Thomas Carlyle Quotes (394 Quotes)

I grow daily to honour 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.

Nothing builds self-esteem and self-confidence like accomplishment.

In a symbol there is concealment and yet revelation here therefore, by silence and by speech acting together, comes a double significance. . .

Every day that is born into the world comes like a burst of music and rings the whole day through, and you make of it a dance, a dirge, or a life march, as you will.

The battle that never ends is the battle of belief against unbelief.

Not our logical faculty, but our imaginative one is king over us. I might say, priest and prophet to lead us to heaven-ward, or magician and wizard to lead us hellward.

A whiff of grapeshot.

I have seen gleams in the face and eyes of the man that have let you look into a higher country.

The glory of a workman, still more of a master workman, that he does his work well, ought to be his most precious possession like the honor of a soldier, dearer to him than life.

The courage we desire and prize is not the courage to die decently, but to live manfully.

Men are to be guided only by their self-interests. Good government is a good balancing of these and, except a keen eye and appetite for self-interest, requires no virtue in any quarter.

To a shower of gold most things are penetrable.

Let a man try faithfully, manfully to be right, he will daily grow more and more right. It is at the bottom of the condition on which all men have to cultivate themselves.

War is a quarrel between two thieves too cowardly to fight their own battle.

O poor mortals, how ye make this earth bitter for each other

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

What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books.

Over the times thou hast no power.... Solely over one man thou hast quite absolute power. Him redeem and make honest.

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

It must have been a most blessed discovery, that of an old Latin Bible which he found in the Erfurt Library about this time. He had never seen the Book before. It taught him another lesson than that of fasts and vigils Luther learned now that a man was saved not by singing masses, but by the infinite grace of God a more credible hypothesis. He gradually got himself founded, as on the rock. No wonder he should venerate the Bible, which had brought this blessed help to him. He prized it as the Word of the Highest must be prized by such a man. He determined to hold by that, as through life and to death he firmly did.

The fraction of life can be increased in value not so much By increasing your numerator as by lessening your denominator. Nay, unless my Algebra deceives me, unity itself divided by zero will give infinity.

History shows that the majority of people that have done anything great have passed their youth in seclusion.

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

Man is, properly speaking, based upon hope, he has no other possession but hope; this world of his is emphatically the place of hope.

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

Clever men are good, but they are not the best.

The eternal stars shine out as soon as it is dark enough.

Love is not altogether a delirium, yet it has many points in common therewith.

The most fearful unbelief is unbelief in your self.

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

Of all acts of man repentance is the most divine. The greatest of all faults is to be conscious of none.

If what you have done is unjust, you have not succeeded.

Originality is a thing we constantly clamour for, and constantly quarrel with.

Do the duty which lieth nearest to thee Thy second duty will already have become clearer.

Foolish men imagine that because judgment for an evil thing is delayed, there is no justice; but only accident here below. Judgment for an evil thing is many times delayed some day or two, some century or two, but it is sure as life, it is sure as death.

Happy the people whose annals are blank in the history books.

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

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 cut of a garment speaks of intellect and talent and the color of temperament and heart.

Except by name, Jean Paul Friedrich Richter is little known out of Germany. The only thing connected with him, we think, that has reached this country is his saying,imported by Madame de Stal, and thankfully pocketed by most newspaper critics,'Providence has given to the French the empire of the land to the English that of the sea to the Germans that ofthe air' Richter German humorist prose writer.

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.

The greatest of all faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none.

History is the essence of innumerable biographies.

Skepticism, as I said, is not intellectual only it is moral also a chronic atrophy and disease of the whole soul. A man lives by believing something not by debating and arguing about many things. A sad case for him when all that he can manage to believe i

We have our little theory on all human and divine things. Poetry, the workings of genius itself, which, in all times, with one or another meaning, has been called Inspiration, and held to be mysterious and inscrutable, is no longer without its scientific exposition. The building of the lofty rhyme is like any other masonry or bricklaying we have theories of its rise, height, decline and fall -- which latter, it would seem, is now near, among all people.

The first duty of man is to conquer fear; he must get rid of it, he cannot act till then.

The gospel according to Jean Jacques.

No pressure, no diamonds.

The Public is an old woman. Let her maunder and mumble.

A man willing to work, and unable to find work, is perhaps the saddest sight that fortune's inequality exhibits under this sun.