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Thomas Carlyle

412 quotes

• “O poor mortals, how ye make this earth bitter for each other.”

  Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) said by 1881 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Where this will end? In the Abyss, one may prophecy; whither all Delusions are, at all moments, travelling; where this Delusion has now arrived. For if there be a Faith, from of old, it is this, as we often repeat, that no Lie can live for ever. The very Truth has to change its vesture, from time to time; and be born again. But all Lies have sentence of death written down against them, and Heaven's Chancery itself; and, slowly or fast, advance incessantly towards their hour.”

  Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) said by 1881 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Do nothing, only keep agitating, debating; and things will destroy themselves.”

  Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) said by 1881 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “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 (1795–1881) said by 1881 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “History a distillation of Rumour.”

  Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) said by 1881 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Misery which, through long ages, had no spokesman, no helper, will now be its own helper and speak for itself.”

  Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) said by 1881 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “He that has a secret should not only hide it, but hide that he has it to hide.”

  Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) said by 1881 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

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

  Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) said by 1881 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The difference between Orthodoxy or Mydoxy and Heterodoxy or Thy-doxy.”

  Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) said by 1881 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “There are depths in man which go down the length of the lowest Hell, as there are heights which reach the highest Heaven; — for are not both Heaven and Hell made out of him, everlasting Miracle and Mystery that he is?”

  Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) said by 1881 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: This was slightly paraphrased in A Dictionary of Thoughts : Being a Cyclopedia of Laconic Quotations from the Best Authors, Both Ancient and Modern (1891) edited by Tryon Edwards. p. 327. This version in turn was refere…

• “There is no heroic poem in the world but is at bottom a biography, the life of a man; also, it may be said, there is no life of a man, faithfully recorded, but is a heroic poem of its sort, rhymed or unrhymed.”

  Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) said by 1881 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “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 (1795–1881) said by 1881 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “No man lives without jostling and being jostled; in all ways he has to elbow himself through the world, giving and receiving offense.”

  Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) said by 1881 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Literature is the Thought of thinking Souls.”

  Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) said by 1881 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “All greatness is unconscious, or it is little and naught.”

  Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) said by 1881 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The uttered part of a man's life, let us always repeat, bears to the unuttered, unconscious part a small unknown proportion. He himself never knows it, much less do others.”

  Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) said by 1881 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “It can be said of him [Scott], when he departed he took a man's life along with him. No sounder piece of British manhood was put together in that eighteenth century of time.”

  Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) said by 1881 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Nothing that was worthy in the past departs; no truth or goodness realized by man ever dies, or can die.”

  Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) said by 1881 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “To the very last, he had a kind of idea; that, namely, of la carrière ouverte aux talents,—the tools to him that can handle them.”

  Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) first seen 1837 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: On Napoleon; Carlyle in his essay on Mirabeau, 1837, quotes this from a "New England book".

• “Blessed is the healthy nature; it is the coherent, sweetly co-operative, not incoherent, self-distracting, self-destructive one!”

  Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) said by 1881 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Everywhere in life, the true question is not what we gain, but what we do.”

  Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) said by 1881 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “a matter in regard to which if something be not done, something will do itself one day, and in a fashion that will please nobody”

  Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) said by 1881 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “A witty statesman said, you might prove anything by figures.”

  Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) said by 1881 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Democracy is, by the nature of it, a self-canceling business; and it gives in the long run a net result of zero.”

  Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) said by 1881 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “O reader, to what shifts is poor Society reduced, struggling to give still some account of herself, in epochs when Cash Payment has become the sole nexus of man to men!”

  Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) said by 1881 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Cash Payment the sole nexus; and there are so many things which cash will not pay! Cash is a great miracle; yet it has not all power in Heaven, nor even on Earth. 'Supply and demand' we will honour also; and yet how many 'demands' are there, entirely indispensable, which have to go elsewhere than to the shops, and produce quite other than cash, before they can get their supply? On the whole, what astonishing payments does cash make in this world!”

  Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) said by 1881 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “One comfort is, that Great Men, taken up in any way, are profitable company. We cannot look, however imperfectly, upon a great man, without gaining something by him. He is the living light-fountain, which it is good and pleasant to be near. The light which enlightens, which has enlightened the darkness of the world; and this not as a kindled lamp only, but rather as a natural luminary shining by the gift of Heaven; a flowing light-fountain, as I say, of native original insight, of manhood and heroic nobleness;—in whose radiance all souls feel that it is well with them.”

  Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) said by 1881 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “I here, on the very threshold, protest against it in reference to Paganism, and to all other isms by which man has ever for a length of time striven to walk in this world. They have all had a truth in them, or men would not have taken them up. Quackery and dupery do abound; in religions, above all in the more advanced decaying stages of religions, they have fearfully abounded: but quackery was never the originating influence in such things; it was not the health and life of such things, but their disease, the sure precursor of their being about to die! Let us never forget this.”

  Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) said by 1881 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “They have their belief, these poor Thibet people, that Providence sends down always an Incarnation of Himself into every generation. At bottom some belief in a kind of Pope! At bottom still better, belief that there is a Greatest Man; that he is discoverable; that, once discovered, we ought to treat him with an obedience which knows no bounds! This is the truth of Grand Lamaism; the "discoverability" is the only error here.”

  Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) said by 1881 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “It is a most earnest thing to be alive in this world; to die is not sport for a man. Man's life never was a sport to him; it was a stern reality, altogether a serious matter to be alive!”

  Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) said by 1881 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Men, I say, never did believe idle songs, never risked their soul's life on allegories: men in all times, especially in early earnest times, have had an instinct for detecting quacks, for detesting quacks.”

  Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) said by 1881 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “To the wild deep-hearted man all was yet new, not veiled under names or formulas; it stood naked, flashing in on him there, beautiful, awful, unspeakable. Nature was to this man, what to the Thinker and Prophet it forever is, preternatural. This green flowery rock-built earth, the trees, the mountains, rivers, many-sounding seas;—that great deep sea of azure that swims overhead; the winds sweeping through it; the black cloud fashioning itself together, now pouring out fire, now hail and rain.”

  Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) said by 1881 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “We call that fire of the black thunder-cloud "electricity," and lecture learnedly about it, and grind the like of it out of glass and silk: but what is it? What made it? Whence comes it? Whither goes it? Science has done much for us; but it is a poor science that would hide from us the great deep sacred infinitude of Nescience, whither we can never penetrate, on which all science swims as a mere superficial film. This world, after all our science and sciences, is still a miracle; wonderful, inscrutable, magical and more, to whosoever will think of it.”

  Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) said by 1881 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Cannot we understand how these men worshipped Canopus; became what we call Sabeans, worshipping the stars? Such is to me the secret of all forms of Paganism. Worship is transcendent wonder; wonder for which there is now no limit or measure; that is worship.”

  Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) said by 1881 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The young generations of the world, who had in them the freshness of young children, and yet the depth of earnest men, who did not think that they had finished off all things in Heaven and Earth by merely giving them scientific names, but had to gaze direct at them there, with awe and wonder: they felt better what of divinity is in man and Nature; they, without being mad, could worship Nature, and man more than anything else in Nature.”

  Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) said by 1881 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “What I called the perplexed jungle of Paganism sprang, we may say, out of many roots: every admiration, adoration of a star or natural object, was a root or fibre of a root; but Hero-worship is the deepest root of all; the tap-root, from which in a great degree all the rest were nourished and grown.”

  Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) said by 1881 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “No nobler feeling than this of admiration for one higher than himself dwells in the breast of man. It is to this hour, and at all hours, the vivifying influence in man's life.”

  Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) said by 1881 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “But I liken common languid Times, with their unbelief, distress, perplexity, with their languid doubting characters and embarrassed circumstances, impotently crumbling down into ever worse distress towards final ruin;—all this I liken to dry dead fuel, waiting for the lightning out of Heaven that shall kindle it. The great man, with his free force direct out of God's own hand, is the lightning. His word is the wise healing word which all can believe in. All blazes round him now, when he has once struck on it, into fire like his own.”

  Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) said by 1881 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “In that strange island Iceland,—burst up, the geologists say, by fire from the bottom of the sea; a wild land of barrenness and lava; swallowed many months of every year in black tempests, yet with a wild gleaming beauty in summertime; towering up there, stern and grim, in the North Ocean with its snow jokuls, roaring geysers, sulphur-pools and horrid volcanic chasms, like the waste chaotic battle-field of Frost and Fire;—where of all places we least looked for Literature or written memorials, the record of these things was written down.”

  Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) said by 1881 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “A great soul, any sincere soul, knows not what he is,—alternates between the highest height and the lowest depth; can, of all things, the least measure—Himself! What others take him for, and what he guesses that he may be; these two items strangely act on one another, help to determine one another. With all men reverently admiring him; with his own wild soul full of noble ardors and affections, of whirlwind chaotic darkness and glorious new light; a divine Universe bursting all into godlike beauty round him, and no man to whom the like ever had befallen, what could he think himself to be?”

  Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) said by 1881 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “[S]uppose Odin to have been the inventor of Letters, as well as "magic," among that people! It is the greatest invention man has ever made! this of marking down the unseen thought that is in him by written characters. It is a kind of second speech, almost as miraculous as the first.”

  Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) said by 1881 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “I feel that these old Northmen wore looking into Nature with open eye and soul: most earnest, honest; childlike, and yet manlike; with a great-hearted simplicity and depth and freshness, in a true, loving, admiring, unfearing way.”

  Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) said by 1881 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “They understood in their heart that it was indispensable to be brave; that Odin would have no favor for them, but despise and thrust them out, if they were not brave. Consider too whether there is not something in this! It is an everlasting duty, valid in our day as in that, the duty of being brave. Valor is still value. The first duty for a man is still that of subduing Fear. We must get rid of Fear; we cannot act at all till then.”

  Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) said by 1881 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “I called it a small light shining and shaping in the huge vortex of Norse darkness. Yet the darkness itself was alive; consider that. It was the eager inarticulate uninstructed Mind of the whole Norse People, longing only to become articulate, to go on articulating ever farther!”

  Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) said by 1881 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “It is a greatness not of mere body and gigantic bulk, but a rude greatness of soul. There is a sublime uncomplaining melancholy traceable in these old hearts. A great free glance into the very deeps of thought. They seem to have seen, these brave old Northmen, what Meditation has taught all men in all ages, That this world is after all but a show,—a phenomenon or appearance, no real thing. All deep souls see into that,—the Hindoo Mythologist, the German Philosopher,—the Shakspeare, the earnest Thinker, wherever he may be.”

  Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) said by 1881 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “No sadder proof can be given by a man of his own littleness than disbelief in great men.”

  Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) said by 1881 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The history of the world is but the biography of great men.”

  Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) said by 1881 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The greatest of faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none.”

  Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) said by 1881 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Mahomet can work no miracles; he often answers impatiently: I can work no miracles. I? "I am a Public Preacher;" appointed to preach this doctrine to all creatures. Yet the world, as we can see, had really from of old been all one great miracle to him. Look over the world, says he; is it not wonderful, the work of Allah; wholly "a sign to you," if your eyes were open!”

  Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) said by 1881 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “His Religion is not an easy one: with rigorous fasts, lavations, strict complex formulas, prayers five times a day, and abstinence from wine, it did not "succeed by being an easy religion." As if indeed any religion, or cause holding of religion, could succeed by that! It is a calumny on men to say that they are roused to heroic action by ease, hope of pleasure, recompense, — sugar-plums of any kind, in this world or the next! In the meanest mortal there lies something nobler.”

  Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) said by 1881 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

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