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(no category)
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Only perhaps in the United States, which alone of countries can do without governing,every man being at least able to live, and move off into the wilderness, let Congress jargon as it will,can such a form of so-called Government continue for any length of time to torment men with the semblance, when the indispensable substance is not there.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Of America it would ill beseem any Englishman, and me perhaps as little as another, to speak unkindly, to speak unpatriotically, if any of us even felt so. Sure enough, America is a great, and in many respects a blessed and hopeful phenomenon. Sure enough, these hardy millions of Anglosaxon men prove themselves worthy of their genealogy. But as to a Model Republic, or a model anything, the wise among themselves know too well that there is nothing to be said. Their Constitution, such as it may be, was made here, not there. Cease to brag to me of America, and its model institutions and constitutions.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Democracy will prevail when men believe the vote of Judas as good as that of Jesus Christ.
-Thomas Carlyle
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The most unhappy of all men is the man who cannot tell what he is going to do, who has got no work cut-out for him in the world, and does not go into it. For work is the grand cure of all the maladies and miseries that ever beset mankind,honest work, which you intend getting done.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Manhood begins when we have in any way made truce with Necessity; begins even when we have surrendered to Necessity, as the most part only do; but begins joyfully and hopefully only when we have reconciled ourselves to Necessity; and thus, in reality, triumphed over it, and felt that in Necessity we are free.
-Thomas Carlyle
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That a Parliament, especially a Parliament with Newspaper Reporters firmly established in it, is an entity which by its very nature cannot do work, but can do talk only.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Parliament will train you to talk; and above all things to hear, with patience, unlimited quantities of foolish talk.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Ability
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What you see, but can't see over is as good as infinite.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Action(s)
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Action hangs, as it were, dissolved in speech, in thoughts whereof speech is the shadow; and precipitates itself therefrom. The kind of speech in a man betokens the kind of action you will get from him.
-Thomas Carlyle
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The end of man is action, and not thought, though it be of the noblest.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Everywhere in life, the true question is not what we gain, but what we do.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Narrative is linear, but action has breadth and depth as well as height and is solid.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Our grand business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand.
-Thomas Carlyle
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No man lives without jostling and being jostled; in all ways he has to elbow himself through the world, giving and receiving offence.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Adversity
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Adversity is sometimes hard upon a man; but for one man who can stand prosperity, there are a hundred that will stand adversity.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Advice
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Talk that does not end in any kind of action is better suppressed altogether.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Age
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Old age is not a matter for sorrow. It is matter for thanks if we have left our work done behind us.
-Thomas Carlyle
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The outer passes away; the innermost is the same yesterday, today, and forever.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Anger
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In a controversy the instant we feel anger we have already ceased striving for the truth, and have begun striving for ourselves.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Argument & Debate
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The dust of controversy is merely the falsehood flying off.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Scepticism, as I said, is not intellectual only; it is moral also; a chronic atrophy and disease of the whole soul. A man lives by believing something; not by debating and arguing about many things. A sad case for him when all that he can manage to believe is something he can button in his pocket, and with one or the other organ eat and digest! Lower than that he will not get.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Authors & Writing
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Writing is a dreadful labor, yet not so dreadful as Idleness.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Beginnings
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In every phenomenon the beginning remains always the most notable moment.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Belief
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Conviction never so excellent, is worthless until it coverts itself into conduct.
-Thomas Carlyle
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No iron chain, or outward force of any kind, can ever compel the soul of a person to believe or to disbelieve.
-Thomas Carlyle
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The battle that never ends is the battle of belief against unbelief.
-Thomas Carlyle
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The most fearful unbelief is unbelief in your self.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Books
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There is a great discovery still to be made in literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Bravery
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The courage we desire and prize is not the courage to die decently, but to live manfully.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Career, Vocation
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It is the first of all problems for a man to find out what kind of work he is to do in this universe.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Certainty
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One must verify or expel his doubts, and convert them into the certainty of Yes or NO.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Change
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By nature man hates change; seldom will he quit his old home till it has actually fallen around his ears.
