Thomas Carlyle Quotes

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.

History is a mighty dramos, enacted upon the theatre of times, with suns for lamps and eternity for a background.

All that mankind has done, thought or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books.

The great silent man! Looking round on the noisy inanity of the world,--words with little meaning, actions with little worth,--one loves to reflect on the great Empire of Silence.

Every man has a coward and hero in his soul.

Thou fool! Nature alone is antique, and the oldest art a mushroom; that idle crag thou sittest on is six thousand years of age.

Creation is great, and cannot be understood.

Self-contemplation is infallibly the symptom of disease.

The dust of controversy is merely the falsehood flying off.

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

There is in man a higher than love of happiness; he can do without happiness, and instead thereof find blessedness.

Caution is the lower story of prudence.

Stop a moment, cease your work, and look around you.

Woe to him that claims obedience when it is not due; woe to him that refuses it when it is.

Man, it is not thy works, which are mortal, infinitely little, and the greatest no greater than the least, but only the spirit thou workest in, that can have worth or continuance.

Of all your troubles, great and small, the greatest are the ones that don't happen at all.

Man is a tool-using animal.

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

The Orator persuades and carries all with him, he knows not how; the Rhetorician can prove that he ought to have persuaded and carried all with him.

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

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.

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.

All deep things are song. It seems somehow the very central essence of us, song; as if all the rest were but wrappages and hulls!

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

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.

A man's felicity consists not in the outward and visible blessing of fortune, but in the inward and unseen perfections and riches of the mind.

The latest gospel in this world is, know thy work and do it.

He is wise who can instruct us and assist us in the business of virtuous living.

All greatness is unconscious, or it is little and naught.

Terror itself, when once grown transcendental, becomes a kind of courage; as frost sufficiently intense, according to the poet Milton, will burn.

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

Of a truth, men are mystically united: a mystic bond of brotherhood makes all men one.

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

All true work is sacred. In all true work, were it but true hand work, there is something of divineness. Labor, wide as the earth, has its summit in Heaven.

Is not light grander than fire?

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

"Love is not altogether a Delirium," says he elsewhere; "yet has it many points in common therewith."

There are but two ways of paying debt: Increase of industry in raising income, increase of thrift in laying out.

The best effect of any book is that it excites the reader to self activity.

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

The tragedy of life is not so much what men suffer, but rather what they miss.

If you are ever in doubt as to whether to kiss a pretty girl, always give her the benefit of the doubt.

No man sees far, most see no farther than their noses.

A man cannot make a pair of shoes rightly unless he do it in a devout manner.

A good book is the purest essence of a human soul.

Only the person of worth can recognize the worth in others.

The first duty of man is that of subduing fear.

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

The fearful unbelief is unbelief in yourself.

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