Thomas Carlyle Quotes (394 Quotes)

Happy the people whose annals are vacant.

Aristocracy of the Money bag.

Work is the grand cure for all maladies and miseries that ever beset mankind - honest work, which you intend getting done.

Of all paths a man could strike into, there is, at any given moment, a best path for every man to find this path, and to walk in it, is the one thing needful for him.

Today is not yesterday we ourselves change how can our works and thoughts, if they are always to be the fittest, continue always the same Change, indeed is painful yet ever needful and if memory have its force and worth, so also has hope.

The archenemy is the arch stupid.

Nothing that was worthy in the past departs; no truth or goodness realized by man ever dies, or can die.

There are good and bad times, but our mood changes more often than our fortune.

Democracy will prevail when men believe the vote of Judas as good as that of Jesus Christ.

Every noble work is at first impossible.

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. . .

We call it a Society and go about professing openly the totalest separation, isolation. Our life is not a mutual helpfulness but rather, cloaked under due laws-of-war, named 'fair competition' and so forth, it is a mutual hostility.

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.

Every new opinion, at its starting, is precisely in a minority of one.

Great men are the commissioned guides of mankind, who rule their fellows because they are wiser.

Speech is human, silence is divine, yet also brutish and dead: therefore we must learn both arts.

Perseverance is patience concentrated.

For suffering and enduring there is no remedy, but striving and doing.

The depth of our despair measures what capability and height of claim we have to hope.

To the mean eye all things are trivial, as certainly as to the jaundiced they are yellow.

Our works are the mirror wherein the spirit first sees its natural lineaments, Hence, too, the folly of that impossible precept, Know thyself till it be translated into this partially possible one, know what thou canst work at.

Men's hearts ought not to be set against one another, but set with one another, and all against evil only.

What we might call, by way of eminence, the Dismal Science.

Conviction is worthless unless it is converted into conduct.

Doubt, of whatever kind, can be ended by action alone.

Work alone is noble.

No sadder proof can be given of a person's own tiny stature, than their disbelief in great people.

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

A man without a goal is like a ship without a rudder.

In every phenomenon the beginning remains always the most notable moment.

Freedom is the one purport, wisely aimed at, or unwisely, of all man's struggles, toilings and sufferings, in this earth.

All men, if they work not as in the great taskmaster's eye, will work wrong, and work unhappily for themselves and for you.

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

A witty statesman said, you might prove anything by figures.

The seagreen Incorruptible.

Close thy Byron open thy Goethe.

If time is precious, no book that will not improve by repeated reading deserves to be read at all.

The end of man is action, and not thought, though it be of the noblest.

Lives there the man that can figure a naked Duke of Windlestraw addressing a naked House of Lords.

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

Man is a tool-using animal.

Man's unhappiness, as I construe, comes of his greatness; it is because there is an Infinite in him, which with all his cunning he cannot quite bury under the Finite.

When an oak-tree is felled the whole forest echoes with it but a hundred acorns are planted silently by some unnoticed breeze.

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

Teaching school is but another word for sure and not very slow destruction.

If you do not wish a man to do a thing, you had better get him to talk about it; for the more men talk, the more likely they are to do nothing else.

Pin your faith to no ones sleeves, haven't you two eyes of your own.

Fancy that thou deservest to be hanged. . . thou wilt feel it happiness to be only shot fancy that thou deservest to be hanged in a hair halter, it will be a luxury to die in hemp.

Cash-payment never was, or could except for a few years be, the union-bond of man to man. Cash never yet paid one man fully his deserts to another nor could it, nor can it, now or henceforth to the end of the world.

The spiritual is the parent of the practical.