Thomas Carlyle Quotes

The insignificant, the empty, is usually the loud; and after the manner of a drum, is louder even because of its emptiness.

Great men are the modelers, patterns, and in a wide sense creators, of whatsoever the general mass of men contrived to do and attain.

Music... a kind of inarticulate, unfathomable speech, which leads to the edge of the Infinite.

The philosopher is he to whom the highest has descended, and the lowest has mounted up; who is the equal and kindly brother of all.

A heavenly awe overshadowed and encompassed, as it still ought, and must, all earthly business whatsoever.

Prayer is and remains always a native and deepest impulse of the soul of man.

Reform, like charity, must begin at home.

History after all is the true poetry.

Might and right do differ frightfully from hour to hour, but then centuries to try it in, they are found to be identical.

The dead are all holy, even they that were base and wicked while alive. Their baseness and wickedness was not they, was but the heavy and unmanageable environment that lay round them.

The wise man is but a clever infant, spelling letters from a hieroglyphical prophetic book, the lexicon of which lies in eternity.

Let Time and Chance combine, combine! Let Time and Chance combine! The fairest love from heaven above, That love of yours was mine, My Dear! That love of yours was mine.

To the vulgar eye, few things are wonderful that are not distant

Lord Bacon could as easily have created the planets as he could have written Hamlet.

History is the new poetry.

Battles, in these ages, are transacted by mechanism; with the slightest possible development of human individuality or spontaneity; men now even die, and kill one another, in an artificial manner.

Song is the heroics of speech.

A force as of madness in the hands of reason has done all that was ever done in the world.

Freedom is the one purport, wisely aimed at, or unwisely, of all man's struggles, toilings and sufferings, in this earth.

The deadliest sin were the consciousness of no sin

Perfect ignorance is quiet, perfect knowledge is quiet; not so the transition from the former to the latter.

Properly speaking, all true work is religion.

O Time! Time! how it brings forth and devours! And the roaring flood of existence rushes on forever similar, forever changing!

Thought will not work except in silence.

A very sea of thought; neither calm nor clear, if you will, yet wherein the toughest pearl-diver may dive to his utmost depth, and return not only with sea-wreck but with true orients.

A background of wrath, which can be stirred up to the murderous infernal pitch, does lie in every man.

Our very walking is an incessant falling; a falling and a catching of ourselves before we come actually to the pavement. It is emblematic of all things a man does.

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

Just in ratio as knowledge increases, faith diminishes.

On the whole, I would bid you stand up to your work, whatever it may be, and not be afraid of it; not in sorrows or contradictions to yield, but to push on towards the goal.

Hunger whets everything, especially Suspicion and Indignation.

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

Coining "Dismal Science" as a nickname for Political Economy

A collection of books is the best of all universities.

There are female dandies as well as clothes-wearing men; and the former are as objectionable as the latter.

Hardened round us, encasing wholly every notion we form is a wrapping of traditions, hearsay's, and mere words.

Once turn to practice, error and truth will no longer consort together.

The person who cannot laugh is not only ready for treason, and deceptions, their whole life is already a treason and deception.

Man is, and was always, a block-head and dullard; much readier to feel and digest, than to think and consider.

And man's little Life has Duties that are great, that are alone great, and go up to Heaven and down to Hell.

Reality, if rightly interpreted, is grander than fiction.

The Builder of this Universe was wise, He plann'd all souls, all systems, planets, particles: The Plan He shap'd all Worlds and Æons by, Was-Heavens!-was thy small Nine-and-thirty Articles!

The mystery of a person, indeed, is ever divine to him that has a sense for the godlike.

Society is founded upon Cloth.

The healthy know not of their health, but only the sick: this is the physician's aphorism, and applicable in a far wider sense than he gives it.

Venerable to me is the hard hand,--crooked, coarse,--wherein, notwithstanding, lies a cunning virtue, indispensably royal as of the sceptre of the planet.

Science must have originated in the feeling that something was wrong.

Men are grown mechanical in head and in the heart, as well as in the hand. They have lost faith in individual endeavour, and in natural force of any kind.

Heroes, it would seem, exist always and a certain worship of them.

What, in the devil's name, is the use of respectability, with never so many gigs and silver spoons, if thou inwardly art the pitifulness of all men?