Thomas Carlyle Best Quotes & Sayings

The memory of that first state of Freedom and paradisiac Unconsciousness has faded away into an ideal poetic dream. We stand here too conscious of many things: with Knowledge, the symptom of Derangement, we must even do our best to restore a little Order. Life is, in few instances, and at rare intervals, the diapason of a heavenly melody; oftenest the fierce jar of disruptions and convulsions, which, do what we will, there is no disregarding. — 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

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

No good book or good thing of any kind shows it best face at first. No the most common quality of in a true work of art that has excellence and depth, is that at first sight it produces a certain disappointment. — 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

Ignorance was as remarkable as his knowledge. Of contemporary literature, philosophy and politics he appeared to know next to nothing. Upon my quoting Thomas Carlyle, he inquired in the naivest way who he might be and what he had done. My surprise reached a climax, however, when I found incidentally that he was ignorant of the Copernican Theory and of the composition of the Solar System. That any civilized human being in this nineteenth century should not be aware that the earth travelled round the sun appeared to me to be such an extraordinary fact that I could hardly realize it. "You appear to be astonished," he said, smiling at my expression of surprise. "Now that I do know it I shall do my best to forget it. — Arthur Conan Doyle

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

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

Fire is the best of servants, but what a master! — 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

Weak eyes are fondest of glittering objects. — Thomas Carlyle

But deepest of all illusory Appearances, for hiding Wonder, as for many other ends, are your two grand fundamental world-enveloping Appearances, SPACE and TIME. These, as spun and woven for us from before Birth itself, to clothe our celestial ME for dwelling here, and yet to blind it, lie all-embracing, as the universal canvas, or warp and woof, whereby all minor Illusions, in this Phantasm Existence, weave and paint themselves. In vain, while here on Earth, shall you endeavor to strip them off; you can, at best, but rend them asunder for moments, and look through. — 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

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

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

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

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

Experience is the best of school masters, only the school fees are heavy. — 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

To know, to get into the truth of anything, is ever a mystic art, of which the best logic's can but babble on the surface. — Thomas Carlyle

Clever men are good, but they are not the best. — Thomas Carlyle

A collection of books is the best of all universities. — Thomas Carlyle

The best lesson which we get from the tragedy of Karbala is that Husain and his companions were rigid believers in God. They illustrated that the numerical superiority does not count when it comes to the truth and the falsehood. The victory of Husain, despite his minority, marvels me! — Thomas Carlyle

After all manner of professors have done their best for us, the place we are to get knowledge is in books. — Thomas Carlyle

No good book, or good thing of any sort, shows its best face at first. — Thomas Carlyle

Of all the paths a man could strike into, there is, at any given moment, a best path .. A thing which, here and now, it were of all things wisest for him to do .. To find this path, and walk in it, is the one thing needful for him. — Thomas Carlyle

Do not be embarrassed by your mistakes. Nothing can teach us better than our understanding of them. This is one of the best ways of self-education. — Thomas Carlyle

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

Learn to be good readers, which is perhaps a more difficult thing than you imagine. Learn to be discriminative in your reading; to read faithfully, and with your best attention, all kinds of things which you have a real interest in,
a real, not an imaginary,
and which you find to be really fit for what you are engaged in. — Thomas Carlyle

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

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

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

No person is important enough to make me angry. — 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Popular opinion is the greatest lie in the world. — 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

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