Thomas Carlyle Quotes (394 Quotes)

I don't pretend to understand the Universe - it's a great deal bigger than I am.

Action hangs, as it were, dissolved in speech, in thoughts whereof speech is the shadow and precipitates itself there from. The kind of speech in a man betokens the kind of action you will get from him.

The Universe is but one vast symbol of God.

Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together.

One is hardly sensible of fatigue while he marches to music.

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

Let one who wants to move and convince others, first be convinced and moved themselves. If a person speaks with genuine earnestness the thoughts, the emotion and the actual condition of their own heart, others will listen. . .

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

Song is the heroics of speech.

Pleasure is the last resort of the desperate. Happy people do not need to be amused.

Society is founded upon cloth.

The Ideal is in thyself, the impediments too is in thyself.

Show me the man you honor, and I will know what kind of man you are.

We were wise indeed, could we discern truly the signs of our own time and by knowledge of its wants and advantages, wisely adjust our own position in it.

Just in ratio as knowledge increases, faith diminishes.

The man of life upright has a guiltless heart, free from all dishonest deeds or thought of vanity.

The soul gives unity to what it looks at with love.

Tell a man he is brave, and you help him to become so.

The difference between Socrates and Jesus? The great conscious and the immeasurably great unconscious.

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

All evil is like a nightmare the instant you stir under it, the evil is gone.

Poetry and Religion (and it is really worth knowing) are a product of the smaller intestines'.

We do everything by custom, even believe by it our very axioms, let us boast of free-thinking as we may, are oftenest simply such beliefs as we have never heard questioned.

The first sin in our universe was Lucifer's self conceit.

In epochs when cash payment has become the sole nexus of man to man.

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

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

A great man shows his greatness by the way he treats little men.

No violent extreme endures.

Figure him there, with his scrofulous diseases, with his great greedy heart, and unspeakable chaos of thoughts stalking mournful as a stranger in this Earth eagerly devouring what spiritual thing he could come at. . .

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

No person is important enough to make me angry.

Humor is the finest perfection of poetic genius.

Virtue, like health, is the harmony of the whole man.

Man is a tool-using animal. Without tools he is nothing, with tools he is all.

No iron chain, or outward force of any kind, can ever compel the soul of a person to believe or to disbelieve.

Worship is transcendent wonder.

Oblivion is the dark page whereon memory writes her light-beam characters were it all light, nothing could be read there, any more than if it were all darkness.

History, a distillation of rumour.

Blessed is he who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness.

Metaphysics is the attempt of the mind to rise above the mind.

A healthy hatred of scoundrels.

Conviction never so excellent, is worthless until it coverts itself into conduct.

The real use of gunpowder is to make all men tall.