110 Thomas Carlyle Quotes

Thomas Carlyle quotes

1. Speech is human, silence is divine, yet also brutish and dead: therefore we must learn both arts.

2. It is now almost my sole rule of life to clear myself of cants and formulas, as of poisonous Nessus shirts.

3. The Public is an old woman. Let her maunder and mumble.

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

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

6. So here hath been dawning Another blue Day: Think wilt thou let it Slip useless away.

7. He that works and does some Poem, not he that merely says one, is worthy of the name of Poet.

8. Here numerous persons, with big wigs many of them, and austere aspect, whom I take to be Professors of the Dismal Science, start up in an agitated vehement manner: but the Premier resolutely beckons them down again

9. A Parliament speaking through reporters to Buncombe and the twenty-seven millions, mostly fools.

10. A healthy hatred of scoundrels.

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

12. Happy the people whose annals are blank in history books!

13. This great maxim of Philosophy he had gathered by the teaching of nature alone: That man was created to work, not to speculate, or feel, or dream.

14. A well-written Life is almost as rare as a well-spent one.

15. The great law of culture is: Let each become all that he was created capable of being.

16. The three great elements of modern civilization, gunpowder, printing, and the Protestant religion.

17. Literary men are...a perpetual priesthood.

18. In every man's writings, the character of the writer must lie recorded.

19. A poet without love were a physical and metaphysical impossibility.

20. Our grand business undoubtedly is, not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand.

21. : with what scientific stoicism he walks through the land of wonders, unwondering :

22. Aesop's Fly, sitting on the axle of the chariot, has been much laughed at for exclaiming: What a dust I do raise!

23. Whoso belongs only to his own age, and reverences only its gilt Popinjays or smoot-smeared Mumbojumbos, must needs die with it.

24. The stupendous Fourth Estate, whose wide world-embracing influences what eye can take in?

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

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

27. There is no heroic poem in the world but is at bottom a biography, the life of a man; also, it may be said, there is no life of a man, faithfully recorded, but is a heroic poem of its sort, rhymed or unrhymed.

28. Under all speech that is good for anything there lies a silence that is better. Silence is deep as Eternity; speech is shallow as Time.

29. No man lives without jostling and being jostled; in all ways he has to elbow himself through the world, giving and receiving offense.

30. Literature is the Thought of thinking Souls.

31. All greatness is unconscious, or it is little and naught.

32. The uttered part of a man's life, let us always repeat, bears to the unuttered, unconscious part a small unknown proportion. He himself never knows it, much less do others.

    Attribution disputed; shown as originally published.

33. It can be said of him [Scott], when he departed he took a man's life along with him. No sounder piece of British manhood was put together in that eighteenth century of time.

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

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

36. The Book had in a high degree excited us to self-activity, which is the best effect of any book.

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

38. He who first shortened the labor of copyists by device of movable types was disbanding hired armies, and cashiering most kings and senates, and creating a whole new democratic world: he had invented the art of printing.

39. Man is a tool-using animal...Without tools he is nothing, with tools he is all.

40. Be not the slave of Words.

41. Man's unhappiness, as I construe, comes of his greatness; it is because there is an Infinite in him, which with all his cunning he cannot quite bury under the Finite.

42. Close thy Byron; open thy Goethe.

43. Wonder is the basis of worship.

44. What you see, yet can not see over, is as good as infinite.

45. Sarcasm I now see to be, in general, the language of the Devil; for which reason I have, long since, as good as renounced it.

46. With stupidity and sound digestion man may front much.

47. Alas! the fearful Unbelief is unbelief in yourself.

48. Great men are the inspired (speaking and acting) texts of that divine Book of Revelations, wherof a chapter is completed from epoch to epoch, and by some named History.

49. Love not Pleasure; love God.

50. 'Do the Duty which lies nearest thee,' which thou knowest to be a Duty! Thy second Duty will already have become clearer.

51. As the Swiss inscription says: Sprechen ist silbern, Schweigen ist golden- 'Speech is silvern, Silence is golden'; or, as I might rather express it: speech is of time, silence is of eternity.

52. For is not a Symbol ever, to him who has eyes for it, some dimmer or clearer revelation of the God-like?

53. The highest ensign that men ever met and embraced under, the Cross itself, had no meaning save an accidental extrinsic one.

54. That there should one Man die ignorant who had capacity for Knowledge, this I call a tragedy.

55. France was long a despotism tempered by epigrams.

56. No lie you can speak or act but it will come, after longer or shorter circulation, like a Bill drawn on Nature's Reality, and be presented there for payment, - with the answer, No effects.

57. To a shower of gold most things are penetrable.

58. 'The people may eat grass': hasty words, which fly abroad irrevocable-and will send back tidings.

