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Quotes by Thomas Carlyle


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

No iron chain, or outward force of any kind, can ever compel the soul of a person to believe or to disbelieve.
– Thomas Carlyle
A loving heart is the beginning of all knowledge.
– Thomas Carlyle
A man lives by believing something: not by debating and arguing about many things.
– Thomas Carlyle
A man without a goal is like a ship without a rudder.
– Thomas Carlyle
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.
– Thomas Carlyle
A person who is gifted sees the essential point and leaves the rest as surplus.
– Thomas Carlyle
A sad spectacle. If they be inhabited, what a scope for misery and folly. If they be not inhabited, what a waste of space.
– Thomas Carlyle
A well-written life is almost as rare as a well-spent one.
– Thomas Carlyle
Action hangs, as it were, dissolved in speech, in thoughts whereof speech is the shadow; and precipitates itself therefrom. The kind of speech in a man betokens the kind of action you will get from him.
– Thomas Carlyle
Adversity is the diamond dust Heaven polishes its jewels with.
– Thomas Carlyle
All great peoples are conservative.
– Thomas Carlyle
All men, if they work not as in the great taskmaster's eye, will work wrong, and work unhappily for themselves and for you.
– Thomas Carlyle
All that mankind has done, thought or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books.
– Thomas Carlyle
As a first approximation, I define belief not as the object of believing (a dogma, a program, etc.) but as the subject's investment in a proposition, the act of saying it and considering it as true.
– Thomas Carlyle
Be not a slave of words.
– Thomas Carlyle
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.
– Thomas Carlyle
Clever men are good, but they are not the best.
– Thomas Carlyle
Conviction is worthless unless it is converted into conduct.
– Thomas Carlyle
Culture is the process by which a person becomes all that they were created capable of being.
– Thomas Carlyle
Do the duty which lies nearest to you, the second duty will then become clearer.
– Thomas Carlyle
Doubt, of whatever kind, can be ended by action alone.
– Thomas Carlyle
Egotism is the source and summary of all faults and miseries.
– Thomas Carlyle
Every new opinion, at its starting, is precisely in a minority of one.
– Thomas Carlyle
Every noble work is at first impossible.
– Thomas Carlyle
Everywhere in life, the true question is not what we gain, but what we do.
– Thomas Carlyle
Everywhere the human soul stands between a hemisphere of light and another of darkness; on the confines of the two everlasting empires, necessity and free will.
– 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
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
For man is not the creature and product of Mechanism; but, in a far truer sense, its creator and producer.
– Thomas Carlyle
Fun I love, but too much fun is of all things the most loathsome. Mirth is better than fun, and happiness is better than mirth.
– Thomas Carlyle
Genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains.
– Thomas Carlyle
He who could foresee affairs three days in advance would be rich for thousands of years.
– Thomas Carlyle
He who has health, has hope; and he who has hope, has everything.
– Thomas Carlyle
Humor has justly been regarded as the finest perfection of poetic genius.
– Thomas Carlyle
I do not believe in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.
– Thomas Carlyle
I don't like to talk much with people who always agree with me. It is amusing to coquette with an echo for a little while, but one soon tires of it.
– Thomas Carlyle
I don't pretend to understand the Universe - it's a great deal bigger than I am.
– Thomas Carlyle
I've got a great ambition to die of exhaustion rather than boredom.
– Thomas Carlyle
If there be no enemy there's no fight. If no fight, no victory and if no victory there is no crown.
– Thomas Carlyle
If what you have done is unjust, you have not succeeded.
– 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
If you look deep enough you will see music; the heart of nature being everywhere music.
– Thomas Carlyle
Imagination is a poor matter when it has to part company with understanding.
– Thomas Carlyle
Imperfection clings to a person, and if they wait till they are brushed off entirely, they would spin for ever on their axis, advancing nowhere.
– Thomas Carlyle
In books lies the soul of the whole past time.
– Thomas Carlyle
In every phenomenon the beginning remains always the most notable moment.
– 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
Isolation is the sum total of wretchedness to a man.
– Thomas Carlyle
It is a strange trade that of advocacy. Your intellect, your highest heavenly gift is hung up in the shop window like a loaded pistol for sale.
