Thomas Carlyle's Quotes

Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together.

For all right judgment of any man or things it is useful, nay, essential, to see his good qualities before pronouncing on his bad.

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

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.

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.

Go as far as you can see; when you get there you'll be able to see farther.

He who could foresee affairs three days in advance would be rich for thousands of years.

Man is a tool-using animal. Without tools he is nothing, with tools he is all.

No ghost was every seen by two pair of eyes.

No man who has once heartily and wholly laughed can be altogether irreclaimably bad.

The block of granite which was an obstacle in the pathway of the weak, became a stepping-stone in the pathway of the strong.

The greatest of faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none.

The man of life upright has a guiltless heart, free from all dishonest deeds or thought of vanity.

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

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.

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

In every phenomenon the beginning remains always the most notable moment.

It is the heart always that sees, before the head can see.

Nothing is more terrible than activity without insight.

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

Originality is a thing we constantly clamour for, and constantly quarrel with.

A well-written life is almost as rare as a well-spent one.

Thought is the parent of the deed.

A person who is gifted sees the essential point and leaves the rest as surplus.

I do not believe in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.

If there be no enemy there's no fight. If no fight, no victory and if no victory there is no crown.

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

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

Secrecy is the element of all goodness; even virtue, even beauty is mysterious.

The fearful unbelief is unbelief in yourself.

This world, after all our science and sciences, is still a miracle wonderful, inscrutable, magical and more, to whosoever will think of it.

All great peoples are conservative.

Egotism is the source and summary of all faults and miseries.

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.

Talk that does not end in any kind of action is better suppressed altogether.

The spiritual is the parent of the practical.

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

Be not a slave of words.

Conviction never so excellent, is worthless until it coverts itself into conduct.

Doubt, of whatever kind, can be ended by action alone.

Every new opinion, at its starting, is precisely in a minority of one.

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

History shows that the majority of people that have done anything great have passed their youth in seclusion.

History, a distillation of rumour.

Love is the only game that is not called on account of darkness.

Not brute force but only persuasion and faith are the kings of this world.

Nothing that was worthy in the past departs; no truth or goodness realized by man ever dies, or can die.

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

Silence is as deep as eternity, speech a shallow as time.

Teach a parrot the terms 'supply and demand' and you've got an economist.

The cut of a garment speaks of intellect and talent and the color of temperament and heart.

The difference between Socrates and Jesus? The great conscious and the immeasurably great unconscious.

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

The true university of these days is a collection of books.

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.

Weak eyes are fondest of glittering objects.

When the oak is felled the whole forest echoes with it fall, but a hundred acorns are sown in silence by an unnoticed breeze.

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

Do the duty which lies nearest to you, the second duty will then become clearer.

Happy the people whose annals are vacant.

If an eloquent speaker speak not the truth, is there a more horrid kind of object in creation?

Imagination is a poor matter when it has to part company with understanding.

In books lies the soul of the whole past time.

Isolation is the sum total of wretchedness to a man.

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.

Laughter is one of the very privileges of reason, being confined to the human species.

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

Love is not altogether a delirium, yet it has many points in common therewith.

Man is, properly speaking, based upon hope, he has no other possession but hope; this world of his is emphatically the place of hope.

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

Narrative is linear, but action has breadth and depth as well as height and is solid.

Necessity dispenseth with decorum.

No iron chain, or outward force of any kind, can ever compel the soul of a person to believe or to disbelieve.

No sadder proof can be given by a man of his own littleness than disbelief in great men.