Carlyle Thomas Quotes & Sayings

There is but one temple in this Universe: The Body. We speak to God whenever we lay our hands upon it. — Thomas Carlyle

Biography is the only true history. — 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

If Hero means sincere man, why may not every one of us be a Hero? — Thomas Carlyle

They have their belief, these poor Tibet people, that Providence sends down always an Incarnation of Himself into every generation. At bottom some belief in a kind of pope! At bottom still better, a belief that there is a Greatest Man; that he is discoverable; that, once discovered, we ought to treat him with an obedience which knows no bounds. This is the truth of Grand Lamaism; the "discoverability" is the only error here. — Thomas Carlyle

Scarcely two hundred years back can Fame recollect articulately at all; and there she but maunders and mumbles. — Thomas Carlyle

The eye sees what it brings the power to see. — Thomas Carlyle

Clean undeniable right, clear undeniable might: either of these once ascertained puts an end to battle. All battle is a confused experiment to ascertain one and both of these. — Thomas Carlyle

To me the Universe was all void of Life, of Purpose, of Volition, even of Hostility; it was one huge, dead, immeasurable Steam-engine, rolling on, in its dead indifference, to grind me limb from limb. Oh vast gloomy, solitary Golgotha, and Mill of Death! Why was the living banished thither companionless, conscious? Why, if there is no Devil; nay, unless the Devil is your God? — Thomas Carlyle

It is not honest inquiry that makes anarchy; but it is error, insincerity, half belief and untruth that make it. — Thomas Carlyle

Even in the meanest sorts of labor, the whole soul of a man is composed into a kind of real harmony the instant he sets himself to work. — Thomas Carlyle

Quackery gives birth to nothing; gives death to all things. — Thomas Carlyle

Our grand business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand. Thomas Carlyle — Bohdi Sanders

For the superior morality, of which we hear so much, we too would desire to be thankful: at the same time, it were but blindness to deny that this superior morality is properly rather an inferior criminality, produced not by greater love of Virtue, but by greater perfection of Police; and of that far subtler and stronger Police, called Public Opinion. — Thomas Carlyle

The world is an old woman, and mistakes any gilt farthing for a gold coin; whereby being often cheated, she will thenceforth trust nothing but the common copper. — Thomas Carlyle

In the poorest cottage are Books: is one Book, wherein for several thousands of years the spirit of man has found light, and nourishment, and an interpreting response to whatever is Deepest in him. — Thomas Carlyle

One seems to believe almost all that they believe; and when they stop short and call it a Religion, and you pass on, and call it only a reminiscence of one, should you not part with the kiss of peace? — Thomas Carlyle

Egotism is the source and summary of all faults and miseries. — Thomas Carlyle

A battle is a terrible conjugation of the verb to kill: I kill, thou killest, he kills, we kill, they kill, all kill. — Thomas Carlyle

Tobacco smoke is the one element in which, by our European manners, men can sit silent together without embarrassment, and where no man is bound to speak one word more than he has actually and veritably got to say. Nay, rather every man is admonished and enjoined by the laws of honor, and even of personal ease, to stop short of that point; and at all events to hold his peace and take to his pipe again the instant he has spoken his meaning, if he chance to have any. — 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

Feel it in thy heart and then say whether it is of God! — Thomas Carlyle

Weak eyes are fondest of glittering objects. — Thomas Carlyle

Universal history, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here. — Thomas Carlyle

Statistics is a science which ought to be honourable, the basis of many most important sciences; but it is not to be carried on by steam, this science, any more than others are; a wise head is requisite for carrying it on. — Thomas Carlyle

Superstition! that horrid incubus which dwelt in darkness, shunning the light, with all its racks, and poison chalices, and foul sleeping draughts, is passing away without return. Religion cannot pass away. The burning of a little straw may hide the stars of the sky; but the stars are there and will reappear. — Thomas Carlyle

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. — Thomas Carlyle

Democracy is, by the nature of it, a self-canceling business: and gives in the long run a net result of zero. — Thomas Carlyle

The genuine essence of truth never dies. — Thomas Carlyle

With union grounded on falsehood and ordering us to speak and act lies, we will not have anything to do. Peace? A brutal lethargy is peaceable; the noisome is peaceable. We hope for a living peace, not a dead one! — Thomas Carlyle

