Thomas Carlyle Quotes

The true Sovereign of the world, who moulds the world like soft wax, according to his pleasure, is he who lovingly sees into the world.

Close thy Byron ; open thy Goethe .

Beautiful it is, and a gleam from the same eternal pole-star visible amid the destinies of men, that all talent, all intellect, is in the first plane moral. What a world were this otherwise!

I have seen gleams in the face and eyes of the man that have let you look into a higher country.

Society is founded on hero-worship.

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.

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

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

In the huge mass of evil as it rolls and swells, there is ever some good working toward deliverance and triumph.

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.

What unknown seas of feeling lie in man, and will from time to time break through!

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.

Are not our greatest men as good as lost? The men that walk daily among us, warming us, feeding us, walk shrouded in darkness, mere mythic men.

The steam-engine I call fire-demon and great; but it is nothing to the invention of fire.

All work is as seed sown; it grows and spreads, and sows itself anew.

A man's perfection is his work.

The Christian must be consumed by the conviction of the infinite beauty of holiness and the infinite damnability of sin.

That monstrous tuberosity of civilised life, the capital of England.

Rightly viewed no meanest object is insignificant; all objects are as windows through which the philosophic eye looks into infinitude itself.

We are not altogether here to tolerate. We are here to resist, to control and vanquish withal.

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.

The greatest fault is to be conscious of none.

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

Let a man try faithfully, manfully to be right; he will grow daily more and more right. It is at bottom the condition on which all men have to cultivate themselves.

Parties on the back of Parties, at war with the world and with each other.

Friendship, in the old heroic sense of that term, no longer exists. It is in reality no longer expected or recognized as a virtue among men.

Every poet... finds himself born in the midst of prose. He has to struggle from the littleness and obstruction of an actual world into the freedom and infinitude of an ideal.

(Quoted by Thomas Carlyle) The rude man requires only to see something going on. The man of more refinement must be made to feel. The man of complete refinement must be made to reflect.

My books are friends that never fai

No magic Rune is stranger than a Book. All that Mankind has done, thought, gained or been: it is lyingas in magic preservation in the pages of Books. They are the chosen possession of men.

A Dandy is a clothes-wearing Man, a Man whose trade, office and existence consists in the wearing of clothes.

Well at ease are the Sleepers for whom Existence is a shallow Dream.

All that Mankind has done, thought, gained or been is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of Books. They are the chosen possession of men.

Make yourself an honest man, and then you may be sure that there is one less scoundrel in the world.

Under all speech that is good for anything there lies a silence that is better.

The whole universe is but a huge Symbol of god".

Surely of all ‘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.

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

Adversity is sometimes hard upon a man, but for one man who can stand prosperity, there are a hundred that will stand adversity.

The block of granite which was an obstacle in the path of the weak becomes a steppingstone in the path of the strong.

Adversity is sometimes hard upon a man but for one man who can stand prosperity there are a hundred that will stand adversity.

The eternal stars shine out as soon as it is dark enough.

If you can walk you can dance. Zimbabwe saying Music is well said to be the speech of angels.

The three great elements of modern civilization Gunpowder Printing and the Protestant Religion.

The courage we desire and prize is not the courage to die decently but to live manfully.

Today is not yesterday how can our works and thoughts if they are always to be the fittest continue always the same? Change indeed is painful yet ever needful.

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

Give me a man who sings at his work.

Experience is the best of schoolmasters only the school-fees are heavy.

I grow daily to honor facts more and more and theory less and less.