Thomas Carlyle Quotes

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

Long stormy spring-time, wet contentious April, winter chilling the lap of very May; but at length the season of summer does come.

The eye sees what it brings the power to see.

True humor springs not more from the head than from the heart. It is not contempt; its essence is love. It issues not in laughter, but in still smiles, which lie far deeper.

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

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.

Wonder is the basis of worship.

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

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

The difference between Socrates and Jesus? The great conscious and the immeasurably great unconscious.

Love is the only game that is not called on account of darkness.

None of us will ever accomplish anything excellent or commanding except when he listens to this whisper which is heard by him alone.

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

Silence is more eloquent than words.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

Show me the person you honor, for I know better by that the kind of person you are. For you show me what your idea of humanity is.

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

Weak eyes are fondest of glittering objects.

The outer passes away; the innermost is the same yesterday, today, and forever.

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.

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

History, a distillation of rumour.

War is a quarrel between two thieves too cowardly to fight their own battle.

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

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

Writing is a dreadful labor, yet not so dreadful as Idleness.

Nothing is more terrible than activity without insight.

The spiritual is the parent of the practical.

The man of life upright has a guiltless heart, free from all dishonest deeds or thought of vanity.

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

This world, after all our science and sciences, is still a miracle wonderful, inscrutable, magical and more, to whosoever will think of it.

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.

A man cannot make a pair of shoes rightly unless he do it in a devout manner.

Worship is transcendent wonder.

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

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.

If you are ever in doubt as to whether to kiss a pretty girl, always give her the benefit of the doubt.

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

To us also, through every star, through every blade of grass, is not God made visible if we will open our minds and our eyes.

Happy the people whose annals are vacant.

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

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

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

For, if a good speaker, never so eloquent, does not see into the fact, and is not speaking the truth of that – is there a more horrid kind of object in creation?

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

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

Youth is to all the glad season of life; but often only by what it hopes, not by what it attains, or what it escapes.

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

The fearful unbelief is unbelief in yourself.

No person is important enough to make me angry.

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.

No ghost was every seen by two pair of eyes.

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

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