The meaning of song goes deep. Who in logical words can explain the effect music has on us? A kind of inarticulate, unfathomable speech, which leads us to the edge of the infinite, and lets us for a moment gaze into that! — Thomas Carlyle

A man's religion is the chief fact with regard to him... By religion I do not mean here the church-creed which he professes, the articles of faith which he will sign... We see men of all kinds of professed creeds attain to almost all degrees of worth or worthlessness under each or any of them... but the thing a man does practically believe (and this is often enough without asserting it even to himself, much less to others); the thing a man does practically lay to heart, concerning his vital relations to this mysterious universe, and his duty and destiny there, that is in all cases the primary thing for him, and creatively determines all the rest. That is his religion. — Thomas Carlyle

Once the mind has been expanded by a big idea, it will never go back to its original state. — Thomas Carlyle

A fair day's wage for a fair day's work: it is as just a demand as governed men ever made of governing. It is the everlasting right of man. — Thomas Carlyle

Silence is as deep as eternity, speech a shallow as time. — Thomas Carlyle

God gave you that gifted tongue of yours, and set it between your teeth, to make known your true meaning to us, not to be rattled like a muffin man's bell. — Thomas Carlyle

We arc the miracle of miracles, the great inscrutable mystery of God. — Thomas Carlyle

Man's Unhappiness ... comes of his Greatness; it is because there is an Infinite in him, with which all his cunning he cannot quite bury under the Finite ... Try him with half of a Universe, of an Omnipotence, he sets to quarreling with the proprietor of the other half, and declares himself the most maltreated of men. Always there is a black spot in our sunshine: It is ... the Shadow of Ourselves. — Thomas Carlyle

The unquietest humour possesses all men; ferments, seeks issue, in pamphleteering, caricaturing, projecting, declaiming; vain jangling of thought, word and deed. It is Spiritual Bankruptcy, long tolerated; verging now towards Economical Bankruptcy, and become intolerable. For from the lowest dumb rank, the inevitable misery, as was predicted, has spread upwards. In every man is some obscure feeling that his position, oppressive or else oppressed, is a false one: all men, in one or the other acrid dialect, as assaulters or as defenders, must give vent to the unrest that is in them. Of such stuff national well-being, and the glory of rulers, is not made. — Thomas Carlyle

Life is a series of lessons that have to be understood. — Thomas Carlyle

When new turns of behavior cease to appear in the life of the individual, its behavior ceases to be intelligent. — Thomas Carlyle

Permanence, perseverance and persistence in spite of all obstacles, discouragements, and impossibilities: It is this, that in all things distinguishes the strong soul from the weak. — 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

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

Love not pleasure; love God. This is the Everlasting Yea, wherein all contradiction is solved ... — Thomas Carlyle

The barrenest of all mortals is the sentimentalist — Thomas Carlyle

Variety is the condition of harmony. — Thomas Carlyle

What this country needs is a man who knows God other than by heresay. — Thomas Carlyle

Men worship the shows of great men; the most disbelieve that there is any reality of great men to worship. — Thomas Carlyle

Look to be treated by others as you have treated others. — Thomas Carlyle

Skepticism ... is not intellectual only it is moral also, a chronic atrophy and disease of the whole soul. — Thomas Carlyle

know a Work of Art from a Daub of Artifice) — 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

The deadliest sin were the consciousness of no sin — Thomas Carlyle

Speech that leads not to action, still more that hinders it, is a nuisance on the earth. — Thomas Carlyle

Who is it that loves me and will love me forever with an affection which no chance, no misery, no crime of mine can do away? It is you, my mother. — Thomas Carlyle

At the bottom there is no perfect history; there is none such conceivable. All past centuries have rotted down, and gone confusedly dumb and quiet. — 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

Laws themselves, political Constitutions, are not our Life; but only the house wherein our Life is led. — Thomas Carlyle

How indestructibly the good grows, and propagates itself, even among the weedy entanglements of evil. — Thomas Carlyle

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

Instead of saying that man is the creature of circumstance, it would be nearer the mark to say that man is the architect of circumstance. It is character which builds an existence out of circumstance. From the same materials one man builds palaces, another hovels; one warehouses, another villas; bricks and mortar are mortar and bricks until the architect can make them something else. — 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

. . . everywhere a good and a bad book — Thomas Carlyle

A poor creature who has said or done nothing worth a serious man taking the trouble of remembering. — Thomas Carlyle

