Quotes by Carlyle, Thomas

Thomas Carlyle (December 4, 1795 - February 5, 1881) was a Scottish essayist, satirist, and historian, whose work was hugely influential during the Victorian era. Coming from a strictly Calvinist family, Carlyle was expected by his parents to become a preacher. However, while at the University of Edinburgh he lost his Christian faith. Nevertheless Calvinist values remained with him throughout his life. This combination of a religious temperament with loss of faith in traditional Christianity made Carlyle's work appealing to many Victorians who were grappling with scientific and political changes that threatened the traditional social order..

"Silence is as deep as eternity, speech a shallow as time."

Carlyle, Thomas on silence
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"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."

Carlyle, Thomas on silence

"When the oak is felled the whole forest echoes with it fall, but a hundred acorns are sown in silence by an unnoticed breeze."

Carlyle, Thomas on silence

"Speech is of time, silence is of eternity."

Carlyle, Thomas on silence

"The first sin in our universe was Lucifer's self conceit."

Carlyle, Thomas on sin

"The merit of originality is not novelty; it is sincerity."

Carlyle, Thomas on sincerity
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"Skepticism, as I said, is not intellectual only; it is moral also; a chronic atrophy and disease of the whole soul. A man lives by believing something; not by debating and arguing about many things. A sad case for him when all that he can manage to believe is something he can button in his pocket, and with one or the other organ eat and digest! Lower than that he will not get."

Carlyle, Thomas on skepticism

"We call it a Society; and go about professing openly the totalest separation, isolation. Our life is not a mutual helpfulness; but rather, cloaked under due laws-of-war, named fair competition and so forth, it is a mutual hostility."

Carlyle, Thomas on society

"History shows that the majority of people that have done anything great have passed their youth in seclusion."

Carlyle, Thomas on solitude
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"The soul gives unity to what it looks at with love."

Carlyle, Thomas on soul

"If an eloquent speaker speak not the truth, is there a more horrid kind of object in creation?"

Carlyle, Thomas on speakers and speaking

"Speech is human, silence is divine, yet also brutish and dead: therefore we must learn both arts."

Carlyle, Thomas on speech

"The spiritual is the parent of the practical."

Carlyle, Thomas on spirituality

"No ghost was every seen by two pair of eyes."

Carlyle, Thomas on spirituality

"It were a real increase of human happiness, could all young men from the age of nineteen be covered under barrels, or rendered otherwise invisible; and there left to follow their lawful studies and callings, till they emerged, sadder and wiser, at the age of twenty-five."

Carlyle, Thomas on students

"If what you have done is unjust, you have not succeeded."

Carlyle, Thomas on success

"For suffering and enduring there is no remedy, but striving and doing."

Carlyle, Thomas on suffering
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"Action hangs, as it were, dissolved in speech, in thoughts whereof speech is the shadow; and precipitates itself therefrom. The kind of speech in a man betokens the kind of action you will get from him."

Carlyle, Thomas on action

"The end of man is action, and not thought, though it be of the noblest."

Carlyle, Thomas on action

"Everywhere in life, the true question is not what we gain, but what we do."

Carlyle, Thomas on action
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"Narrative is linear, but action has breadth and depth as well as height and is solid."

Carlyle, Thomas on action

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

Carlyle, Thomas on action

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

Carlyle, Thomas on action

"In every phenomenon the beginning remains always the most notable moment."

Carlyle, Thomas on beginning

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"It is the unseen and the spiritual in people that determines the outward and the actual."

Carlyle, Thomas on behavior

"Conviction never so excellent, is worthless until it coverts itself into conduct."

Carlyle, Thomas on belief

"No iron chain, or outward force of any kind, can ever compel the soul of a person to believe or to disbelieve."

Carlyle, Thomas on belief

"The battle that never ends is the battle of belief against unbelief."

Carlyle, Thomas on belief
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"The most fearful unbelief is unbelief in your self."

Carlyle, Thomas on belief
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"A well-written life is almost as rare as a well-spent one."

Carlyle, Thomas on biography

"History is the essence of innumerable biographies."

Carlyle, Thomas on biography

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"If those gentlemen would let me alone I should be much obliged to them. I would say, as Shakespeare would say... Sweet Friend, for Jesus sake forbear."

Carlyle, Thomas on biography

"No sooner does a great man depart, and leave his character as public property, than a crowd of little men rushes towards it. There they are gathered together, blinking up to it with such vision as they have, scanning it from afar, hovering round it this way and that, each cunningly endeavoring, by all arts, to catch some reflex of it in the little mirror of himself."

Carlyle, Thomas on biography

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

Carlyle, Thomas on books - reading
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"The best effect of any book, is that it excites the reader to self-activity."

Carlyle, Thomas on books - reading
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"After all manner of professors have done their best for us, the place we are to get knowledge is in books. The true university of these days is a collection of books."

Carlyle, Thomas on books - reading
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"If a book comes from the heart it will contrive to reach other hearts. All art and author craft are of small account to that."

Carlyle, Thomas on books - reading

"One must verify or expel his doubts, and convert them into the certainty of Yes or NO."

Carlyle, Thomas on certainty

"By nature man hates change; seldom will he quit his old home till it has actually fallen around his ears."

Carlyle, Thomas on change
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"The true past departs not, no truth or goodness realized by man ever dies, or can die; but all is still here, and, recognized or not, lives and works through endless change."

Carlyle, Thomas on change
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