Thomas Carlyle Quotes

A loving heart is the beginning of all knowledge.
Thomas Carlyle

A man lives by believing something: not by debating and arguing about many things.
Thomas Carlyle

A man without a goal is like a ship without a rudder.
Thomas Carlyle

A man's felicity consists not in the outward and visible blessing of fortune, but in the inward and unseen perfections and riches of the mind.
Thomas Carlyle

A person who is gifted sees the essential point and leaves the rest as surplus.
Thomas Carlyle

A sad spectacle. If they be inhabited, what a scope for misery and folly. If they be not inhabited, what a waste of space.
Thomas Carlyle

A strong mind always hopes, and has always cause to hope.
Thomas Carlyle

A well-written life is almost as rare as a well-spent one.
Thomas Carlyle

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.
Thomas Carlyle

Adversity is the diamond dust Heaven polishes its jewels with.
Thomas Carlyle

All great peoples are conservative.
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

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

As a first approximation, I define "belief" not as the object of believing (a dogma, a program, etc.) but as the subject's investment in a proposition, the act of saying it and considering it as true.
Thomas Carlyle

Be not a slave of words.
Thomas Carlyle

Blessed is he who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness.
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

Clever men are good, but they are not the best.
Thomas Carlyle

Conviction is worthless unless it is converted into conduct.
Thomas Carlyle

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

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

Do the duty which lies nearest to you, the second duty will then become clearer.
Thomas Carlyle

Doubt, of whatever kind, can be ended by action alone.
Thomas Carlyle

Egotism is the source and summary of all faults and miseries.
Thomas Carlyle

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

Every noble work is at first impossible.
Thomas Carlyle

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

Everywhere the human soul stands between a hemisphere of light and another of darkness; on the confines of the two everlasting empires, necessity and free will.
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

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

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

Fun I love, but too much fun is of all things the most loathsome. Mirth is better than fun, and happiness is better than mirth.
Thomas Carlyle

Genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains.
Thomas Carlyle

He who could foresee affairs three days in advance would be rich for thousands of years.
Thomas Carlyle

He who has health, has hope; and he who has hope, has everything.
Thomas Carlyle

Humor has justly been regarded as the finest perfection of poetic genius.
Thomas Carlyle

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

I don't like to talk much with people who always agree with me. It is amusing to coquette with an echo for a little while, but one soon tires of it.
Thomas Carlyle

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

I've got a great ambition to die of exhaustion rather than boredom.
Thomas Carlyle

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

If there be no enemy there's no fight. If no fight, no victory and if no victory there is no crown.
Thomas Carlyle

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

Imagination is a poor matter when it has to part company with understanding.
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

In books lies the soul of the whole past time.
Thomas Carlyle

In every phenomenon the beginning remains always the most notable moment.
Thomas Carlyle

In the long-run every Government is the exact symbol of its People, with their wisdom and unwisdom; we have to say, Like People like Government.
Thomas Carlyle

Isolation is the sum total of wretchedness to a man.
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

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

Laughter is one of the very privileges of reason, being confined to the human species.
Thomas Carlyle

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

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

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

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

Man is a tool-using Animal. Nowhere do you find him without tools; without tools he is nothing, with tools he is all.
Thomas Carlyle

Man is, properly speaking, based upon hope, he has no other possession but hope; this world of his is emphatically the place of hope.
Thomas Carlyle

Men do less than they ought, unless they do all that they can.
Thomas Carlyle

Men seldom, or rather never for a length of time and deliberately, rebel against anything that does not deserve rebelling against.
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

Music is well said to be the speech of angels.
Thomas Carlyle

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

Necessity dispenseth with decorum.
Thomas Carlyle

No age seemed the age of romance to itself.
Thomas Carlyle

No amount of ability is of the slightest avail without honor.
Thomas Carlyle

No ghost was every seen by two pair of eyes.
Thomas Carlyle

No great man lives in vain. The history of the world is but the biography of great men.
Thomas Carlyle

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

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

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

No person is important enough to make me angry.
Thomas Carlyle

No pressure, no diamonds.
Thomas Carlyle

No violent extreme endures.
Thomas Carlyle

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