Thomas Carlyle – 70 Quotes

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70 Quotes by Thomas Carlyle

Work alone is noble.

– Thomas Carlyle

Wonder is the basis of worship.

– Thomas Carlyle

History, a distillation of rumour.

– Thomas Carlyle

All great peoples are conservative.

– Thomas Carlyle

Endurance is patience concentrated.

– Thomas Carlyle

Every noble work is at first impossible.

– Thomas Carlyle

Oh, give us the man who sings at his work.

– Thomas Carlyle

The eye sees what it brings the power to see.

– Thomas Carlyle

In books lies the soul of the whole past time.

– Thomas Carlyle

Music is well said to be the speech of angels.

– Thomas Carlyle

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

– Thomas Carlyle

A loving heart is the beginning of all knowledge.

– Thomas Carlyle

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

– Thomas Carlyle

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

– Thomas Carlyle

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

– Thomas Carlyle

What you see, but can’t see over is as good as infinite.

– Thomas Carlyle

A strong mind always hopes, and has always cause to hope.

– Thomas Carlyle

Silence is as deep as eternity, speech a shallow as time.

– Thomas Carlyle

Men do less than they ought, unless they do all that they can.

– Thomas Carlyle

He who has health, has hope and he who has hope, has everything.

– Thomas Carlyle

I do not believe in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.

– Thomas Carlyle

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

– Thomas Carlyle

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

– Thomas Carlyle

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

– Thomas Carlyle

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

– Thomas Carlyle

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

– Thomas Carlyle

Not brute force but only persuasion and faith are the kings of this world.

– Thomas Carlyle

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

– Thomas Carlyle

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

– Thomas Carlyle

Secrecy is the element of all goodness even virtue, even beauty is mysterious.

– Thomas Carlyle

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

– Thomas Carlyle

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

– Thomas Carlyle

If you look deep enough you will see music the heart of nature being everywhere music.

– Thomas Carlyle

No great man lives in vain. The history of the world is but the biography of great men.

– Thomas Carlyle

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

– Thomas Carlyle

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

– Thomas Carlyle

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

– Thomas Carlyle

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

– Thomas Carlyle

If an eloquent speaker speak not the truth, is there a more horrid kind of object in creation?

– Thomas Carlyle

Our main business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand.

– Thomas Carlyle

The three great elements of modern civilization, Gun powder, Printing, and the Protestant religion.

– Thomas Carlyle

Old age is not a matter for sorrow. It is matter for thanks if we have left our work done behind us.

– Thomas Carlyle

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

– Thomas Carlyle

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

– Thomas Carlyle

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

– Thomas Carlyle

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

– Thomas Carlyle

There is a great discovery still to be made in literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write.

– Thomas Carlyle

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.

– Thomas Carlyle

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

– Thomas Carlyle

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

– Thomas Carlyle

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.

– Thomas Carlyle

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

– Thomas Carlyle

For all right judgment of any man or things it is useful, nay, essential, to see his good qualities before pronouncing on his bad.

– Thomas Carlyle

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

– Thomas Carlyle

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

– Thomas Carlyle

None of us will ever accomplish anything excellent or commanding except when he listens to this whisper which is heard by him alone.

– Thomas Carlyle

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.

– Thomas Carlyle

This world, after all our science and sciences, is still a miracle wonderful, inscrutable, magical and more, to whosoever will think of it.

– Thomas Carlyle

In the long-run every Government is the exact symbol of its People, with their wisdom and unwisdom we have to say, Like People like Government.

– Thomas Carlyle

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.

– Thomas Carlyle

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.

– Thomas Carlyle

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.

– Thomas Carlyle

For, if a good speaker, never so eloquent, does not see into the fact, and is not speaking the truth of that – is there a more horrid kind of object in creation?

– Thomas Carlyle

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.

– Thomas Carlyle

True humor springs not more from the head than from the heart. It is not contempt its essence is love. It issues not in laughter, but in still smiles, which lie far deeper.

– Thomas Carlyle

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.

– Thomas Carlyle

Wondrous is the strength of cheerfulness, and its power of endurance – the cheerful man will do more in the same time, will do it better, will preserve it longer, than the sad or sullen.

– Thomas Carlyle

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.

– Thomas Carlyle

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.

– Thomas Carlyle

It were a real increase of human happiness, could all young men from the age of nineteen be covered under barrels, or rendered otherwise invisible and there left to follow their lawful studies and callings, till they emerged, sadder and wiser, at the age of twenty-five.

– Thomas Carlyle