Thomas Carlyle Quotes

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.

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

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

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.

Of all the things which man can do or make here below, by far the most momentous, wonderful, and worthy are the things we call books.

The word of Mohammad is a voice direct from nature's own heart - all else is wind in comparison.

There is endless merit in a man's knowing when to have done.

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

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

Wonder is the basis of worship.

The present is the living sum-total of the whole past.

Nine-tenths of the miseries and vices of mankind proceed from idleness.

Love is ever the beginning of Knowledge as fire is of light.

'Genius' which means transcendent capacity of taking trouble, first of all.

I should say sincerity, a deep, great, genuine sincerity, is the first characteristic of all men in any way heroic.

Whose school-hours are all the days and nights of our existence.

Burke said there were Three Estates in Parliament; but, in the Reporter's gallery yonder, there sat a fourth estate more important far than they all.

A judicious man looks at Statistics, not to "get knowledge, but to save himself from having ignorance foisted 'on him".

No violent extreme endures.

The past is all holy to us; the dead are all holy; even they that were wicked when alive.

Pin thy faith to no man's sleeve. Hast thou not two eyes of thy own?

The sincere alone can recognize sincerity.

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

Dishonesty is the raw material not of quacks only, but also in great part dupes.

Good Christian people, here lies for you an inestimable loan; take all heed thereof, in all carefulness, employ it: with high recompense, or else with heavy penalty, will it one day be required back.

We have not read an author till we have seen his object, whatever it may be, as he saw it.

Rest is for the dead.

O Heaven, it is mysterious, it is awful to consider that we not only carry each a future Ghost within him; but are, in very deed, Ghosts!

The whole past is the procession of the present.

In books lies the soul of the whole Past Time; the articulate audible voice of the Past, when the body and material substance of it has altogether vanished like a dream.

To the mean eye all things are trivial, as certainly as to the jaundiced they are yellow.

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

The true eye for talent presupposes the true reverence for it.

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.

There is a great discovery still to be made in literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write.

Culture is the process by which a person becomes all that they were created capable of being.

Reform is not pleasant, but grievous; no person can reform themselves without suffering and hard work, how much less a nation.

Life is a series of lessons that have to be understood.

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

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

Not our Logical, Mensurative faculty, but our Imaginative one is King over us; I might say, Priest and Prophet to lead us heavenward; or Magician and Wizard to lead us hellward.

Variety is the condition of harmony.

The modern majesty consists in work. What a man can do is his greatest ornament, and he always consults his dignity by doing it.

It is a fact which escapes no one, that, generally speaking, whoso is acquainted with his worth has but a little stock to cultivate acquaintance with.

Wondrous is the strength of cheerfulness, altogether past calculation its powers of endurance.

And yet without labour there were no ease, no rest, so much as conceivable.

The condition of the most passionate enthusiast is to be preferred over the individual who, because of the fear of making a mistake, won't in the end affirm or deny anything

All evil is like a nightmare; the instant you stir under it, the evil is gone.

Dinners are defined as 'the ultimate act of communion;' men that can have communion in nothing else, can sympathetically eat together, can still rise into some glow of brotherhood over food and wine.

If those gentlemen would let me alone I should be much obliged to them. I would say, as Shakespeare would say... Sweet Friend, for Jesus sake forbear.