Thomas Carlyle Quotes

If time is precious, no book that will not improve by repeated readings deserves to be read at all.

~ Thomas Carlyle

He who has health, has hope; and he who has hope, has everything

~ Thomas Carlyle

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.

~ Thomas Carlyle

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.

~ Thomas Carlyle

The lies (Western slander) which well-meaning zeal has heaped round this man (Muhammad) are disgraceful to ourselves only.

~ Thomas Carlyle

A loving heart is the beginning of all knowledge.

~ Thomas Carlyle

What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books.

~ Thomas Carlyle

(Quoted by Thomas Carlyle) The rude man requires only to see something going on. The man of more refinement must be made to feel. The man of complete refinement must be made to reflect.

~ 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

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

~ 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

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

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

History is the essence of innumerable biographies.

~ Thomas Carlyle

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!

~ Thomas Carlyle

A Dandy is a clothes-wearing Man, a Man whose trade, office and existence consists in the wearing of clothes.

~ 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

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

~ Thomas Carlyle

A man lives by believing something, not by debating and arguing about many things.

~ Thomas Carlyle

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

~ 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

Of our thinking it is but the upper surface that we shape into articulate thought, underneath the region of argument and conscious discourse lies the region of meditation.

~ Thomas Carlyle

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

~ 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

The suffering man ought really to consume his own smoke, there is no good in emitting smoke till you have made it into fire.

~ Thomas Carlyle

Make yourself an honest man, and then you may be sure that there is one less scoundrel in the world.

~ Thomas Carlyle

Under all speech that is good for anything there lies a silence that is better.

~ Thomas Carlyle

The whole universe is but a huge Symbol of god.

~ 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

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

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

~ 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

Intellect is not speaking and logicising, it is seeing and ascertaining.

~ Thomas Carlyle

One life, a little gleam of Time between two Eternities, no second chance to us for evermore!

~ Thomas Carlyle

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

~ 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

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