-Thomas Carlyle
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The true past departs not, no truth or goodness realized by man ever dies, or can die; but all is still here, and, recognized or not, lives and works through endless change.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Today is not yesterday: we ourselves change; how can our works and thoughts, if they are always to be the fittest, continue always the same? Change, indeed is painful; yet ever needful; and if memory have its force and worth, so also has hope.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Character
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Show me the man you honor, and I will know what kind of a man you are. It shows me what your ideal of manhood is, and what kind of a man you long to be.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Civilization
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The three great elements of modern civilization, Gun powder, Printing, and the Protestant religion.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Class
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Real good breeding, as the people have it here, is one of the finest things now going in the world. The careful avoidance of all discussion, the swift hopping from topic to topic, does not agree with me; but the graceful style they do it with is beyond that of minuets!
-Thomas Carlyle
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Commitment
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A person with half volition goes backwards and forwards, but makes no progress on even the smoothest of roads.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Competition
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Our life is not really a mutual helpfulness; but rather, it's fair competition cloaked under due laws of war; it's a mutual hostility.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Concentration
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A person who is gifted sees the essential point and leaves the rest as surplus.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Conflict
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The archenemy is the arch stupid!
-Thomas Carlyle
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Conservatism
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All great peoples are conservative.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Consumerism
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Not what I have, but what I do is my kingdom.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Conversation
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Speech is human, silence is divine, yet also brutish and dead: therefore we must learn both arts.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Conviction
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Conviction is worthless unless it is converted into conduct.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Cooking, Culinary
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Not on morality, but on cookery, let us build our stronghold: there brandishing our frying-pan, as censer, let us offer sweet incense to the Devil, and live at ease on the fat things he has provided for his elect!
-Thomas Carlyle
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Criticism
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No sadder proof can be given of a person's own tiny stature, than their disbelief in great people.
-Thomas Carlyle
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We have our little theory on all human and divine things. Poetry, the workings of genius itself, which, in all times, with one or another meaning, has been called Inspiration, and held to be mysterious and inscrutable, is no longer without its scientific exposition. The building of the lofty rhyme is like any other masonry or bricklaying: we have theories of its rise, height, decline and fall -- which latter, it would seem, is now near, among all people.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Cynicism
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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.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Debt / Borrow / Loan
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There are but two ways of paying debt: Increase of industry in raising income, increase of thrift in laying out.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Decisions
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The block of granite which was an obstacle in the pathway of the weak becomes a stepping-stone in the pathway of the strong.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Despair
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The depth of our despair measures what capability and height of claim we have to hope.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Determination
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It is not a lucky word, this name impossible; no good comes of those who have it so often in their mouths.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Difficulty
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The eternal stars shine out as soon as it is dark enough.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Doubt
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The fearful unbelief is unbelief in yourself.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Doubt, of whatever kind, can be ended by action alone.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Duty
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Do the duty which lies nearest to you, the second duty will then become clearer.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Education
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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.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Ego
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Egotism is the source and summary of all faults and miseries.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Emotions
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The barrenest of all mortals is the sentimentalist.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Enemy, Enemies
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If there be no enemy there's no fight. If no fight, no victory and if no victory there is no crown.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Enthusiasm
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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.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Evil
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All evil is like a nightmare; the instant you stir under it, the evil is gone.
-Thomas Carlyle
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The devil has his elect.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Excellence
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Let each become all that he was created capable of being.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Eyes
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Weak eyes are fondest of glittering objects.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Facts
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What are your historical Facts; still more your biographical? Wilt thou know a man by stringing-together beadrolls of what thou namest Facts?
-Thomas Carlyle
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I grow daily to honor facts more and more, and theory less and less. A fact, it seems to me, is a great thing -- a sentence printed, if not by God, then at least by the Devil.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Conclusive facts are inseparable from inconclusive except by a head that already understands and knows.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Faith
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To us also, through every star, through every blade of grass, is not God made visible if we will open our minds and our eyes.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Fame
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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.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Fanaticism
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No violent extreme endures.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Fashion
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Society is founded upon cloth.
-Thomas Carlyle
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If the cut of the costume indicates intellect and talent, then the color indicates temper and heart.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Fear
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The first duty of man is to conquer fear; he must get rid of it, he cannot act till then.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Fellowship
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The Mystic Bond of Brotherhood makes all men one.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Forgiveness
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Of all acts of man repentance is the most divine. The greatest of all faults is to be conscious of none.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Genius
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Genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Goals
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A man without a goal is like a ship without a rudder.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Goodness
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Nothing that was worthy in the past departs; no truth or goodness realized by man ever dies, or can die.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Government
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Men are to be guided only by their self-interests. Good government is a good balancing of these; and, except a keen eye and appetite for self-interest, requires no virtue in any quarter. To both parties it is emphatically a machine: to the discontented, a taxing-machine; to the contented, a machine for securing property. Its duties and its faults are not those of a father, but of an active parish-constable.
