Thomas Carlyle Quotes
Most popular Thomas Carlyle Quotes
Be not the slave to Words.
Be not the slave of Words.
Man is a tool-using animal.
Worship is transcendent wonder.
Custom doth make dotards of us all.
Silence is more eloquent than words.
Every noble work is at first impossible.
Habit is the deepest law of human nature.
Wondrous is the strength of cheerfulness.
Speech is of time, silence is of eternity.
The universe is but one vast Symbol of God.
Oh, give us the soul who sings at his work.
Genius is the infinite art of taking pains.
Not what I have but what I do is my kingdom.
He that can work is a born King of something.
Thought once awakened does not again slumber.
Music is well said to be the speech of angels.
A mystic bond of brotherhood makes all men one.
Clever men are good, but they are not the best.
No person is important enough to make me angry.
The coldest word was once a glowing new metaphor.
A vein of poetry exists in the hearts of all men.
A loving heart is the beginning of all knowledge.
A good book is the purest essence of a human soul.
Nothing is so terrible than activity without insight.
A man's religion is the chief fact with regard to him.
Silence is deep as Eternity; speech is shallow as Time.
Just in ratio as knowledge increases, faith diminishes.
All greatness is unconscious, or it is little and naught.
The merit of originality is not novelty, it is sincerity.
Happy the people whose annals are blank in history-books.
A well-written Life is almost as rare as a well-spent one.
My whinstone house my castle is; I have my own four walls.
It is the heart always that sees, before the head can see.
The true University of these days is a Collection of Books.
The history of the world is but the biography of great men.
Worship of a hero is transcendent admiration of a great man.
Love is ever the beginning of Knowledge, as fire is of light.
True humor springs not more from the head than from the heart.
The true university of these days is a collection of good books.
A great man shows his greatness by the way he treats little men.
The greatest of faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none.
A poet without love were a physical and metaphysical impossibility.
A word spoken in season, at the right moment, is the matter of ages.
Show me the man you honor, and I will know what kind of man you are.
Every new opinion, at its starting, is precisely in a minority of one.
Every noble crown is, and on earth will forever be, a crown of thorns.
Blessed is he who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness.
Experience is the best of schoolmasters, only the school-fees are heavy.
In every phenomenon the beginning remains always the most notable moment.
Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together.
Great men are the commissioned guides of mankind, who rule their fellows.
Blessed is the man who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness.
He who has a secret should not only hide it, but hide that he has it to hide.
Thought works in silence, so does virtue. One might erect statues to silence.
How much lies in laughter: the cipher-key wherewith we decipher the whole man!
Love is not altogether a delirium, yet it has many points in common therewith.
There are good and bad times, but our mood changes more often than our fortune.
Love is not altogether a delirium...yet has it many points in common therewith.
Work is the grand cure of all the maladies and miseries that ever beset mankind.
Hero-worship exists, has existed, and will forever exist, universally among mankind.
Self-deception once yielded to, all other deceptions follow naturally more and more.
There is no heroic poem in the world but is at bottom a biography, the life of a man.
The great law of culture is: Let each become all that he is created capable of being.
The man without a purpose is like a ship without a rudder; a waif, a nothing, a no-man.
Wonder is the basis of Worship: the reign of wonder is perennial, indestructible in Man.
No sadder proof can be given by a man of his own littleness than disbelief in great men.
Pain was not given thee merely to be miserable under; learn from it, turn it to account.
No great man lives in vain. The history of the world is but the biography of great men.
No man who has once heartily and wholly laughed can be altogether and irreclaimably depraved.
This is such a serious world that we should never speak at all unless we have something to say.
Make yourself an honest man, and then you may be sure that there is one less rascal in the world.
The three great elements of modern civilization: Gunpowder, Printing, and the Protestant Religion.
It is the first of all problems for man to find out what kind of work he is to do in this universe.
A laugh, to be joyous, must flow from a joyous heart, for without kindness there can be no true joy.
The fine arts once divorcing themselves from truth are quite certain to fall mad, if they do not die.
Our grand business is not to see what lies dimly in the distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand.
The wealth of man is the number of things which he loves and blesses, which he is loved and blessed by.
Nothing that was worthy in the past departs; no truth or goodness realized by man ever dies, or can die.
Men's hearts ought not to be set against one another, but set with one another, and all against evil only.
Fame is no sure test of merit, but only a probability of such; it is an accident, not a property of a man.
All that man has done, thought, gained or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books.
Youth is to all the glad season of life, but often only by what it hopes, not by what it attains or escapes.
For Love is ever the beginning of Knowledge, as fire is of light; and works also more in the manner of fire.
All that Mankind has done, thought, gained or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of Books.
In the huge mass of evil as it rolls and swells, there is ever some good working toward deliverance and triumph.
He was...a man of an immense head and great jaws like a crocodile's, cast in a mold designed for prodigious work.
The first duty for a man is still that of subduing Fear. We must get rid of Fear; we cannot act at all till then.
I should say sincerity, a deep, great, genuine sincerity, is the first characteristic of all men in any way heroic.
In every epoch of the world, the great event, parent of all others, is it not the arrival of a Thinker in the world?
The work of an unknown good man is like a vein of water flowing hidden underground, secretly making the ground greener.
The work an unknown good man has done is like a vein of water flowing hidden underground, secretly making the ground green.
The block of granite which was an obstacle in the pathway of the weak, became a stepping-stone in the pathway of the strong.
A man willing to work, and unable to find work, is perhaps the saddest sight that fortune's inequality exhibits under this sun.
Is there no God, then, but at best an absentee God, sitting idle, ever since the first Sabbath, at the outside of his Universe?
Adversity is sometimes hard upon a man; but for one man who can stand prosperity, there are a hundred that will stand adversity.
The philosopher is one to whom the highest has descended and the lowest has mounted up; who is the equal and kindly brother of all.
For all right judgment of any man or thing, it is useful, nay essential, to see their good qualities before pronouncing on their bad.
No man lives without jostling and being jostled; in all ways he has to elbow himself through the world, giving and receiving offense.
Someone who is willing to work, and unable to find work, is perhaps the saddest sight that fortune's inequality exhibits under the sun.
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.
A man's felicity consists not in the outward and visible blessing of fortune, but in the inward and unseen perfections and riches of the mind.
Each one of us...has he not a Life of his own to lead? One life; a little gleam of Time between two Eternities; no second chance to us for evermore!
Good breeding differs, if at all, from high breeding only as it gracefully remembers the rights of others, rather than gracefully insists on its own rights.
Music is well said to be the speech of angels; in fact, nothing among the utterances allowed to man is felt to be so divine. It brings us near to the Infinite.
Everywhere the human soul stands between a hemisphere of light and another of darkness on the confines of two everlasting hostile empires—Necessity and Free Will.
I grow daily to honor facts more and more, and theory less and less. A fact, it seems to me, is a great thing—a sentence printed, if not by God, then at least by the Devil.
The illimitable, silent, never-resting thing called Time, rolling, rushing on, swift, silent, like an all-embracing ocean-tide, on which we and all the universe swim like exhalations, like apparitions which are, and then are not ...
War is a quarrel between two thieves too cowardly to fight their own battle; therefore they take boys from one village and another village, stick them into uniforms, equip them with guns, and let them loose like wild beasts against each other.
Of Representative Assemblies may not this good be said: That contending parties in a country do thereby ascertain one another's strength? They fight there, since fight they must, by petition, Parliamentary eloquence, not by sword, bayonet and bursts of military cannon.
Love is ever the beginning of knowledge as fire is of light.
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.
