Thomas Carlyle Quotes - Page 2

Hero-worship exists has existed and will forever exist universally among mankind.
Thomas Carlyle
Without kindness there can be no true joy.
Thomas Carlyle
Blessed is he who has found his work let him ask no other blessedness. He has a work a life-purpose. ... Get your happiness out of your work or you will never know what real happiness is. ... 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
Innumerable are the illusions and legerdemain tricks of custom: but of all these perhaps the cleverest is her knack of persuading us that the miraculous by simple repetition ceases to be miraculous.
Thomas Carlyle
No sadder proof can be given by a man of his own littleness than disbelief in great men.
Thomas Carlyle
In the long run every government is the exact symbol of its people with their wisdom and unwisdom.
Thomas Carlyle
Nothing is more terrible than activity without insight.
Thomas Carlyle
The end of man is action.
Thomas Carlyle
The greatest of faults I should say is to be conscious of none.
Thomas Carlyle
Faith is loyalty to some inspired teacher some spiritual hero.
Thomas Carlyle
I grow daily to honor facts more and more and theory less and less.
Thomas Carlyle
Experience is the best of schoolmasters only the school-fees are heavy.
Thomas Carlyle
Give me a man who sings at his work.
Thomas Carlyle
Of all paths a man could strike into there is at any given moment a best path which here and now it were of all things wisest for him to do. To find this path and walk in it is the one thing needful for him.
Thomas Carlyle
It is the heart always that sees before the head can see.
Thomas Carlyle
Today is not yesterday 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.
Thomas Carlyle
The courage we desire and prize is not the courage to die decently but to live manfully.
Thomas Carlyle
The three great elements of modern civilization Gunpowder Printing and the Protestant Religion.
Thomas Carlyle
Debt is a bottomless sea.
Thomas Carlyle
The true university of these days is a collection of books.
Thomas Carlyle
Biography is the only true history.
Thomas Carlyle
Acorns are planted silently by some unnoticed breeze.
Thomas Carlyle
If you can walk you can dance. Zimbabwe saying Music is well said to be the speech of angels.
Thomas Carlyle
The eternal stars shine out as soon as it is dark enough.
Thomas Carlyle
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
The block of granite which was an obstacle in the path of the weak becomes a steppingstone in the path of the strong.
Thomas Carlyle
There is endless merit in a man's knowing when to have done.
Thomas Carlyle
Everywhere the human soul stands between a hemisphere of light and another of darkness; on the confines of two everlasting empires, necessity and free will.
Thomas Carlyle
There are impertinent inquiries made; your rule is, to leave the inquirer uninformed on the matter; not, if you can help it, misinformed, but precisely as dark as he was!
Thomas Carlyle
Of all your troubles, great and small, the greatest are the ones that don't happen at all.
Thomas Carlyle
I've got a great ambition to die of exhaustion rather than boredom.
Thomas Carlyle
Thus must the bewildered Wanderer stand, as so many have done, shouting question after question into the Sibyl-cave of Destiny, and receive no Answer but an Echo. It is all a grim howling of wild beasts, or the shrieks of despairing, hate-filled men...(The Everlasting No)
Thomas Carlyle
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
Such I hold to be the genuine use of Gunpowder: that it makes all men tall.
Thomas Carlyle
It is a great shame for anyone to listen to the accusation that Islam is a lie and that Muhammad was a fabricator and a deceiver. We saw that he remained steadfast upon his principles, with firm determination; kind and generous, compassionate, pious, virtuous, with real manhood, hardworking and sincere. Besides all these qualities, he was lenient with others, tolerant, kind, cheerful and praiseworthy and perhaps he would joke and tease his companions. He was just, truthful, smart, pure, magnanimous and present-minded; his face was radiant as if he had lights within him to illuminate the darkest of nights; he was a great man by nature who was not educated in a school nor nurtured by a teacher as he was not in need of any of this.
Thomas Carlyle
Of all the paths a man could strike into, there is, at any given moment, a best path .. A thing which, here and now, it were of all things wisest for him to do .. To find this path, and walk in it, is the one thing needful for him.
Thomas Carlyle
Surely of all ‘rights of man’, this right of the ignorant man to be guided by the wiser, to be, gently or forcibly, held in the true course by him, is the indisputablest.
Thomas Carlyle
Go as far as you can see; when you get there, you'll be able to see further.