-Thomas Carlyle
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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.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Greatness & Great Things
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The difference between Socrates and Jesus? The great conscious and the immeasurably great unconscious.
-Thomas Carlyle
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No great man lives in vain. The history of the world is but the biography of great men.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Happiness
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The only happiness a brave person ever troubles themselves in asking about, is happiness enough to get their work done.
-Thomas Carlyle
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But the whim we have of happiness is somewhat thus. By certain valuations, and averages, of our own striking, we come upon some sort of average terrestrial lot; this we fancy belongs to us by nature, and of indefeasible rights. It is simple payment of our wages, of our deserts; requires neither thanks nor complaint. Foolish soul! What act of legislature was there that thou shouldst be happy? A little while ago thou hadst no right to be at all.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Wondrous is the strength of cheerfulness, and its power of endurance -- the cheerful man will do more in the same time, will do it ;better, will preserve it longer, than the sad or sullen.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Oh, give us the man who sings at his work.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Health
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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!
-Thomas Carlyle
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Heart
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The heart always sees before than the head can see.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Hell
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The hell of these days is the fear of not getting along, especially of not making money.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Heroes/Heroism
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Heroism is the divine relation which, in all times, unites a great man to other men.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Hero-worship is the deepest root of all; the tap-root, from which in a great degree all the rest were nourished and grown . . . Worship of a Hero is transcendent admiration of a Great Man. I say great men are still admirable; I say there is, at bottom, nothing else admirable! No nobler feeling than this of admiration for one higher than himself dwells in the breast of men.
-Thomas Carlyle
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All sorts of Heroes are intrinsically of the same material; that given a great soul, open to the Divine Significance of Life, then there is given a man fit to speak of this, to sing of this, to fight and work for this, in a great, victorious, enduring manner; there is given a Hero, -- the outward shape of whom will depend on the time and the environment he finds himself in.
-Thomas Carlyle
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History
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History is the distillation of rumor.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Stern accuracy in inquiring, bold imagination in describing, these are the cogs on which history soars or flutters and wobbles.
-Thomas Carlyle
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The whole past is the procession of the present.
-Thomas Carlyle
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The history of the world is but the biography of great men.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Honesty
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Make yourself an honest man, and then you may be sure there is one less rascal in the world.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Humanity
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Man is emphatically a proselytizing creature.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Humility
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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.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Humor
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True humor springs not more from the head than from the heart. It is not contempt; its essence is love. It issues not in laughter, but in still smiles, which lie far deeper.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Idealism
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The actual well seen is ideal.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Ideas
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Nothing is more terrible than activity without insight.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Ignorance & Stupidity
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I do not believe in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Imagination
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Imagination is a poor matter when it has to part company with understanding.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Not our logical faculty, but our imaginative one is king over us. I might say, priest and prophet to lead us to heaven-ward, or magician and wizard to lead us hellward.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Individuality
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Pin your faith to no ones sleeves, haven't you two eyes of your own.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Intelligence
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Clever men are good, but they are not the best.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Inventing, Inventions
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The real use of gunpowder is to make all men tall.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Judging, Judgment
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For all right judgment of any man or things it is useful, nay, essential, to see his good qualities before pronouncing on his bad.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Foolish men imagine that because judgment for an evil thing is delayed, there is no justice; but only accident here below. Judgment for an evil thing is many times delayed some day or two, some century or two, but it is sure as life, it is sure as death.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Knowledge
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Wonder is the basis of worship.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Labor
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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.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Laughter
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Laughter is the cipher key wherewith we decipher the whole man
-Thomas Carlyle
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The person who cannot laugh is not only ready for treason, and deceptions, their whole life is already a treason and deception.
-Thomas Carlyle
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No man who has once heartily and wholly laughed can be altogether irreclaimably bad.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Laughter is one of the very privileges of reason, being confined to the human species.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Leadership
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Tell a person they are brave and you help them become so.
