Top 500 Thomas Carlyle Quotes (2025 Update)
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451. “What, in the devil’s name, is the use of respectability, with never so many gigs and silver spoons, if thou inwardly art the pitifulness of all men?”

— Thomas Carlyle

452. “Every man has a coward and hero in his soul.”

— Thomas Carlyle

453. “Acorns are planted silently by some unnoticed breeze.”

— Thomas Carlyle

454. “I have no patience whatever with these gorilla damnifications of humanity.”

— Thomas Carlyle

455. “How indestructibly the good grows, and propagates itself, even among the weedy entanglements of evil.”

— Thomas Carlyle

456. “There are but two ways of paying debt: Increase of industry in raising income, increase of thrift in laying out.”

— Thomas Carlyle

457. “A man must indeed be a hero to appear such in the eyes of his valet.”

— Thomas Carlyle

458. “A man ought to inquire and find out what he really and truly has an appetite for; what suits his constitution; and that, doctors tell him, is the very thing he ought to have in general. And so with books.”

— Thomas Carlyle

459. “On the whole, I would bid you stand up to your work, whatever it may be, and not be afraid of it; not in sorrows or contradictions to yield, but to push on towards the goal.”

— Thomas Carlyle

460. “The true Church of England, at this moment, lies in the Editors of the newspapers.”

— Thomas Carlyle

461. “A force as of madness in the hands of reason has done all that was ever done in the world.”

— Thomas Carlyle

462. “In our wide world there is but one altogether fatal personage, the dunce, – he that speaks irrationally, that sees not, and yet thinks he sees.”

— Thomas Carlyle

463. “Who is there that, in logical words, can express the effect music has on us?”

— Thomas Carlyle

464. “I want to meet my God awake.”

— Thomas Carlyle

465. “One monster there is in the world, the idle man.”

— Thomas Carlyle

466. “Great men are the inspired texts of that divine Book of Revelations, whereof a chapter is completed from epoch to epoch, and by some named History.”

— Thomas Carlyle

467. “The actual well seen is ideal.”

— Thomas Carlyle

468. “The nobleness of silence. The highest melody dwells only in silence, – the sphere melody, the melody of health.”

— Thomas Carlyle

469. “I never heard tell of any clever man that came of entirely stupid people.”

— Thomas Carlyle

470. “The leafy blossoming present time springs from the whole past, remembered and unrememberable.”

— Thomas Carlyle

471. “A very sea of thought; neither calm nor clear, if you will, yet wherein the toughest pearl-diver may dive to his utmost depth, and return not only with sea-wreck but with true orients.”

— Thomas Carlyle

472. “Great is wisdom; infinite is the value of wisdom. It cannot be exaggerated; it is the highest achievement of man.”

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle

474. “Our very walking is an incessant falling; a falling and a catching of ourselves before we come actually to the pavement. It is emblematic of all things a man does.”

— Thomas Carlyle

475. “Great men are the modelers, patterns, and in a wide sense creators, of whatsoever the general mass of men contrived to do and attain.”

— Thomas Carlyle

476. “In the poorest cottage are Books: is one Book, wherein for several thousands of years the spirit of man has found light, and nourishment, and an interpreting response to whatever is Deepest in him.”

— Thomas Carlyle

477. “The devil has his elect.”

— Thomas Carlyle

478. “What I loved in the man was his health, his unity with himself; all people and all things seemed to find their quite peaceable adjustment with him, not a proud domineering one, as after doubtful contest, but a spontaneous-looking peaceable, even humble one.”

— Thomas Carlyle

479. “Is not cant the materia prima of the devil, from which all falsehoods, imbecilities, abominations, body themselves, from which no true thing can come? For cant is itself the properly a double-distilled lie, the second power of a lie.”

— Thomas Carlyle

480. “There is but one thing without honor, smitten with eternal barrenness, inability to do or to be,-insincerity, unbelief.”

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle

482. “A true delineation of the smallest man is capable of interesting the greatest man.”

— Thomas Carlyle

483. “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

484. “Venerable to me is the hard hand, – crooked, coarse, – wherein, notwithstanding, lies a cunning virtue, indispensably royal as of the sceptre of the planet.”

— Thomas Carlyle

485. “I know so little about any history. How little do I know even about the history of myself.”

— Thomas Carlyle

486. “Pin thy faith to no man’s sleeve. Hast thou not two eyes of thy own?”

— Thomas Carlyle

487. “There can be no acting or doing of any kind till it be recognized that there is a thing to be done; the thing once recognized, doing in a thousand shapes becomes possible.”

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle

489. “He that works and does some Poem, not he that merely says one, is worthy of the name of Poet.”

— Thomas Carlyle

490. “Ever, as before, does Madness remain a mysterious-terrific, altogether infernal boiling-up of the Nether Chaotic Deep, through this fair-painted Vision of Creation, which swims thereon, which we name the Real.”

— Thomas Carlyle

491. “Goethe’s devil is a cultivated personage and acquainted with the modern sciences; sneers at witchcraft and the black art even while employing them, and doubts most things, nay, half disbelieves even his own existence.”

— Thomas Carlyle

492. “The greatest of all heroes is One – whom we do not name here! Let sacred silence meditate that sacred matter; you will find it the ultimate perfection of a principle extant throughout man’s whole history on earth.”

— Thomas Carlyle

493. “Let him who gropes painfully in darkness or uncertain light, and prays vehemently that the dawn may ripen into day, lay this precept well to heart: “Do the duty which lies nearest to thee,” which thou know to be a duty! Thy second duty will already have become clearer.”

— Thomas Carlyle

494. “Laws themselves, political Constitutions, are not our Life; but only the house wherein our Life is led.”

— Thomas Carlyle

495. “This little life has its duties that are great-that are alone great, and that go up to heaven and down to hell.”

— Thomas Carlyle

496. “To the mean eye all things are trivial, as certainly as to the jaundiced they are yellow.”

— Thomas Carlyle

497. “Are not our greatest men as good as lost? The men that walk daily among us, warming us, feeding us, walk shrouded in darkness, mere mythic men.”

— Thomas Carlyle

498. “Man’s earthly interests,’are all hooked and buttoned together, and held up, by Clothes.”

— Thomas Carlyle

499. “We observe with confidence that the truly strong mind, view it as intellect or morality, or under any other aspect, is nowise the mind acquainted with its strength; that here the sign of health is unconsciousness.”

— Thomas Carlyle

500. “Whose school-hours are all the days and nights of our existence.”

— Thomas Carlyle