Thomas Carlyle Quotes

I want to meet my God awake.

Genuine Work alone, what thou workest faithfully, that is eternal, as the Almighty Founder and World-Builder himself.

It is well said, in every sense, that a man's religion is the chief fact with regard to him.

So here hath been dawning Another blue day; Think, wilt thou let it Slip useless away? Out of eternity This new day is born, Into eternity At night will return.

How indestructibly the good grows, and propagates itself, even among the weedy entanglements of evil.

Money will buy money's worth; but the thing men call fame, what is it?

Evil, once manfully fronted, ceases to be evil; there is generous battle-hope in place of dead, passive misery; the evil itself has become a kind of good.

Not one false man but doth uncountable evil.

There is always hope in a man that actually and earnestly works: in Idleness alone is there perpetual despair.

The true epic of our times is not "Arm's and the Man," but "Tools and the Man"--an infinitely wider kind of epic.

Experience takes dreadfully high school-wages, but he teaches like no other.

Fire is the best of servants, but what a master!

Also, what mountains of dead ashes, wreck and burnt bones, does assiduous pedantry dig up from the past time and name it History.

Democracy is, by the nature of it, a self-canceling business: and gives in the long run a net result of zero.

Skepticism . . . is not intellectual only it is moral also, a chronic atrophy and disease of the whole soul.

The king is the man who can.

The authentic insight and experience of any human soul, were it but insight and experience in hewing of wood and drawing of water, is real knowledge, a real possession and acquirement.

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

Of all God's creatures, Man alone is poor.

There is so much data available to us, but most data won't help us succeed.

Woe to him, . . . who has no court of appeal against the world's judgment.

With stupidity and sound digestion, man may front much.

The times are very bad. Very well, you are there to make them better.

Authors are the vanguard in the march of mind, the intellectual backwoodsmen, reclaiming from the idle wilderness new territories for the thought and activity of their happier brethren.

The greatest event for the world is the arrival of a new and wise person.

My books are friends that never fail me.

Oblivion is the dark page, whereon Memory writes her light-beam characters, and makes them legible; were it all light, nothing could be read there, any more than if it were all darkness.

Whoso has sixpence is sovereign (to the length of sixpence) over all men; commands cooks to feed him, philosophers to teach him, kings to mount guard over him,to the length of sixpence.

The actual well seen is ideal.

Teaching school is but another word for sure and not very slow destruction.

Fancy that thou deservest to be hangedthou wilt feel it happiness to be only shot: fancy that thou deservest to be hanged ina hair halter, it will be a luxury to die in hemp.

Little other than a red tape Talking-machine, and unhappy Bag of Parliamentary Eloquence.

Success in life, in anything, depends upon the number of persons that one can make himself agreeable to.

To each is given a certain inward talent, a certain outward environment or fortune; to each by wisest combination of these two, a certain maximum capacity.

A frightful dialect for the stupid, the pedant and dullard sort.

Biography is the most universally pleasant and profitable of all reading.

All comes out even at the end of the day.

We arc the miracle of miracles, the great inscrutable mystery of God.

He that has done nothing has known nothing.

Worship of a hero is transcendent admiration of a great man.

Let him who would move and convince others, be first moved and convinced himself.

The all importance of clothes has sprung up in the intellect of the dandy without effort, like an instinct of genius; he is inspired with clothes, a poet of clothes.

God gave you that gifted tongue of yours, and set it between your teeth, to make known your true meaning to us, not to be rattled like a muffin man's bell.

No age seemed the age of romance to itself.

One is hardly sensible of fatigue while he marches to music.

A witty statesman said, you might prove anything by figures.

Be not a slave of words.

The battle that never ends is the battle of belief against disbelief

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

Democracy means despair of finding any heroes to govern you, and contented putting up with the want of them.