Thomas Carlyle
The whole universe is but a huge Symbol of god".
Thomas Carlyle
Under all speech that is good for anything there lies a silence that is better.
Thomas Carlyle
Make yourself an honest man, and then you may be sure that there is one less scoundrel in the world.
Thomas Carlyle
All that Mankind has done, thought, gained or been is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of Books. They are the chosen possession of men.
Thomas Carlyle
Well at ease are the Sleepers for whom Existence is a shallow Dream.
Thomas Carlyle
Some comfort it would have been, could I, like a Faust, have fancied myself tempted and tormented of the Devil; for a Hell, as I imagine, without Life, though only Diabolic Life, were more frightful: but in our age of Downpulling and Disbelief, the very Devil has been pulled down, you cannot so much as believe in a Devil. To me the Universe was all void of Life, of Purpose, of Volition, even of Hostility: it was one huge, dead, immeasurable Steam-engine, rolling on, in its dead indifference, to grind me limb from limb.
Thomas Carlyle
The word of Mohammad is a voice direct from nature's own heart - all else is wind in comparison.
Thomas Carlyle
I do not believe in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.
Thomas Carlyle
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
Music is well said to be the speech of angels; in fact, nothing among the utterances allowed to man is felt to be so divine. It brings us near to the infinite.
Thomas Carlyle
A Dandy is a clothes-wearing Man, a Man whose trade, office and existence consists in the wearing of clothes.
Thomas Carlyle
War is a quarrel between two thieves too cowardly to fight their own battle; therefore they take boys from one village and another village, stick them into uniforms, equip them with guns, and let them loose like wild beasts against one other.
Thomas Carlyle
History is the essence of innumerable biographies.
Thomas Carlyle
Of all the things which man can do or make here below, by far the most momentous, wonderful, and worthy are the things we call books.
Thomas Carlyle
No magic Rune is stranger than a Book. All that Mankind has done, thought, gained or been: it is lyingas in magic preservation in the pages of Books. They are the chosen possession of men.
Thomas Carlyle
My books are friends that never fai
Thomas Carlyle
All that mankind has done, thought, gained, or been; it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books.
Thomas Carlyle
Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together; that at length they may emerge, full-formed and majestic, into the daylight of Life, which they are thenceforth to rule. Not William the Silent only, but all the considerable men I have known, and the most undiplomatic and unstrategic of these, forbore to babble of what they were creating and projecting. Nay, in thy own mean perplexities, do thou thyself but hold thy tongue for one day: on the morrow, how much clearer are thy purposes and duties; what wreck and rubbish have those mute workmen within thee swept away, when intrusive noises were shut out! Speech is too often not, as the Frenchman defined it, the art of concealing Thought; but of quite stifling and suspending Thought, so that there is none to conceal. Speech too is great, but not the greatest. As the Swiss Inscription says: Sprecfien 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.
Thomas Carlyle
Let each become all that he was created capable of being.
Thomas Carlyle
Fool! The Ideal is in thyself, the impediment too is in thyself: thy Condition is but the stuff thou art to shape that same Ideal out of: what matters whether such stuff be of this sort or that, so the Form thou give it be heroic, be poetic? O thou that pinest in the imprisonment of the Actual, and criest bitterly to the gods for a kingdom wherein to rule and create, know this of a truth: the thing thou seekest is already with thee, ‘here or nowhere,’ couldst thou only see!
Thomas Carlyle
Ye are most strong, ye Sons of the icy North, of the far East, far marching from your rugged Eastern Wildernesses, hither-ward from the gray Dawn of Time! Ye are Sons of the Jotun-land; the land of Difficulties Conquered. Difficult? You must try this thing. Once try it with the understanding that it will and shall have to be done. Try it as ye try the paltrier thing, making of money! I will bet on you once more, against all Jo'tuns, Tailor-gods, Double-barrelled Law-wards, and Denizens of Chaos whatsoever!
Thomas Carlyle
Look around you. Your world-hosts are all in mutiny, in confusion, destitution; on the eve of fiery wreck and madness! They will not march farther for you, on the sixpence a day and supply-demand principle; they will not; nor ought they, nor can they. Ye shall reduce them to order, begin reducing them. to order, to just subordination; noble loyalty in return for noble guidance. Their souls are driven nigh mad; let yours be sane and ever saner.
Thomas Carlyle