59. A whiff of grapeshot.

60. O poor mortals, how ye make this earth bitter for each other.

61. Battles, in these ages, are transacted by mechanism; with the slightest possible development of human individuality or spontaneity: men now even die, and kill one another, in an artificial manner.

62. History a distillation of rumor.

63. The All of Things is an infinite conjugation of the verb To do.

64. The difference between Orthodoxy or Mydoxy and Heterodoxy or Thy-doxy.

65. No sadder proof can be given by a man of his own littleness than disbelief in great men.

66. The history of the world is but the biography of great men.

67. We must get rid of fear.

68. We have chosen Mahomet not as the most eminent Prophet; but as the one we are freest to speak of. He is by no means the truest of Prophets; but I do esteem him a true one. Farther, as there is no danger of our becoming, any of us, Mahometans, I mean to say all the good of him I justly can. It is the way to get at his secret: let us try to understand what he meant with the world; what the world meant and means with him, will then be a more answerable question. Our current hypothesis about Mahomet, that he was a scheming Impostor, a Falsehood incarnate, that his religion is a mere mass of quackery and fatuity, begins really to be now untenable to any one. The lies, which well-meaning zeal has heaped round this man, are disgraceful to ourselves only.

69. The greatest of faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none.

70. Much has been said of Mahomet's propagating his Religion by the sword. It is no doubt far nobler what we have to boast of the Christian Religion, that it propagated itself peaceably in the way of preaching and conviction. Yet withal, if we take this for an argument of the truth or falsehood of a religion, there is a radical mistake in it. The sword indeed: but where will you get your sword! Every new opinion, at its starting, is precisely in a minority of one. In one man's head alone, there it dwells as yet. One man alone of the whole world believes it; there is one man against all men. That he take a sword, and try to propagate with that, will do little for him. You must first get your sword! On the whole, a thing will propagate itself as it can. We do not find, of the Christian Religion either, that it always disdained the sword, when once it had got one.

71. I care little about the sword: I will allow a thing to struggle for itself in this world, with any sword or tongue or implement it has, or can lay hold of. We will let it preach, and pamphleteer, and fight, and to the uttermost bestir itself, and do, beak and claws, whatsoever is in it; very sure that it will, in the long-run, conquer nothing which does not deserve to be conquered. What is better than itself, it cannot put away, but only what is worse. In this great Duel, Nature herself is umpire, and can do no wrong: the thing which is deepest-rooted in Nature, what we call truest, that thing and not the other will be found growing at last.

72. We are to remember what an umpire Nature is; what a greatness, composure of depth and tolerance there is in her. You take wheat to cast into the Earth's bosom; your wheat may be mixed with chaff, chopped straw, barn-sweepings, dust and all imaginable rubbish; no matter: you cast it into the kind just Earth; she grows the wheat, - the whole rubbish she silently absorbs, shrouds it in, says nothing of the rubbish. The yellow wheat is growing there; the good Earth is silent about all the rest, - has silently turned all the rest to some benefit too, and makes no complaint about it! So everywhere in Nature! She is true and not a lie; and yet so great, and just, and motherly in her truth. She requires of a thing only that it be genuine of heart; she will protect it if so; will not, if not so. There is a soul of truth in all the things she ever gave harbor to. Alas, is not this the history of all highest Truth that comes or ever came into the world?

73. Mahomet can work no miracles; he often answers impatiently: I can work no miracles. I? 'I am a Public Preacher;' appointed to preach this doctrine to all creatures. Yet the world, as we can see, had really from of old been all one great miracle to him. Look over the world, says he; is it not wonderful, the work of Allah; wholly 'a sign to you,' if your eyes were open!

74. His Religion is not an easy one: with rigorous fasts, lavations, strict complex formulas, prayers five times a day, and abstinence from wine, it did not 'succeed by being an easy religion.' As if indeed any religion, or cause holding of religion, could succeed by that! It is a calumny on men to say that they are roused to heroic action by ease, hope of pleasure, recompense, - sugar-plums of any kind, in this world or the next! In the meanest mortal there lies something nobler.

75. Mahomet himself, after all that can be said about him, was not a sensual man. We shall err widely if we consider this man as a common voluptuary, intent mainly on base enjoyments, - nay on enjoyments of any kind. His household was of the frugalest; his common diet barley-bread and water: sometimes for months there was not a fire once lighted on his hearth. They record with just pride that he would mend his own shoes, patch his own cloak. A poor, hard-toiling, ill-provided man; careless of what vulgar men toil for

76. No Dilettantism in this Mahomet; it is a business of Reprobation and Salvation with him, of Time and Eternity: he is in deadly earnest about it! Dilettantism, hypothesis, speculation, a kind of amateur-search for Truth, toying and coquetting with Truth: this is the sorest sin. The root of all other imaginable sins. It consists in the heart and soul of the man never having been open to Truth; - 'living in a vain show.' Such a man not only utters and produces falsehoods, but is himself a falsehood. The rational moral principle, spark of the Divinity, is sunk deep in him, in quiet paralysis of life-death.

