Thomas Carlyle Quotes

The three great elements of modern civilization Gunpowder Printing and the Protestant Religion.

Silence is deep as Eternity speech shallow as Time.

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.

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

The whole universe is but a huge Symbol of god".

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.

Every noble crown is and on earth will ever be a crown of thorns.

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.

Without kindness there can be no true joy.

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.

Poetry therefore we will call Musical Thought.

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)

The end of man is action.

The word of Mohammad is a voice direct from nature's own heart - all else is wind in comparison.

The present is the living sum-total of the whole past.

Give me a man who sings at his work.

All work is seed sown. It grows and spreads and sows itself anew.

Faith is loyalty to some inspired teacher some spiritual hero.

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.

Burke said there were Three Estates in Parliament but in the Reporters' gallery yonder there sat a Fourth Estate more important far than they all.

His religion at best is an anxious wish - like that of Rebelais a great Perhaps.

Such I hold to be the genuine use of Gunpowder: that it makes all men tall.

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!

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

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.

Every poet... finds himself born in the midst of prose. He has to struggle from the littleness and obstruction of an actual world into the freedom and infinitude of an ideal.

Skepticism means not intellectual doubt alone but moral doubt.

In the long run every government is the exact symbol of its people with their wisdom and unwisdom.

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.

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

Adversity is sometimes hard upon a man, but for one man who can stand prosperity, there are a hundred that will stand adversity.

If you can walk you can dance. Zimbabwe saying Music is well said to be the speech of angels.

History a distillation of rumor

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.

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

Let each become all that he was created capable of being.

The man who cannot laugh is not only fit for treasons strategems and spoils but his whole life is already a treason and a stratagem.

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

I grow daily to honor facts more and more and theory less and less.

Nothing is more terrible than activity without insight.

Music is well said to be the speech of angels.

The block of granite which was an obstacle in the path of the weak becomes a steppingstone in the path of the strong.

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

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!

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.

Man is a tool-using animal.

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

Every noble work is at first impossible.

Macaulay is well for awhile but one wouldn't live under Niagara.

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.

Of all your troubles, great and small, the greatest are the ones that don't happen at all.

If Jesus Christ were to come today, people would not even crucify him. They would ask him to dinner, and hear what he had to say, and make fun of it.

The eternal stars shine out as soon as it is dark enough.

Biography is the only true history.

Work is the grand cure of all the maladies and miseries that ever beset mankind.

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.

Well at ease are the Sleepers for whom Existence is a shallow Dream.

Of a truth men are mystically united: a mystic bond of brotherhood makes all men one.

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

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.