Thomas Carlyle

Pin your faith to no ones sleeves, haven't you two eyes of your own.

— Thomas Carlyle

It is a strange trade that of advocacy. Your intellect, your highest heavenly gift is hung up in the shop window like a loaded pistol for sale.

— Thomas Carlyle

Nothing is more terrible than activity without insight.

— Thomas Carlyle

The real use of gunpowder is to make all men tall.

— Thomas Carlyle

For all right judgment of any man or things it is useful, nay, essential, to see his good qualities before pronouncing on his bad.

— Thomas Carlyle

Foolish men imagine that because judgment for an evil thing is delayed, there is no justice; but only accident here below. Judgment for an evil thing is many times delayed some day or two, some century or two, but it is sure as life, it is sure as death.

— Thomas Carlyle

He that can work is born to be king of something.

— Thomas Carlyle

Even in the meanest sorts of labor, the whole soul of a man is composed into a kind of real harmony the instant he sets himself to work.

— Thomas Carlyle

Laughter is the cipher key wherewith we decipher the whole man

— Thomas Carlyle

The person who cannot laugh is not only ready for treason, and deceptions, their whole life is already a treason and deception.

— Thomas Carlyle

No man who has once heartily and wholly laughed can be altogether irreclaimably bad.

— Thomas Carlyle

Tell a person they are brave and you help them become so.

— Thomas Carlyle

The true university of these days is a collection of books.

— Thomas Carlyle

In private life I never knew anyone interfere with other people's disputes but he heartily repented of it.

— Thomas Carlyle

The tragedy of life is not so much what men suffer, but rather what they miss.

— Thomas Carlyle

Life is a little gleam of time between two eternity s.

— Thomas Carlyle

We have our little theory on all human and divine things. Poetry, the workings of genius itself, which, in all times, with one or another meaning, has been called Inspiration, and held to be mysterious and inscrutable, is no longer without its scientific exposition. The building of the lofty rhyme is like any other masonry or bricklaying: we have theories of its rise, height, decline and fall -- which latter, it would seem, is now near, among all people.

— Thomas Carlyle

There is a great discovery still to be made in literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write.

— Thomas Carlyle

Isolation is the sum total of wretchedness to a man.

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle

For man is not the creature and product of Mechanism; but, in a far truer sense, its creator and producer.

— Thomas Carlyle

Not what I have, but what I do is my kingdom.

— Thomas Carlyle

The world is a republic of mediocrities, and always was.

— Thomas Carlyle

Cash-payment never was, or could except for a few years be, the union-bond of man to man. Cash never yet paid one man fully his deserts to another; nor could it, nor can it, now or henceforth to the end of the world.

— Thomas Carlyle

For the superior morality, of which we hear so much, we too would desire to be thankful: at the same time, it were but blindness to deny that this superior morality is properly rather an inferior criminality, produced not by greater love of Virtue, but by greater perfection of Police; and of that far subtler and stronger Police, called Public Opinion.

— Thomas Carlyle

If you do not wish a man to do a thing, you had better get him to talk about it; for the more men talk, the more likely they are to do nothing else.

— Thomas Carlyle

If you look deep enough you will see music; the heart of nature being everywhere music.

— Thomas Carlyle

One is hardly sensible of fatigue while he marches to music.

— Thomas Carlyle

Song is the heroics of speech.

— 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

Secrecy is the element of all goodness; even virtue, even beauty is mysterious.

— Thomas Carlyle

Every new opinion, at its starting, is precisely in a minority of one.

— Thomas Carlyle

The past is all holy to us; the dead are all holy; even they that were wicked when alive.

— Thomas Carlyle

Cash-payment is not the sole nexus of man with man.

— Thomas Carlyle

Imperfection clings to a person, and if they wait till they are brushed off entirely, they would spin for ever on their axis, advancing nowhere.

— Thomas Carlyle

Permanence, perseverance and persistence in spite of all obstacle s, discouragement s, and impossibilities: It is this, that in all things distinguishes the strong soul from the weak.

— Thomas Carlyle

Let one who wants to move and convince others, first be convinced and moved themselves. If a person speaks with genuine earnestness the thoughts, the emotion and the actual condition of their own heart, others will listen because we all are knit together by the tie of sympathy.

— Thomas Carlyle

Not brute force but only persuasion and faith are the kings of this world.

— Thomas Carlyle

Little other than a red tape Talking-machine, and unhappy Bag of Parliamentary Eloquence.

— Thomas Carlyle

It is a vain hope to make people happy by politics.

— Thomas Carlyle

Popular opinion is the greatest lie in the world.

— Thomas Carlyle

Culture is the process by which a person becomes all that they were created capable of being.

— Thomas Carlyle

Only the person of worth can recognize the worth in others.

— Thomas Carlyle

We were wise indeed, could we discern truly the signs of our own time; and by knowledge of its wants and advantages, wisely adjust our own position in it. Let us, instead of gazing idly into the obscure distance, look calmly around us, for a little, on the perplexed scene where we stand. Perhaps, on a more serious inspection, something of its perplexity will disappear, some of its distinctive characters and deeper tendencies more clearly reveal themselves; whereby our own relations to it, our own true aims and endeavors in it, may also become clearer.

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle

There is often more spiritual force in a proverb than in whole philosophical systems.

