Thomas Carlyle quotes
Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881): Scottish essayist, historian and philosopher. The library holds 1148 quotes by Thomas Carlyle, drawn from Sartor Resartus, Past and Present, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History and other works. The 60 below are the most quoted; search the library in the maker for the rest.
Often about: life, faith, time, nature, truth, death
The best-known Thomas Carlyle quotes
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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.
Heroes and Hero-Worship. The Hero as a Man of Letters -
No sadder proof can be given by man of his own littleness than disbelief in great men.
On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History -
Labour is life. From the inmost heart of the worker rises his God-given force—the sacred celestial life-essence breathed into him by Almighty God.
Past and Present -
How much lies in laughter, the cipher-key wherewith we decipher the whole man.
Sartor Resartus -
The greatest of faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none.
Heroes and Hero-Worship. The Hero as a Prophet -
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.
Heroes and Hero-Worship. The Hero as a Man of Letters -
How indestructibly the good grows, and propagates itself, even among the weedy entanglements of evil!
Sartor Resartus -
The true University of these days is a Collection of Books.
Heroes and Hero-Worship. The Hero as a Man of Letters -
One life,—a little gleam of time between two Eternities.
Heroes and Hero-Worship. The Hero as a Man of Letters -
Literature is the Thought of thinking Souls.
Sir Walter Scott. London and Westminster Review, 1838 -
Within the most starched cravat there passes a windpipe and weasand, and under the thickliest embroidered waistcoat beats a heart.
Sartor Resartus -
Hitherto all miracles have been wrought by thought, and henceforth innumerable will be wrought; whereof we, even in these days, witness some.
Sartor Resartus -
The sun flings out impurities, gets balefully incrusted with spots; but it does not quench itself, and become no sun at all, but a mass of darkness.
On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History -
To consume your own choler, as some chimneys consume their own smoke; to keep a whole Satanic school spouting, if it must spout, inaudibly, is a negative yet no slight virtue, nor one of the commonest in these times.
Sartor Resartus -
Can I choose my king? I can choose my King Popinjay, and play what farce or tragedy I may with him; but he who is to be my ruler, whose will is higher than my will, was chosen for me in heaven.
Sartor Resartus -
Man ever tends to reckon his own insight as final, and goes upon it as such.
On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History -
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.
Sartor Resartus, Book iii. Chap. iii -
What is man but a symbol of God, and all that he does, if not symbolical, a revelation to sense of the mystic God-given force that is in him?
Sartor Resartus -
Know of a truth that only the time-shadows have perished or are perishable; that the real being of whatever was, and whatever is, and whatever will be, is even now and for ever.
Sartor Resartus -
Sincerity, a deep, great, genuine sincerity, is the first characteristic of all men in any way heroic.
On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History -
The battle of belief against unbelief is the never-ending battle.
On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History -
Conviction, never so excellent, is worthless till it convert itself into conduct.
Sartor Resartus -
“A fair day’s wages for a fair day’s work,” is as just a demand as governed men ever made of governing; yet in what corner of this planet was that ever realised?
Past and Present -
If a book come from the heart, it will contrive to reach other hearts.
On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History -
As a priest, or interpreter of the holy, is the noblest and highest of all men; so is a sham priest the falsest and basest.
Sartor Resartus -
The world is an old woman, that mistakes any gilt farthing for a gold coin; whereby, being often cheated, she will henceforth trust nothing but the common copper.
Sartor Resartus -
What are your axioms, and categories, and systems, and aphorisms? Words, words. High air-castles are cunningly built of words, the words well bedded in good logic-mortar; wherein, however, no knowledge will come to lodge.
Sartor Resartus -
Meditation has taught all men in all ages that this world is after all but a show—a phenomenon or appearance, no real thing.
On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History -
There is in man a Higher than love of happiness; he can do without happiness, and instead thereof find blessedness!
Sartor Resartus -
The first spiritual want of a barbarous man is decoration, as indeed we still see among the barbarous classes in civilised countries.
Sartor Resartus -
If the paternal cottage still shuts us in, its roof still screens us; and with a father we have as yet a prophet, priest, and king, and an obedience that makes us free.
Sartor Resartus -
Make yourself an honest man, and then you may be sure that there is one rascal less in the world.
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How many causes that can plead for themselves in the courts of Westminster, and yet in the general court of the universe and free soul of man, have no word to utter!
Past and Present -
The one unhappiness of a man is that he cannot work, that he cannot get his destiny as a man fulfilled.
Past and Present -
Justice is conformity to what the Maker has seen good to make.
Past and Present -
Why do we pray to Heaven without setting our own shoulder to the wheel?
Past and Present -
The eternal stars shine out again, as soon as it is dark enough.
Past and Present -
In our age of down-pulling and disbelief, the very devil has been pulled down; you cannot so much as believe in a devil.
Sartor Resartus -
No man who has once heartily and wholly laughed can be altogether irreclaimably bad.
Sartor Resartus -
There is no communion possible among men who believe only in hearsays.
On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History -
It is a man’s sincerity and depth of vision that makes him a poet.
On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History -
Matter exists only spiritually, and to represent some idea and body it forth.
Sartor Resartus -
Not one false man but does unaccountable mischief; how much, in a generation or two, will twenty-seven millions, mostly false, manage to accumulate?
Past and Present -
Let a man do his work; the fruit of it is the care of Another than he.
On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History -
The true literary man 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.
On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History -
You cannot lead a fighting world without having it regimented, chivalried; nor can you any more continue to lead a working world unregimented, anarchic.
Past and Present -
Music is a kind of inarticulate unfathomable speech, which leads us to the edge of the infinite, and lets us for moments gaze that.
On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History -
Is that a wonder which happens in two hours; and does it cease to be wonderful if happening in two millions?
Sartor Resartus -
Outward religion originates by society; society becomes possible by religion.
Sartor Resartus -
For one man who can stand prosperity, there are a hundred that will stand adversity.
On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History -
Sarcasm I now see to be, in general, the language of the devil.
Sartor Resartus -
Divine right, take it on the great scale, is found to mean divine might withal.
On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History -
Curious to think how, for every man, any the truest fact is modelled by the nature of the man.
On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History -
Man has ever been a striving, struggling, and, in spite of wide-spread calumnies to the contrary, a veracious creature.
Past and Present -
There is no good in emitting smoke till you have made it into fire, which all smoke is capable of becoming.
On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History -
Always there is a black spot in our sunshine, the shadow of ourselves.
Sartor Resartus -
Nature, which is the Time-vesture of God, and reveals Him to the wise, hides Him from the foolish.
Sartor Resartus -
The curtains of yesterday drop down, the curtains of to-morrow roll up; but yesterday and to-morrow both are. Pierce into the Time-element, glance into the Eternal.
Sartor Resartus -
To the wisest man, wide as is his vision, Nature remains of quite infinite depth, of quite infinite expansion; and all experience thereof limits itself to some few computed centuries and measured square miles.
Sartor Resartus -
In a valiant suffering for others, not in a slothful making others suffer for us, did nobleness ever lie.
Past and Present
Where these quotes come from
- Sartor Resartus (197 quotes)
- Past and Present (117 quotes)
- On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (99 quotes)
- Sir Walter Scott. London and Westminster Review (6 quotes)
- Heroes and Hero-Worship. The Hero as a Man of Letters (4 quotes)
- Burns. Edinburgh Review (3 quotes)
- Goethe. Edinburgh Review (2 quotes)
- Voltaire. Foreign Review (2 quotes)
Every quote comes from a public-domain edition. How the library was made .