Without tools he is nothing, with tools he is all.

Thomas Carlyle

#20. 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

#21. The dust of controversy is merely the falsehood flying off.

Thomas Carlyle

#22. Neither in tailoring nor in legislating does man proceed by mere accident.

Thomas Carlyle

#23. 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. Fame is no sure test of merit.

Thomas Carlyle

#25. 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

#26. With stupidity and sound digestion, man may front much.

Thomas Carlyle

#27. The worst waste, that of time.

Thomas Carlyle

#28. 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

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

Thomas Carlyle

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

Thomas Carlyle

#31. 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

#32. Of a truth, men are mystically united: a mystic bond of brotherhood makes all men one.

Thomas Carlyle

#33. The mystical bond of brotherhood makes all men brothers.

Thomas 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. 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

#37. 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

#38. The All of Things is an infinite conjugation of the verb To do .

Thomas Carlyle

#39. There are female dandies as well as clothes-wearing men; and the former are as objectionable as the latter.

Thomas Carlyle

#40. 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

#41. The steam-engine I call fire-demon and great; but it is nothing to the invention of fire.

Thomas Carlyle

#42. Metaphysics is the attempt of the mind to rise above the mind.

Thomas Carlyle

#43. History is a great dust heap.

Thomas Carlyle

#44. 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

#45. 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

#46. France was long a despotism tempered by epigrams.

Thomas Carlyle

#47. Every man has a coward and hero in his soul.

Thomas Carlyle

#48. A man lives by believing something.

Thomas Carlyle

#49. 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

#50. 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

#51. 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

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

Thomas Carlyle

#53. 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

#54. He who takes not counsel of the Unseen and Silent, from him will never come real visibility and speech.

Thomas Carlyle

#55. 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

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

Thomas Carlyle

#57. 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

#58. 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

#59. 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

#60. Language is called the garment of thought: however, it should rather be, language is the flesh-garment, the body, of thought.

Thomas Carlyle

#61. In a certain sense all men are historians.

Thomas Carlyle

#62. In every object there is inexhaustible meaning.

Thomas Carlyle

#63. Feel it in thy heart and then say whether it is of God!

Thomas Carlyle

#64. Evil and good are everywhere, like shadow and substance; inseparable (for men) yet not hostile, only opposed.

Thomas Carlyle

#65. Parliament will train you to talk; and above all things to hear, with patience, unlimited quantities of foolish talk.

Thomas Carlyle

#66. Work earnestly at anything, you will by degrees learn to work at all things.

Thomas Carlyle

#67. 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

#68. The sincere alone can recognize sincerity.

Thomas Carlyle

#69. 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

#70. 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

#71. Such I hold to be the genuine use of Gunpowder: that it makes all men tall.

Thomas Carlyle

#72. 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

#73. Democracy means despair of finding any heroes to govern you, and contented putting up with the want of them.

Thomas Carlyle

#74. History, a distillation of rumour.

Thomas Carlyle

#75. 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

#76. I should say sincerity, a deep, great, genuine sincerity, is the first characteristic of all men in any way heroic.

Thomas Carlyle

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

Thomas Carlyle

#78. No man sees far, most see no farther than their noses.

Thomas Carlyle

#79. I had a lifelong quarrel with God, but in the end we made up.

Thomas Carlyle

#80. Nature, after all, is still the grand agent in making poets.

Thomas Carlyle

#81. 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

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

Thomas Carlyle

#83. All great peoples are conservative.

Thomas Carlyle

#84. 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

#85. Imagination is a poor matter when it has to part company with understanding.

Thomas Carlyle

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

Thomas Carlyle

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

Thomas Carlyle

#88. Humor has justly been regarded as the finest perfection of poetic genius.

Thomas Carlyle

#89. 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.

Thomas Carlyle

#90. Only the person of worth can recognize the worth in others.

Thomas Carlyle

#91. Pain was not given thee merely to be miserable under; learn from it, turn it to account.

Thomas Carlyle

#92. Terror itself, when once grown transcendental, becomes a kind of courage; as frost sufficiently intense, according to the poet Milton, will burn.

Thomas Carlyle

#93. I want to meet my God awake.

Thomas Carlyle

#94. The healthy know not of their health, but only the sick: this is the physician's aphorism, and applicable in a far wider sense than he gives it.

Thomas Carlyle

#95. A stammering man is never a worthless one. Physiology can tell you why. It is an excess of delicacy, excess of sensibility to the presence of his fellow creature, that makes him stammer.

Thomas Carlyle