Wealth has more and more increased, and at the same time gathered itself more and more into masses, strangely altering the old relations, and increasing the distance between the rich and the poor. — Thomas Carlyle

Fool! The Ideal is in thyself, the impediment too is in thyself: thy Condition is but the stuff thou art to shape that same Ideal out of: what matters whether such stuff be of this sort or that, so the Form thou give it be heroic, be poetic? O thou that pinest in the imprisonment of the Actual, and criest bitterly to the gods for a kingdom wherein to rule and create, know this of a truth: the thing thou seekest is already with thee, 'here or nowhere,' couldst thou only see! — Thomas Carlyle

The Present is the living sum-total of the whole Past. — Thomas Carlyle

Let each become all that he was created capable of being. — 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

No sooner does a great man depart, and leave his character as public property, than a crowd of little men rushes towards it. There they are gathered together, blinking up to it with such vision as they have, scanning it from afar, hovering round it this way and that, each cunningly endeavoring, by all arts, to catch some reflex of it in the little mirror of himself. — Thomas Carlyle

Every man is my superior in that I may learn from him. — Thomas Carlyle

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

Of our thinking it is but the upper surface that we shape into articulate thought; underneath the region of argument and conscious discourse lies the region of meditation. — Thomas Carlyle

Such is the world. Understand it, despise it, love it; cheerfully hold on thy way through it, with thy eye on highest loadstars! — Thomas Carlyle

No person is important enough to make me angry. — Thomas Carlyle

In a different time, in a different place, it is always some other side of our common human nature that has been developing itself. The actual truth is the sum of all these. — Thomas Carlyle

I've got a great ambition to die of exhaustion rather than boredom. — Thomas Carlyle

The graceful minuet-dance of fancy must give place to the toilsome, thorny pilgrimage of understanding. On the transition from the age of romance to that of science. — Thomas Carlyle

In a controversy, the instant we feel anger we have already ceased striving for the truth, and have begun striving for ourselves. — Thomas Carlyle

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

One is weary of hearing about the omnipotence of money. I will say rather that, for a genuine man, it is not evil to be poor. — Thomas Carlyle

Laws, written, if not on stone tables, yet on the azure of infinitude, in the inner heart of God's creation, certain as life, certain as death, are there, and thou shalt not disobey them. — Thomas Carlyle

What are your Axioms, and Categories, and Systems, and Aphorisms? Words, words ... Be not the slave of Words ... — Thomas Carlyle

Everywhere in life, the true question is not what we gain, but what we do. — Thomas Carlyle

When Pococke inquired of Grotius, where the proof was of that story of the pigeon, trained to pick peas from Mahomet's (Muhammad's) ear, and pass for an angel dictating to him? Grotius answered that there was no proof! ... — Thomas Carlyle

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

Such I hold to be the genuine use of Gunpowder: that it makes all men tall. — Thomas Carlyle

A man without a goal is like a ship without a rudder. — Thomas Carlyle

Experience takes dreadfully high school-wages, but he teaches like no other. — 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

Does it even give thee pause, that men used to have a soul
not by hearsay alone, or as a figure of speech; but as a truth
that they knew, and acted upon! Verily it was another world
then ... but yet it is a pity we have lost the tidings of our
souls ... we shall have to go in search of them again, or worse
in all ways shall befall us.
Thomas Carlyle — Mary Ann Shaffer

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

The deepest depth of vulgarism is that of setting up money as the ark of the covenant. — Thomas Carlyle

Authors are the vanguard in the march of mind, the intellectual backwoodsmen, reclaiming from the idle wilderness new territories for the thought and activity of their happier brethren. — Thomas Carlyle

No amount of ability is of the slightest avail without honor. — Thomas Carlyle

In wakeful nights, as one may fancy, the wild soul of the man, tossing amid these vortices, would hail any light of a decision for them as a veritable light from Heaven; any making-up of his mind, so blessed, indispensable for him there, — Thomas Carlyle

Popular opinion is the greatest lie in the world. — Thomas Carlyle

Is there no God, then, but at best an absentee God, sitting idle, ever since the first Sabbath, at the outside of his Universe? — Thomas Carlyle

Eternity looks grander and kinder if time grow meaner and more hostile. — Thomas Carlyle