-Thomas Carlyle
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It is a strange trade that of advocacy. Your intellect, your highest heavenly gift is hung up in the shop window like a loaded pistol for sale.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Legacy
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A well-written life is almost as rare as a well-spent one.
-Thomas Carlyle
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History is the essence of innumerable biographies.
-Thomas Carlyle
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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.
-Thomas Carlyle
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No sooner does a great man depart, and leave his character as public property, than a crowd of little men rushes towards it. There they are gathered together, blinking up to it with such vision as they have, scanning it from afar, hovering round it this way and that, each cunningly endeavoring, by all arts, to catch some reflex of it in the little mirror of himself.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Life
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In private life I never knew anyone interfere with other people's disputes but he heartily repented of it.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Life is a little gleam of time between two eternity s.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Literary
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In the true Literary Man there is thus ever, acknowledged or not by the world, a sacredness: he is the light of the world; the world's Priest; -- guiding it, like a sacred Pillar of Fire, in its dark pilgrimage through the waste of Time.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Loneliness
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Isolation is the sum total of wretchedness to a man.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Love
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Love is not altogether a delirium, yet it has many points in common therewith.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Machines, Machinery
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For man is not the creature and product of Mechanism; but, in a far truer sense, its creator and producer.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Manners
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It is the unseen and the spiritual in people that determines the outward and the actual.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Mathematics
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It is a mathematical fact that the casting of this pebble from my hand alters the centre of gravity of the universe.
-Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, 1834
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Mediocrity
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The world is a republic of mediocrities, and always was.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Mistakes
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The greatest of all faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Money
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Cash-payment never was, or could except for a few years be, the union-bond of man to man. Cash never yet paid one man fully his deserts to another; nor could it, nor can it, now or henceforth to the end of the world.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Cash-payment is not the sole nexus of man with man.
-Thomas Carlyle
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A fair day's wages for a fair day's work.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Morals
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For the superior morality, of which we hear so much, we too would desire to be thankful: at the same time, it were but blindness to deny that this superior morality is properly rather an inferior criminality, produced not by greater love of Virtue, but by greater perfection of Police; and of that far subtler and stronger Police, called Public Opinion.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Motivational
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If you do not wish a man to do a thing, you had better get him to talk about it; for the more men talk, the more likely they are to do nothing else.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Music
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If you look deep enough you will see music; the heart of nature being everywhere music.
-Thomas Carlyle
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One is hardly sensible of fatigue while he marches to music.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Song is the heroics of speech.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Music is well said to be the speech of angels.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Mystery
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Secrecy is the element of all goodness; even virtue, even beauty is mysterious.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Opinion
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Every new opinion, at its starting, is precisely in a minority of one.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Wonderful Force of Public Opinion! We must act and walk in all points as it prescribes; follow the traffic it bids us, realize the sum of money, the degree of influence it expects of us, or we shall be lightly esteemed; certain mouthfuls of articulate wind will be blown at us, and this what mortal courage can front?
-Thomas Carlyle
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Parenting
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Good breeding differs, if at all, from high breeding only as it gracefully remembers the rights of others, rather than gracefully insists on its own rights.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Past, the
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The past is all holy to us; the dead are all holy; even they that were wicked when alive.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Perfection
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Imperfection clings to a person, and if they wait till they are brushed off entirely, they would spin for ever on their axis, advancing nowhere.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Persistence
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Permanence, perseverance and persistence in spite of all obstacle s, discouragement s, and impossibilities: It is this, that in all things distinguishes the strong soul from the weak.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Personality
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The cut of a garment speaks of intellect and talent and the color of temperament and heart.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Persuasion
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Let one who wants to move and convince others, first be convinced and moved themselves. If a person speaks with genuine earnestness the thoughts, the emotion and the actual condition of their own heart, others will listen because we all are knit together by the tie of sympathy.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Not brute force but only persuasion and faith are the kings of this world.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Politics
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Little other than a red tape Talking-machine, and unhappy Bag of Parliamentary Eloquence.
