Thomas Carlyle Quotes

The goal of yesterday will be our starting-point to-morrow.

It is a vain hope to make people happy by politics.

Labor, wide as the earth, has its summit in heaven.

He who talks much about virtue in the abstract, begins to be suspected; it is shrewdly guessed that where there is great preaching there will be little almsgiving.

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

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

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

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.

What the light of your mind, which is the direct inspiration of the Almighty, pronounces incredible, that, in God's name, leave uncredited. At your peril do not try believing that!

Work earnestly at anything, you will by degrees learn to work at all things.

At the bottom there is no perfect history; there is none such conceivable. All past centuries have rotted down, and gone confusedly dumb and quiet.

Democracy will itself accomplish the salutary universal change from delusive to real, and make a new blessed world of us by and by.

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

Rare benevolence, the minister of God.

Look to be treated by others as you have treated others.

If there be not a religious element in the relations of men, such relations are miserable and doomed to ruin.

At worst, is not this an unjust world, full of nothing but beasts of prey, four-footed or two-footed?

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

The outer passes away; the innermost is the same yesterday, today, and forever.

Know what thou canst work at, and work at it like a Hercules.

He who cannot withal keep his mind to himself cannot practice any considerable thing whatsoever.

The deepest depth of vulgarism is that of setting up money as the ark of the covenant.

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.

Habit and imitation--there is nothing more perennial in us than these two. They are the source of all working, and all apprenticeship, of all practice, and all learning, in this world.

Evil and good are everywhere, like shadow and substance; inseparable (for men) yet not hostile, only opposed.

History is a great dust heap.

Stern accuracy in inquiring, bold imagination in describing, these are the cogs on which history soars or flutters and wobbles.

A fair day's wages for a fair day's work.

Before philosophy can teach by Experience, the Philosophy has to be in readiness, the Experience must be gathered and intelligibly recorded.

The nobleness of silence. The highest melody dwells only in silence,--the sphere melody, the melody of health.

The archenemy is the arch stupid!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

The whole past is the procession of the present.

Rest is for the dead.

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.

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

Language is called the garment of thought: however, it should rather be, language is the flesh-garment, the body, of thought.

There is no heroic poem in the world but is at bottom a biography, the life of a man.

The hell of these days is the fear of not getting along, especially of not making money.

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