— Thomas Carlyle

Wonderful Force of Public Opinion! We must act and walk in all points as it prescribes; follow the traffic it bids us, realize the sum of money, the degree of influence it expects of us, or we shall be lightly esteemed; certain mouthfuls of articulate wind will be blown at us, and this what mortal courage can front?

— Thomas Carlyle

The purpose of man is in action not thought.

— Thomas Carlyle

The man without a purpose is like a ship without a rudder -- waif, a nothing, a no man. Have a purpose in life, and, having it, throw such strength of mind and muscle into your work as God has given you.

— Thomas Carlyle

No good book or good thing of any kind shows it best face at first. No the most common quality of in a true work of art that has excellence and depth, is that at first sight it produces a certain disappointment.

— Thomas Carlyle

Reality, if rightly interpreted, is grander than fiction.

— Thomas Carlyle

A person usually has two reasons for doing something: a good reason and the real reason.

— Thomas Carlyle

Reform is not pleasant, but grievous; no person can reform themselves without suffering and hard work, how much less a nation.

— Thomas Carlyle

To reform a world, to reform a nation, no wise man will undertake; and all but foolish men know, that the only solid, though a far slower reformation, is what each begins and perfects on himself.

— Thomas Carlyle

Of all acts of man repentance is the most divine. The greatest of all faults is to be conscious of none.

— Thomas Carlyle

All men, if they work not as in the great taskmaster's eye, will work wrong, and work unhappily for themselves and for you.

— Thomas Carlyle

No age seemed the age of romance to itself.

— Thomas Carlyle

Sarcasm I now see to be, in general, the language of the devil; for which reason I have long since as good as renounced it.

— Thomas Carlyle

Science must have originated in the feeling that something was wrong.

— Thomas Carlyle

The barrenest of all mortals is the sentimentalist.

— Thomas Carlyle

Silence is more eloquent than words.

— Thomas Carlyle

Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves.

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle

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

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

— Thomas Carlyle

Speech is of time, silence is of eternity.

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle

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.

— Thomas Carlyle

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.

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle

The soul gives unity to what it looks at with love.

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle

The spiritual is the parent of the practical.

— Thomas Carlyle

No ghost was every seen by two pair of eyes.

— Thomas Carlyle

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.

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle

In a symbol there is concealment and yet revelation: here therefore, by silence and by speech acting together, comes a double significance. In the symbol proper, what we can call a symbol, there is ever, more or less distinctly and directly, some embodiment and revelation of the Infinite; the Infinite is made to blend itself with the Finite, to stand visible, and as it were, attainable there. By symbols, accordingly, is man guided and commanded, made happy, made wretched.

— Thomas Carlyle

When we can drain the Ocean into mill-ponds, and bottle up the Force of Gravity, to be sold by retail, in gas jars; then may we hope to comprehend the infinitudes of man's soul under formulas of Profit and Loss; and rule over this too, as over a patent engine, by checks, and valves, and balances.

— Thomas Carlyle

The cut of a garment speaks of intellect and talent and the color of temperament and heart.

— Thomas Carlyle

Thought is the parent of the deed.

— Thomas Carlyle

Thought once awakened does not again slumber; unfolds itself into a System of Thought; grows, in man after man, generation after generation, --till its full stature is reached, and such System of Thought can grow no farther, but must give place to another.

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle

The illimitable, silent, never-resting thing called Time, rolling, rushing on, swift, silent, like an all-embracing ocean-tide, on which we and all the universe swim like exhalations, like apparitions which are, and then are not: this is forever very literally a miracle; a thing to strike us dumb, for we have no word to speak about it.

— Thomas Carlyle

Man is a tool-using animal. Without tools he is nothing, with tools he is all.

— Thomas Carlyle

No person was every rightly understood until they had been first regarded with a certain feeling, not of tolerance, but of sympathy.

— Thomas Carlyle

A man willing to work, and unable to find work, is perhaps the saddest sight that Fortune's inequality exhibits under this sun.

— Thomas Carlyle

Man's unhappiness, as I construe, comes of his greatness; it is because there is an Infinite in him, which with all his cunning he cannot quite bury under the Finite.

— Thomas Carlyle

Men's hearts ought not to be set against one another, but set with one another, and all against evil only.

— Thomas Carlyle

I don't pretend to understand the Universe -- it's a great deal bigger than I am.

— Thomas Carlyle

Good breeding differs, if at all, from high breeding only as it gracefully remembers the rights of others, rather than gracefully insists on its own rights.

— Thomas Carlyle

Real good breeding, as the people have it here, is one of the finest things now going in the world. The careful avoidance of all discussion, the swift hopping from topic to topic, does not agree with me; but the graceful style they do it with is beyond that of minuets!

— Thomas Carlyle

Variety is the condition of harmony.

— Thomas Carlyle

No conquest can ever become permanent which does not show itself beneficial to the conquered as well as to the conquerors.

— Thomas Carlyle

Virtue is like health: the harmony of the whole man.

— Thomas Carlyle

No man sees far, most see no farther than their noses.

— Thomas Carlyle

I have seen gleams in the face and eyes of the man that have let you look into a higher country.

— Thomas Carlyle

It is the first of all problems for a man to find out what kind of work he is to do in this universe.

— Thomas Carlyle