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Quotes by Thomas Carlyle

The actual well seen is ideal.
– Thomas Carlyle
The barrenest of all mortals is the sentimentalist.
– Thomas Carlyle
The block of granite which was an obstacle in the pathway of the weak, became a stepping-stone in the pathway of the strong.
– Thomas Carlyle
The courage we desire and prize is not the courage to die decently, but to live manfully.
– Thomas Carlyle
The cut of a garment speaks of intellect and talent and the color of temperament and heart.
– Thomas Carlyle
The depth of our despair measures what capability and height of claim we have to hope.
– Thomas Carlyle
The difference between Socrates and Jesus? The great conscious and the immeasurably great unconscious.
– Thomas Carlyle
The end of man is action, and not thought, though it be of the noblest.
– Thomas Carlyle
The eye sees what it brings the power to see.
– Thomas Carlyle
The fearful unbelief is unbelief in yourself.
– 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 foul sluggard's comfort: 'It will last my time.'
– Thomas Carlyle
The mathematics of high achievement.
– Thomas Carlyle
The merit of originality is not novelty; it is sincerity.
– Thomas Carlyle
The novel can't compete with cars, the movies, television, and liquor. A guy who's had a good feed and tanked up on good wine gives his old lady a kiss after supper and his day is over. Finished.
– Thomas Carlyle
The old cathedrals are good, but the great blue dome that hangs over everything is better.
– Thomas Carlyle
The only happiness a brave person ever troubles themselves in asking about, is happiness enough to get their work done.
– Thomas Carlyle
The outer passes away; the innermost is the same yesterday, today, and forever.
– Thomas Carlyle
The past is all holy to us; the dead are all holy; even they that were wicked when alive.
– Thomas Carlyle
The real use of gunpowder is to make all men tall.
– Thomas Carlyle
The spiritual is the parent of the practical.
– Thomas Carlyle
The three great elements of modern civilization, Gun powder, Printing, and the Protestant religion.
– 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
The world is a republic of mediocrities, and always was.
– Thomas Carlyle
There are good and bad times, but our mood changes more often than our fortune.
– 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
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
Thought is the parent of the deed.
– Thomas Carlyle
Thought once awakened does not again slumber; unfolds itself into a System of Thought; grows, in man after man, generation after generation, - till its full stature is reached, and such System of Thought can grow no farther, but must give place to another.
– 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
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
War is a quarrel between two thieves too cowardly to fight their own battle.
– Thomas Carlyle
We have profoundly forgotten everywhere that cash-payment is not the sole relation of human beings.
– Thomas Carlyle
Weak eyes are fondest of glittering objects.
– 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
What you see, but can't see over is as good as infinite.
– Thomas Carlyle
When new turns of behavior cease to appear in the life of the individual, its behavior ceases to be intelligent.
– Thomas Carlyle
When the oak is felled the whole forest echoes with it fall, but a hundred acorns are sown in silence by an unnoticed breeze.
– Thomas Carlyle
When we can drain the Ocean into mill-ponds, and bottle up the Force of Gravity, to be sold by retail, in gas jars; then may we hope to comprehend the infinitudes of man's soul under formulas of Profit and Loss; and rule over this too, as over a patent engine, by checks, and valves, and balances.
– Thomas Carlyle
Who soweth good seed shall surely reap; The year grows rich as it groweth old, And life's latest sands are its sands of gold!
– Thomas Carlyle
Woe to him that claims obedience when it is not due; woe to him that refuses it when it is.
– 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
Work alone is noble.
– Thomas Carlyle
Youth is to all the glad season of life; but often only by what it hopes, not by what it attains, or what it escapes.
– Thomas Carlyle
Blessed is he who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness. He has a work, a life-purpose; he has found it, and will follow it! How, as a free-flowing channel, dug and torn by noble force through the sour mudswamp of one's existence, like an ever-deepening river there, it runs and flows;—draining off the sour festering water, gradually from the root of the remotest grass-blade; making, instead of pestilential swamp, a green fruitful meadow with its clear-flowing stream. How blessed for the meadow itself, let the stream and its value be great or small! Labour is Life: from the inmost heart of the Worker rises his god-given Force, the sacred celestial Life-essence breathed into him by Almighty God; from his inmost heart awakens him to all nobleness,—to all knowledge, “self-knowledge” and much else, so soon as Work fitly begins. Knowledge? The knowledge that will hold good in working, cleave thou to that; for Nature herself accredits that, says Yea to that. Properly thou hast no other knowledge but what thou hast got by working: the rest is yet all a hypothesis of knowledge; a thing to be argued of in schools, a thing floating in the clouds, in endless logic-vortices, till we try it and fix it.“
– Thomas Carlyle
Enjoy things which are pleasant; that is not the evil: it is the reducing of our moral self to slavery by them that is.
– 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
That there should one Man die ignorant who had capacity for Knowledge, this I call a tragedy.
– Thomas Carlyle
The best effect of any book is that it excites the reader to self-activity.
– 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
Wonder is the basis of worship.
– 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
No sadder proof can be given by a man of his own littleness than disbelief in great men.
– Thomas Carlyle
Men do less than they ought, unless they do all that they can.
– 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
History, a distillation of rumour.
– Thomas Carlyle
History shows that the majority of people that have done anything great have passed their youth in seclusion.
– 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
Endurance is patience concentrated.
– 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