Thomas Carlyle quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Thomas Carlyle

Thomas Carlyle Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Thomas Carlyle on Wise Famous Quotes.

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

Neither in tailoring nor in legislating does man proceed by mere accident.

Time has only a relative existence.

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.

The person who cannot wonder is but a pair of spectacles behind which there is no eye.

Thou fool! Nature alone is antique, and the oldest art a mushroom; that idle crag thou sittest on is six thousand years of age.

The person who cannot laugh is not only ready for treason, and deceptions, their whole life is already a treason and deception.

Tell a person they are brave and you help them become so.

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

The crash of the whole solar and stellar systems could only kill you once.

Fame is no sure test of merit.

He who would write heroic poems should make his whole life a heroic poem.

Perfect ignorance is quiet, perfect knowledge is quiet; not so the transition from the former to the latter.

Necessity dispenseth with decorum.

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

The genuine essence of truth never dies.

We have profoundly forgotten everywhere that Cash-payment is not the sole relation of human beings.

OH, Heaven,it is mysterious,it is awful to consider
that we not only carry a future Ghost within us. but
are,in very deed, GHOSTS !

God Almighty never created a man half as wise as he looks.

Not what I Have," continues he, "but what I Do is my Kingdom.

Parliament will train you to talk; and above all things to hear, with patience, unlimited quantities of foolish talk.

To men in their sleep there is nothing granted in this world.

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

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

Science must have originated in the feeling that something was wrong.

There is often more spiritual force in a proverb than in whole philosophical systems.

A man lives by believing something.

A mind that has seen, and suffered, and done, speaks to us of what it has tried and conquered.

Once turn to practice, error and truth will no longer consort together.

After all manner of professors have done their best for us, the place we are to get knowledge is in books.

We have not the love of greatness, but the love of the love of greatness.

Every man has a coward and hero in his soul.

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

I have seen gleams in the face and eyes of the man that have let you look into a higher country.

Self-contemplation is infallibly the symptom of disease.

A man's felicity consists not in the outward and visible blessing of fortune, but in the inward and unseen perfections and riches of the mind.

No amount of ability is of the slightest avail without honor.

Endurance is patience concentrated.

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

Great souls are always loyally submissive, reverent to what is over them: only small mean souls are otherwise.

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

The end of man is action, and not thought, though it be of the noblest.

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

Habit is the deepest law of human nature

It is part of my creed that the only poetry is history, could we tell it right.

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

Men do less than they ought, unless they do all they can.

Is not every meanest day the confluence of two eternities?

It is the first of all problems for a man to find out what kind of work he is to do in this universe.

All great peoples are conservative.

He who has no vision of eternity has no hold on time.

Nothing builds self-esteem and self-confidence like accomplishment.

The spiritual is the parent of the practical.

Government is emphatically a machine: to the discontented a taxing machine, to the contented a machine for securing property.

Old age is not a matter for sorrow. It is matter for thanks if we have left our work done behind us.

Work alone is noble.

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

He that can work is born to be king of something.

Love is not altogether a delirium, yet it has many points in common therewith.

Affectation is the product of falsehood.

It is the heart always that sees, before the head can see.

No conquest can ever become permanent which does not show itself beneficial to the conquered as well as to the conquerors.

I do not believe in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.

Universal history, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here.

A background of wrath, which can be stirred up to the murderous infernal pitch, does lie in every man.

A force as of madness in the hands of reason has done all that was ever done in the world.

The end of man is action.

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

What is all knowledge except recorded experience, and a product of history?

The depth of our despair measures what capability and height of claim we have to hope.

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

Woe to him that claims obedience when it is not due; woe to him that refuses it when it is.

There needs not a great soul to make a hero; there needs a god-created soul which will be true to its origin; that will be a great soul!

Heroes, it would seem, exist always and a certain worship of them.

Thought is the parent of the deed.

Variety is the condition of harmony.

He that has done nothing has known nothing.

When the oak is felled the whole forest echoes with its fall, but a hundred acorns are sown in silence by an unnoticed breeze.

Faith is loyalty to some inspired teacher, some spiritual hero.

Speech that leads not to action, still more that hinders it, is a nuisance on the earth.

What you see, but can't see over is as good as infinite.

Let me have my own way in exactly everything and a sunnier and pleasanter creature does not exist.

The actual well seen is ideal.

For a hundred that can bear adversity, there is hardly one that can bear prosperity.

Stop a moment, cease your work, and look around you.

Conviction never so excellent, is worthless until it coverts itself into conduct.

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

The king is the man who can.

The Christian must be consumed by the conviction of the infinite beauty of holiness and the infinite damnability of sin.

All work, even cotton-spinning, is noble; work is alone noble.

The Orator persuades and carries all with him, he knows not how; the Rhetorician can prove that he ought to have persuaded and carried all with him.

Speech is of Time, Silence is of Eternity.

No good book, or good thing of any sort, shows its best face at first.

Cash-payment is not the sole nexus of man with man.

Speech is too often not the art of concealing thought, but of quite stifling and suspending thought, so that there is none to conceal.

Doubt, of whatever kind, can be ended by action alone.

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

For man is not the creature and product of Mechanism; but, in a far truer sense, its creator and producer.

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

The essence of humor is sensibility; warm, tender fellow-feeling with all forms of existence.