Thomas Carlyle Quotes

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.

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.

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

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

Go as far as you can see; when you get there, you'll be able to see further.

A loving heart is the beginning of all knowledge.

My books are friends that never fail me." (Letter to his mother, Margaret A. Carlyle; 17 March 1817)

Conviction is worthless unless it is converted into conduct.

Tell a man he is brave, and you help him to become so.

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

Popular opinion is the greatest lie in the world.

Every man is my superior in that I may learn from him.

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

A good book is the purest essence of a human soul.

Silence is deep as Eternity, speech is shallow as Time.

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

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.

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

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

Show me the man you honor, and I will know what kind of man you are

A great man shows his greatness by the way he treats little men.

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

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

The greatest of faults is to be conscious of none.

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

The best effect of any book is that it excites the reader to self activity.

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

Wondrous is the strength of cheerfulness, and its power of endurance - the cheerful man will do more in the same time, will do it better, will preserve it longer, than the sad or sullen.

The block of granite which was an obstacle in the pathway of the weak becomes a stepping-stone in the pathway of the strong.

The true University of these days is a Collection of Books.

Silence is more eloquent than words.

In a controversy, the instant we feel anger we have already ceased striving for the truth, and have begun striving for ourselves.

Have a purpose in life, and having it, throw into your work such strength of mind and muscle as God has given you.

It is the heart always that sees, before the head can see.

One life - a little gleam of Time between two Eternities.

In books lies the soul of the whole Past Time: the articulate audible voice of the Past, when the body and material substance of it has altogether vanished like a dream.

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

Every noble work is at first impossible.

Of all the acts of man, repentance is the most divine. The greatest of all faults . . . is to be conscious of none." (Thomas Carlyle)

Wonder is the basis of worship.

History is the essence of innumerable biographies.

Adversity is the diamond dust Heaven polishes its jewels with

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

In books lies the soul fo the whole past time.

(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.

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.

The history of the world is but a biography of great men.

May blessings be upon the head of Cadmus, the Phoenicians, or whoever it was that invented books.

The English historian Thomas Carlyle defined a person’s religion as the set of values evident in his or her actions, regardless of what the individual would claim to believe when asked.

Love is ever the beginning of knowledge as fire is of light.

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

Fame is no sure test of merit.

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!

No pressure, no diamonds.

For a hundred that can bear adversity, there is hardly one that can bear prosperity.

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.

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

Let me have my own way in exactly everything and a sunnier and pleasanter creature does not exist.

The merit of originality is not novelty, it is sincerity. The believing man is the original man.

Literature is the thought of thinking souls.

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

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

Talk that does not end in any kind of action is better suppressed altogether.

Bright, heroic, tender, true and noble was that lost treasure of my heart, who faithfully accompanied me in all the rocky ways and climbings; and I am forever poor without her.

The greatest of faults...is to be conscious of none.

The crash of the whole solar and stellar systems could only kill you once.

The battle that never ends is the battle of belief against disbelief

The greatest university of all is a collection of books.

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

If you are ever in doubt as to whether or not you should kiss a pretty girl, always give her the benefit of the doubt.

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.

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.

In every object there is inexhaustible meaning.

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

Idleness is worst, Idleness alone is without hope: work earnestly at anything, you will by degrees learn to work at almost all things. There is endless hope in work, were it even work at making money.

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

Nature alone is antique, and the oldest art a mushroom.

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

Look to be treated by others as you have treated others.

War is a quarrel between two thieves too cowardly to fight their own battle; therefore they take boys from one village and another village, stick them into uniforms, equip them with guns, and let them loose like wild beasts against one other.

In every object there is inexhaustible meaning; the eye sees in it what the eye brings means of seeing.

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

Democracy will prevail when men believe the vote of Judas as good as that of Jesus Christ

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.

History of the world is the biography of the great man. And I said: The great man always act like a thunder. He storms the skies, while others are waiting to be stormed.

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

Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together.

I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.

You may take my purse; but I cannot have my moral Self annihilated. The purse is any Highwayman's who might meet me with a loaded pistol: but the Self is mine and God my Maker's; it is not yours; and I will resist you to the death, and revolt against you ...

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.

Adversity is sometimes hard upon a man, but for one man who can stand prosperity, there are a hundred that will stand adversity.

When new turns of behavior cease to appear in the life of the individual, its behavior ceases to be intelligent.

Hunger whets everything, especially Suspicion and Indignation.

Thirty million, mostly fools. [When asked the population of England]

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.

I fear no hell, just as I expect no heaven. Nabokov summed up a nonbeliever’s view of the cosmos, and our place in it, thus: “The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.” The 19th-century Scottish historian Thomas Carlyle put it slightly differently: “One life. A little gleam of Time between two Eternities.” Though I have many memories to cherish, I value the present, my time on earth, those around me now. I miss those who have departed, and recognize, painful as it is, that I will never be reunited with them. There is the here and now – no more. But certainly no less. Being an adult means, as Orwell put it, having the “power of facing unpleasant facts.” True adulthood begins with doing just that, with renouncing comforting fables. There is something liberating in recognizing ourselves as mammals with some fourscore years (if we’re lucky) to make the most of on this earth. There is also something intrinsically courageous about being an atheist. Atheists confront death without mythology or sugarcoating. That takes courage.

Does it ever give thee pause that men used to have a soul? Not by hearsay alone, or as a figure of speech, but as a thruth that they knew and acted upon. Verily it was another world then, but yet it is a pity we have lost the tidings of our souls. We shall have to go in search of them again or worse in all ways shall befall us.

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.

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.

His ignorance was as remarkable as his knowledge. Of contemporary literature, philosophy and politics he appeared to know next to nothing. Upon my quoting Thomas Carlyle, he inquired in the naivest way who he might be and what he had done. My surprise reached a climax, however, when I found incidentally that he was ignorant of the Copernican Theory and of the composition of the Solar System. That any civilized human being in this nineteenth century should not be aware that the earth travelled round the sun appeared to be to me such an extraordinary fact that I could hardly realize it. "You appear to be astonished," he said, smiling at my expression of surprise. "Now that I do know it I shall do my best to forget it." "To forget it!" "You see," he explained, "I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skillful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones." "But the Solar System!" I protested. "What the deuce is it to me?" he interrupted impatiently; "you say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work.