-Thomas Carlyle
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It is a vain hope to make people happy by politics.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Potential
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Culture is the process by which a person becomes all that they were created capable of being.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Only the person of worth can recognize the worth in others.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Present, the
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We were wise indeed, could we discern truly the signs of our own time; and by knowledge of its wants and advantages, wisely adjust our own position in it. Let us, instead of gazing idly into the obscure distance, look calmly around us, for a little, on the perplexed scene where we stand. Perhaps, on a more serious inspection, something of its perplexity will disappear, some of its distinctive characters and deeper tendencies more clearly reveal themselves; whereby our own relations to it, our own true aims and endeavors in it, may also become clearer.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Our main business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what clearly lies at hand.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Prophecy
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No man sees far, most see no farther than their noses.
-Thomas Carlyle
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I have seen gleams in the face and eyes of the man that have let you look into a higher country.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Proverbial Wisdom
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There is often more spiritual force in a proverb than in whole philosophical systems.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Purpose
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The purpose of man is in action not thought.
-Thomas Carlyle
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The man without a purpose is like a ship without a rudder -- waif, a nothing, a no man. Have a purpose in life, and, having it, throw such strength of mind and muscle into your work as God has given you.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Quality
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No good book or good thing of any kind shows it best face at first. No the most common quality of in a true work of art that has excellence and depth, is that at first sight it produces a certain disappointment.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Reading
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The best effect of any book, is that it excites the reader to self-activity.
-Thomas Carlyle
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After all manner of professors have done their best for us, the place we are to get knowledge is in books. The true university of these days is a collection of books.
-Thomas Carlyle
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If a book comes from the heart it will contrive to reach other hearts. All art and author craft are of small account to that.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Reality
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Reality, if rightly interpreted, is grander than fiction.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Reason
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A person usually has two reasons for doing something: a good reason and the real reason.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Recognition
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Popular opinion is the greatest lie in the world.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Reform, Correction
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Reform is not pleasant, but grievous; no person can reform themselves without suffering and hard work, how much less a nation.
-Thomas Carlyle
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To reform a world, to reform a nation, no wise man will undertake; and all but foolish men know, that the only solid, though a far slower reformation, is what each begins and perfects on himself.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Regret & Remorse
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Cherish what is dearest while you have it near you, and wait not till it is far away. Blind and deaf that we are; oh, think, if thou yet love anybody living, wait not till death sweep down the paltry little dust clouds and dissonances of the moment, and all be made at last so mournfully clear and beautiful, when it is too late.
-Thomas Carlyle, Reminiscences
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Relationships
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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.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Religion
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The old cathedrals are good, but the great blue dome that hangs over everything is better.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Responsibility
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All men, if they work not as in the great taskmaster's eye, will work wrong, and work unhappily for themselves and for you.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Romance
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No age seemed the age of romance to itself.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Royalty, Kings, Queens
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He that can work is born to be king of something.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Sadness
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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.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Satisfaction
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No sooner is your ocean filled, than he grumbles that it might have been of better vintage. Try him with half of a Universe, of an Omnipotence, he sets to quarrelling with the proprietor of the other half, and declares himself the most maltreated of men. Always there is a black spot in our sunshine: it is even as I said, the Shadow of Ourselves.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Science
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Science must have originated in the feeling that something was wrong.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Seasons
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Long stormy spring-time, wet contentious April, winter chilling the lap of very May; but at length the season of summer does come.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Silence
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Silence is more eloquent than words.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Silence is as deep as eternity, speech a shallow as time.
-Thomas Carlyle
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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.
-Thomas Carlyle
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When the oak is felled the whole forest echoes with it fall, but a hundred acorns are sown in silence by an unnoticed breeze.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Speech is of time, silence is of eternity.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Sin
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The first sin in our universe was Lucifer's self conceit.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Sincerity
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The merit of originality is not novelty; it is sincerity.
-Thomas Carlyle
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The Great Man's sincerity is of the kind he cannot speak of, is not conscious of: nay, I suppose, he is conscious rather of insincerity; for what man can walk accurately by the law of truth for one day? No, the Great Man does not boast himself sincere, far from that; perhaps does not ask himself if he is so: I would say rather, his sincerity does not depend on himself; he cannot help being sincere!
-Thomas Carlyle
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Society
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We call it a Society; and go about professing openly the totalest separation, isolation. Our life is not a mutual helpfulness; but rather, cloaked under due laws-of-war, named fair competition and so forth, it is a mutual hostility.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Solitude
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History shows that the majority of people that have done anything great have passed their youth in seclusion.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Soul
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The soul gives unity to what it looks at with love.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Speeches (oratory)
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If an eloquent speaker speak not the truth, is there a more horrid kind of object in creation?
