Thomas Carlyle Quotes (394 Quotes)


    Tell a person they are brave and you help them become so.


    Under all speech that is good for anything there lies a silence that is better, Silence is deep as Eternity; speech is shallow as Time.


    He has no resolution, he shrinks from pain or labour in any of its shapes. His very attitude bespeaks this he never straightens his knee joints, he stoops with his fat ill-shapen shoulders, and in walking he does not tread but shovel and slide.



    No sadder proof can be given by a man of his own littleness than disbelief in great men.

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

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

    As one highway engineer put it, We were going by the book, but the damned mountain couldn't read. ... Every noble work is at first impossible.

    Life is a little gleam of time between two eternity s.

    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.

    A terrible, beetle-browed, mastiff-mouthed, yellow-skinned, broad-bottomed, grim-taciturn individual with a pair of dull-cruel-looking black eyes, and as much Parliamentary intellect and silent-rage in him. . . as I have ever seen in any man.

    The man without a purpose is like a ship without a rudder -- waif, a nothing, a no man. Have a purpose in life, and, having it, throw such strength of mind and muscle into your work as God has given you.

    To reform a world, to reform a nation, no wise man will undertake; and all but foolish men know, that the only solid, though a far slower reformation, is what each begins and perfects on himself.

    They raise their minds by brooding over and embellishing their sufferings, from one degree of fervid exaltation and dreary greatness to another, till at length they run amuck entirely, and whoever meets them would do well to run them thro' the body.

    Thought once awakened does not again slumber; unfolds itself into a System of Thought; grows, in man after man, generation after generation, - till its full stature is reached, and such System of Thought can grow no farther, but must give place to another.

    Reform is not pleasant, but grievous; no person can reform themselves without suffering and hard work, how much less a nation.

    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.

    Permanence, perseverance and persistence in spite of all obstacle s, discouragement s, and impossibilities: It is this, that in all things distinguishes the strong soul from the weak.

    When new turns of behavior cease to appear in the life of the individual, its behavior ceases to be intelligent.

    For love is ever the beginning of Knowledge, As fire is of light.

    Men seldom, or rather never for a length of time and deliberately, rebel against anything that does not deserve rebelling against.

    Reality, if rightly interpreted, is grander than fiction.

    Do the duty which lies nearest to you, the second duty will then become clearer.

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

    To us also, through every star, through every blade of grass, is not God made visible if we will open our minds and our eyes.

    The work an unknown good man has done is like a vein of water flowing hidden underground, secretly making the ground green.

    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.

    The man who cannot laugh is not only fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils, but his whole life is already a treason and a stratagem.

    Burke said that there were Three Estates in Parliament but, in the Reporters' Gallery yonder, there sat a Fourth Estate, more important far than they all.

    Let me have my own way in exactly everything, and a sunnier and pleasanter creature does not exist.


    One must verify or expel his doubts, and convert them into the certainty of Yes or NO.

    There is only one post fit for you, and that is the office of perpetual president of the Heaven and Hell Amalgamation Society.

    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.

    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.


    Self-contemplation is infallibly the symptom of disease.

    Having a purpose in life, throw into your work such strength of mind and muscle as God has given you.

    All that Mankind has done, thought, gained or been is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of Books. They are the chosen possession of men.


    There they are cutting each other's throats, because one half of them prefer hiring their servants for life, and the other by the hour.

    Our life is not really a mutual helpfulness but rather, it's fair competition cloaked under due laws of war it's a mutual hostility.


    In books lies the soul of the whole Past Time the articulate audible voice of the Past, when the body and material substance of it has altogether vanished like a dream.

    That monstrous tuberosity of civilised life, the capital of England.


    Science must have originated in the feeling that something was wrong.

    If a book comes from the heart it will contrive to reach other hearts. All art and author craft are of small account to that.


    More Thomas Carlyle Quotations (Based on Topics)


    Man - Work & Career - Life - Mind - Books - World - Time - People - Wisdom & Knowledge - Speech - Silence - Literature - Thought & Thinking - God - Genius - Infinity - Soul - Devils - Good & Evil - View All Thomas Carlyle Quotations

    Related Authors


    Sun Tzu - John Stuart Mill - Francis Bacon - Deepak Chopra - David Hume - Xenophanes - Soren Kierkegaard - Robert M. Pirsig - Marcus Fabius Quintilian - Charles de Montesquieu


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