Thomas Carlyle Quotes

The greatest university is a collection of books.

It is the first of all problems for a man to find out what kind of work he is to do in this universe.

And yet without labour there were no ease, no rest, so much as conceivable.

The first duty of man is that of subduing fear.

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

Weak eyes are fondest of glittering objects.

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

The crash of the whole solar and stellar systems could only kill you once.

Great men taken up in any way are profitable company. We cannot look, however imperfectly, upon a great man without gaining something by him.

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.

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.

Manhood begins when we have in any way made truce with Necessity; begins even when we have surrendered to Necessity, as the most part only do; but begins joyfully and hopefully only when we have reconciled ourselves to Necessity; and thus, in reality, triumphed over it, and felt that in Necessity we are free.

A background of wrath, which can be stirred up to the murderous infernal pitch, does lie in every man.

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

Leaders: Captains of industry.

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

Only perhaps in the United States, which alone of countries can do without governing,every man being at least able to live, and move off into the wilderness, let Congress jargon as it will,can such a form of so-called Government continue for any length of time to torment men with the semblance, when the indispensable substance is not there.

A man
be the heavens ever praised!
is sufficient for himself.

The press is the fourth estate of the realm.

In our wide world there is but one altogether fatal personage, the dunce,
he that speaks irrationally, that sees not, and yet thinks he sees.

Long stormy spring-time, wet contentious April, winter chilling the lap of very May; but at length the season of summer does come.

He that can work is born to be king of something.

To believe practically that the poor and luckless are here only as a nusiance to be abraded and abated, and in some permissable manner made away with, and swept out of sight, is not an amiable faith.

No person was every rightly understood until they had been first regarded with a certain feeling, not of tolerance, but of sympathy.

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! ...

Everywhere the human soul stands between a hemisphere of light and another of darkness; on the confines of two everlasting empires, necessity and free will.

I've got a great ambition to die of exhaustion rather than boredom.

He who could foresee affairs three days in advance would be rich for thousands of years.

Thought, true labor of any kind, highest virtue itself, is it not the daughter of Pain?

He who talks much about virtue in the abstract, begins to be suspected; it is shrewdly guessed that where there is great preaching there will be little almsgiving.

The memory of that first state of Freedom and paradisiac Unconsciousness has faded away into an ideal poetic dream. We stand here too conscious of many things: with Knowledge, the symptom of Derangement, we must even do our best to restore a little Order. Life is, in few instances, and at rare intervals, the diapason of a heavenly melody; oftenest the fierce jar of disruptions and convulsions, which, do what we will, there is no disregarding.

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.

A thought once awakened does not again slumber.

Does not every true man feel that he is himself made higher by doing reverence to what is really above him?

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.

Quackery gives birth to nothing; gives death to all things.

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

The Highest Being reveals himself in man.

That there should one man die ignorant who had capacity for knowledge, this I call a tragedy.

High Air-castles are cunningly built of Words, the Words well bedded also in good Logic-mortar; wherein, however, no Knowledge will come to lodge.

Today
So here hath been dawning
Another blue Day:
Think wilt thou let it
Slip useless away.
Out of Eternity
This new Day is born;
Into Eternity,
At night, will return.
Behold it aforetime
No eye ever did:
So soon it forever
From all eyes is hid.
Here hath been dawning
Another blue Day:
Think wilt thou let it
Slip useless away.

Nothing is more terrible than activity without insight.

The greatest event for the world is the arrival of a new and wise person.

Such is the world. Understand it, despise it, love it; cheerfully hold on thy way through it, with thy eye on highest loadstars!

History, a distillation of rumour.

Hunger whets everything, especially Suspicion and Indignation.

All work is as seed sown; it grows and spreads, and sows itself anew.

Out of Eternity the new day is born; Into Eternity at night will return.

All work of man is as the swimmer's: a vast ocean threatens to devour him; if he front it not bravely, it will keep its word.

A heavenly awe overshadowed and encompassed, as it still ought, and must, all earthly business whatsoever.

