Thomas Carlyle Quotes

Clever men are good, but they are not the best.

The fearful unbelief is unbelief in yourself.

Biography is the only true history.

Debt is a bottomless sea.

Genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains.

Painful for a person is rebellious independence, only in loving companionship with his associates does a person feel safe: Only in reverently bowing down before the higher does a person feel exalted.

Every noble crown is, and on Earth will forever be, a crown of thorns.

The only happiness a brave person ever troubles themselves in asking about, is happiness enough to get their work done.

Show me the person you honor, for I know better by that the kind of person you are. For you show me what your idea of humanity is.

We have not the love of greatness, but the love of the love of greatness.

My whinstone house my castle is, I have my own four walls.

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.

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

Conclusive facts are inseparable from inconclusive except by a head that already understands and knows.

A person with half volition goes backwards and forwards, but makes no progress on even the smoothest of roads.

Speech is of time, silence is of eternity.

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

For man is not the creature and product of Mechanism; but, in a far truer sense, its creator and producer.

There is a majesty and mystery in nature, take her as you will. The essence of poetry comes breathing to a mind that feels from every province of her empire.

Ill-health, of body or of mind, is defeat. Health alone is victory. Let all men, if they can manage it, contrive to be healthy!

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

For suffering and enduring there is no remedy, but striving and doing.

France was long a despotism tempered by epigrams.

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

Fame, we may understand, is no sure test of merit, but only a probability of such; it is an accident, not a property of man.

Unity, agreement, is always silent or soft-voiced; it is only discord that loudly proclaims itself.

There are remedies for all things but death.

Midas-eared Mammonism, double-barrelled Dilettantism, and their thousand adjuncts and corollaries, are not the Law by which God Almighty has appointed this His universe to go.

Out of Eternity the new day is born; Into Eternity at night will return.

Courtesy is the due of man to man; not of suit-of-clothes to suit-of-clothes.

Man always worships something; always he sees the Infinite shadowed forth in something finite; and indeed can and must so see it in any finite thing, once tempt him well to fix his eyes thereon.

The past is always attractive because it is drained of fear.

Who is there that, in logical words, can express the effect music has on us?

A man's religion consists, not of the many things he is in doubt of and tries to believe, but of the few he is assured of and has no need of effort for believing.

One life; a little gleam of Time between two Eternities; no second chance to us for evermore!

A man protesting against error is on the way towards uniting himself with all men that believe in truth.

A thought once awakened does not again slumber.

No ghost was every seen by two pair of eyes.

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

Great is journalism. Is not every able editor a ruler of the world, being the persuader of it?

Not what I have, but what I do is my kingdom.

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

All great peoples are conservative.

A sad spectacle. If they be inhabited, what a scope for misery and folly. If they be not inhabited, what a waste of space.

Faith is loyalty to some inspired teacher, some spiritual hero.

All work, even cotton-spinning, is noble; work is alone noble.

In our wide world there is but one altogether fatal personage, the dunce,--he that speaks irrationally, that sees not, and yet thinks he sees.

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.

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.

That there should one man die ignorant who had capacity for knowledge, this I call a tragedy.