-Thomas Carlyle
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Spirituality
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The spiritual is the parent of the practical.
-Thomas Carlyle
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No ghost was every seen by two pair of eyes.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Strength
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A fundamental mistake to call vehemence and rigidity strength! A man is not strong who takes convulsion-fits; though six men cannot hold him then. He that can walk under the heaviest weight without staggering, he is the strong man . . . A man who cannot hold his peace, till the time come for speaking and acting, is no right man.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Students
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It were a real increase of human happiness, could all young men from the age of nineteen be covered under barrels, or rendered otherwise invisible; and there left to follow their lawful studies and callings, till they emerged, sadder and wiser, at the age of twenty-five.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Success & Failure
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If what you have done is unjust, you have not succeeded.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Suffering
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For suffering and enduring there is no remedy, but striving and doing.
-Thomas Carlyle
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The tragedy of life is not so much what men suffer, but rather what they miss.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Symbols
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In a symbol there is concealment and yet revelation: here therefore, by silence and by speech acting together, comes a double significance. In the symbol proper, what we can call a symbol, there is ever, more or less distinctly and directly, some embodiment and revelation of the Infinite; the Infinite is made to blend itself with the Finite, to stand visible, and as it were, attainable there. By symbols, accordingly, is man guided and commanded, made happy, made wretched.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Talent
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A man cannot make a pair of shoes rightly unless he do it in a devout manner.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Technology
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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.
-Thomas Carlyle, History of the French Revolution, 1837
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When we can drain the Ocean into mill-ponds, and bottle up the Force of Gravity, to be sold by retail, in gas jars; then may we hope to comprehend the infinitudes of man's soul under formulas of Profit and Loss; and rule over this too, as over a patent engine, by checks, and valves, and balances.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Thought
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Thought is the parent of the deed.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Thought once awakened does not again slumber; unfolds itself into a System of Thought; grows, in man after man, generation after generation, --till its full stature is reached, and such System of Thought can grow no farther, but must give place to another.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Time
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If time is precious, no book that will not improve by repeated reading deserves to be read at all.
-Thomas Carlyle
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The illuminable, silent, never-resting thing called Time, rolling, rushing on, swift, silent, like an all-embracing oceantide, on which we and all the universe swim like exhalations, like apparitions which are, and then are not: this is forever very literally a miracle; a thing to strike us dumb, for we have no word to speak about it.
-Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, 1841
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Tools
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Man is a tool-using Animal. Nowhere do you find him without tools; without tools he is nothing, with tools he is all.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Understanding
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No person was every rightly understood until they had been first regarded with a certain feeling, not of tolerance, but of sympathy.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Unity
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Men's hearts ought not to be set against one another, but set with one another, and all against evil only.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Universe, The
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I don't pretend to understand the Universe -- it's a great deal bigger than I am.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Variety
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Variety is the condition of harmony.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Victory
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No conquest can ever become permanent which does not show itself beneficial to the conquered as well as to the conquerors.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Virtue
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Virtue is like health: the harmony of the whole man.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Wisdom
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Great men are the commissioned guides of mankind, who rule their fellows because they are wiser.
-Thomas Carlyle
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The greatest event for the world is the arrival of a new and wise person.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Work
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A man perfects himself by working. Foul jungles are cleared away, fair seed-fields rise instead, and stately cities; and with the man himself first ceases to be a jungle, and foul unwholesome desert thereby. The man is now a man.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Every noble work is at first impossible.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Our works are the mirror wherein the spirit first sees its natural lineaments, Hence, too, the folly of that impossible precept, Know thyself; till it be translated into this partially possible one, know what thou canst work at.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Blessed is he who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness. He has a work, a life-purpose; he has found it, and will follow it! How, as a free-flowing channel, dug and torn by noble force through the sour mudswamp of one's existence, like an ever-deepening river there, it runs and flows;
-Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present, 1843
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A man willing to work, and unable to find work, is perhaps the saddest sight that fortune's inequality exhibits under this sun.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Youth
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Youth is to all the glad season of life; but often only by what it hopes, not by what it attains, or what it escapes.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Books by and about Thomas Carlyle