A fundamental mistake to call vehemence and rigidity strength! A man is not strong who takes convulsion-fits; though six men cannot hold him then. He that can walk under the heaviest weight without staggering, he is the strong man ... A man who cannot hold his peace, till the time come for speaking and acting, is no right man.

The mystical bond of brotherhood makes all men brothers.

A fair day's wage for a fair day's work: it is as just a demand as governed men ever made of governing. It is the everlasting right of man.

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.

Produce! Produce! Were it but the pitifullest infinitesimal fraction of a Product,

A Dandy is a clothes-wearing Man, a Man whose trade, office and existence consists in the wearing of clothes.

Insurrection, never so necessary, is a most sad necessity; and governors who wait for that to instruct them are surely getting into the fatalest course.

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.

Fire is the best of servants, but what a master!

We have not the love of greatness, but the love of the love of greatness.

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.

Laughter means sympathy.

There are depths in man that go to the lowest hell, and heights that reach the highest heaven, for are not both heaven and hell made out of him, everlasting miracle and mystery that he is.

I call the book of Job, apart from all theories about it, one of the grandest things ever written with the pen.

I too acknowledge the all-out omnipotence of early culture and nature; hereby we have either a doddered dwarf-bush, or a high-towering, wide-shadowing tree! either a sick yellow cabbage, or an edible luxuriant green one. Of a truth, it is the duty of all men, especially of all philosophers, to note down with accuracy the characteristic circumstances of their education,
what furthered, what hindered, what in any way modified it.

The old cathedrals are good, but the great blue dome that hangs over everything is better.

The fearful unbelief is unbelief in yourself.

For man is not the creature and product of Mechanism; but, in a far truer sense, its creator and producer.

We have profoundly forgotten everywhere that Cash-payment is not the sole relation of human beings.

Out of the lowest depths there is a path to the loftiest heights.

The true eye for talent presupposes the true reverence for it.

Why tell me that a man is a fine speaker, if it is not the truth that he is speaking?

The block of granite which was an obstacle in the pathway of the weak, became a stepping-stone in the pathway of the strong.

The coldest word was once a glowing new metaphor.

I never heard tell of any clever man that came of entirely stupid people.

Heroes, it would seem, exist always and a certain worship of them.

Love is ever the beginning of knowledge as fire is of light.

There are remedies for all things but death.

The only happiness a brave person ever troubles themselves in asking about, is happiness enough to get their work done.

The authentic insight and experience of any human soul, were it but insight and experience in hewing of wood and drawing of water, is real knowledge, a real possession and acquirement.

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.

One life - a little gleam of Time between two Eternities.

The greatest mistake is to imagine that we never err.

There are but two ways of paying debt: Increase of industry in raising income, increase of thrift in laying out.

Man is emphatically a proselytizing creature.

Worship of a hero is transcendent admiration of a great man.

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

Make yourself an honest man, and then you may be sure that there is one less scoundrel in the world.

Armed Soldier, terrible as Death, relentless as Doom; doing God's judgement on the Enemies of God. It is a phenomenon not of joyful nature; no, but of awful, to be looked at with pious terror and awe.

Experience of actual fact either teaches fools or abolishes them.

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.

A battle is a terrible conjugation of the verb to kill: I kill, thou killest, he kills, we kill, they kill, all kill.

There is a majesty and mystery in nature, take her as you will. The essence of poetry comes breathing to a mind that feels from every province of her empire.

Prayer is and remains always a native and deepest impulse of the soul of man.

For ours is a most fictile world; and man is the most fingent plastic of creatures. A world not fixable; not fathomable! An unfathomable Somewhat, which is Not me; which we can work with, and live amidst
and model, miraculously in our miraculous Being, and name World.

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

I came hither [Craigenputtoch] solely with the design to simplify my way of life and to secure the independence through which I could be enabled to remain true to myself.

Is there no God, then, but at best an absentee God, sitting idle, ever since the first Sabbath, at the outside of his Universe?

Goethe's devil is a cultivated personage and acquainted with the modern sciences; sneers at witchcraft and the black art even while employing them, and doubts most things, nay, half disbelieves even his own existence.

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.