– Thomas Carlyle
It is a vain hope to make people happy by politics.
– 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
Laughter is one of the very privileges of reason, being confined to the human species.
– Thomas Carlyle
Let each become all that he was created capable of being.
– Thomas Carlyle
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 because we all are knit together by the tie of sympathy.
– Thomas Carlyle
Little other than a red tape Talking-machine, and unhappy Bag of Parliamentary Eloquence.
– Thomas Carlyle
Love is not altogether a delirium, yet it has many points in common therewith.
– Thomas Carlyle
Make yourself an honest man, and then you may be sure there is one less rascal in the world.
– Thomas Carlyle
Man is a tool-using Animal. Nowhere do you find him without tools; without tools he is nothing, with tools he is all.
– 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
Men seldom, or rather never for a length of time and deliberately, rebel against anything that does not deserve rebelling against.
– Thomas Carlyle
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.
– Thomas Carlyle
Narrative is linear, but action has breadth and depth as well as height and is solid.
– Thomas Carlyle
Necessity dispenseth with decorum.
– Thomas Carlyle
No age seemed the age of romance to itself.
– Thomas Carlyle
No amount of ability is of the slightest avail without honor.
– Thomas Carlyle
No ghost was every seen by two pair of eyes.
– Thomas Carlyle
No great man lives in vain. The history of the world is but the biography of great men.
– Thomas Carlyle
No man lives without jostling and being jostled; in all ways he has to elbow himself through the world, giving and receiving offence.
– Thomas Carlyle
No man who has once heartily and wholly laughed can be altogether irreclaimably bad.
– Thomas Carlyle
No person is important enough to make me angry.
– Thomas Carlyle
No pressure, no diamonds.
– Thomas Carlyle
No violent extreme endures.
– 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
Not brute force but only persuasion and faith are the kings of this world.
– Thomas Carlyle
Not on morality, but on cookery, let us build our stronghold: there brandishing our frying-pan, as censer, let us offer sweet incense to the Devil, and live at ease on the fat things he has provided for his elect!
– Thomas Carlyle
Not our logical faculty, but our imaginative one is king over us. I might say, priest and prophet to lead us to heaven-ward, or magician and wizard to lead us hellward.
– Thomas Carlyle
Not what I have, but what I do is my kingdom.
– Thomas Carlyle
Nothing builds self-esteem and self-confidence like accomplishment.
– Thomas Carlyle
Nothing is more terrible than activity without insight.
– Thomas Carlyle
Nothing stops the man who desires to achieve. Every obstacle is simply a course to develop his achievement muscle. It's a strengthening of his powers of accomplishment.
– Thomas Carlyle
Nothing that was worthy in the past departs; no truth or goodness realized by man ever dies, or can die.
– Thomas Carlyle
Of all acts of man repentance is the most divine. The greatest of all faults is to be conscious of none.
– Thomas Carlyle
Oh, give us the man who sings at his work.
– 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
One must verify or expel his doubts, and convert them into the certainty of Yes or NO.
– Thomas Carlyle
Originality is a thing we constantly clamour for, and constantly quarrel with.
– Thomas Carlyle
Permanence, perseverance and persistence in spite of all obstacle s, discouragement s, and impossibilities: It is this, that in all things distinguishes the strong soul from the weak.
– 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
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
Science must have originated in the feeling that something was wrong.
– Thomas Carlyle
Secrecy is the element of all goodness; even virtue, even beauty is mysterious.
– Thomas Carlyle
Show me the man you honor, and I will know what kind of man you are.
– Thomas Carlyle
Silence is more eloquent than words.
– Thomas Carlyle
Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together.
– Thomas Carlyle
Speech is human, silence is divine, yet also brutish and dead: therefore we must learn both arts.
– Thomas Carlyle
Surely of all the 'rights of man', this right of the ignorant man to be guided by the wiser, to be, gently or forcibly, held in the true course by him, is the indisputablest.
– Thomas Carlyle
Talk that does not end in any kind of action is better suppressed altogether.
– Thomas Carlyle
Teach a parrot the terms supply and demand and you've got an economist.
– Thomas Carlyle
That monstrous tuberosity of civilized life, the capital of England.
– Thomas Carlyle