77. Enjoying things which are pleasant; that is not the evil: it is the reducing of our moral self to slavery by them that is.

78. We will not praise Mahomet's moral precepts as always of the superfinest sort; yet it can be said that there is always a tendency to good in them; that they are the true dictates of a heart aiming towards what is just and true

79. On the whole, we will repeat that this Religion of Mahomet's is a kind of Christianity; has a genuine element of what is spiritually highest looking through it, not to be hidden by all its imperfections. The Scandinavian God Wish, the god of all rude men, - this has been enlarged into a Heaven by Mahomet; but a Heaven symbolical of sacred Duty, and to be earned by faith and well-doing, by valiant action, and a divine patience which is still more valiant. It is Scandinavian Paganism, and a truly celestial element superadded to that. Call it not false; look not at the falsehood of it, look at the truth of it. For these twelve centuries, it has been the religion and life-guidance of the fifth part of the whole kindred of Mankind. Above all things, it has been a religion heartily believed. These Arabs believe their religion, and try to live by it! No Christians, since the early ages, or only perhaps the English Puritans in modern times, have ever stood by their Faith as the Moslem do by theirs, - believing it wholly, fronting Time with it, and Eternity with it.

80. To the Arab Nation it was as a birth from darkness into light; Arabia first became alive by means of it. A poor shepherd people, roaming unnoticed in its deserts since the creation of the world: a Hero-Prophet was sent down to them with a word they could believe: see, the unnoticed becomes world-notable, the small has grown world-great; within one century afterwards, Arabia is at Grenada on this hand, at Delhi on that; - glancing in valor and splendor and the light of genius, Arabia shines through long ages over a great section of the world. Belief is great, life-giving. The history of a Nation becomes fruitful, soul-elevating, great, so soon as it believes.

81. The Age of Miracles is forever here!

82. 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.

83. A man lives by believing something; not by debating and arguing about many things.

84. All that mankind has done, thought, gained or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books.

85. What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books.

86. The suffering man ought really to consume his own smoke; there is no good in emitting smoke till you have made it into fire.

87. 'A fair day's wages for a fair day's work': it is as just a demand as governed men ever made of governing. It is the everlasting right of man.

88. Fire is the best of servents; but what a master!

89. All work, even cotton spinning, is noble; work is alone noble...A life of ease is not for any man, nor for any god.

90. Every pitifulest whipster that walks within a skin has had his head filled with the notion that he is, shall be, or by all human and divine laws ought to be, 'happy.' His wishes, the pitifulest whipster's, are to be fulfilled for him; his days, the pitifulest whipster's, are to flow on in an ever-gentle current of enjoyment, impossible even for the gods. The prophets preach to us, Thou shalt be happy; thou shalt love pleasant things, and find them. The people clamor, Why have we not found pleasant things? ...God's Laws are become a Greatest Happiness Principle. There is no religion; there is no God; man has lost his soul.

91. The English are a dumb people. They can do great acts, but not describe them.

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

93. Blessed is he who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness.

94. He who takes not counsel of the Unseen and Silent, from him will never come real visibility and speech.

95. Captains of Industry.

96. A person usually has two reasons for doing something: a good reason and the real reason.

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

98. Lord Bacon could as easily have created this planet as he could have written Hamlet.

99. No pressure, no diamonds.

100. It was very good of God to let Carlyle and Mrs Carlyle marry one another and so make only two people miserable instead of four.

1. There are but two ways of paying debt: Increase of industry in raising income, increase of thrift in laying out.

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

3. Fame, we may understand, is no sure test of merit, but only a probability of such: it is an accident, not a property, of a man; like light, it can give little or nothing, but at most may show what is given.

4. The sincere alone can recognize sincerity.

5. Be a pattern to others, and then all will go well; for as a whole city is affected by the licentious passions and vices of great men, so it is likewise reformed by their moderation.

6. The glory of a workman, still more of a master workman, that he does his work well, ought to be his most precious possession; like the honor of a soldier, dearer to him than life.

7. All human things do require to have an ideal in them; to have some soul in them.

8. Insurrection, never so necessary, is a most sad necessity; and governors who wait for that to instruct them are surely getting into the fatalest course.

9. What is philosophy but a continual battle against custom?

10. Let Time and Chance combine, combine! Let Time and Chance combine! The fairest love from heaven above, That love of yours was mine, My Dear! That love of yours was mine.