Top 500 Thomas Carlyle Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “He who has no vision of eternity has no hold on time.”

— Thomas Carlyle

52. “Do not be embarrassed by your mistakes. Nothing can teach us better than our understanding of them. This is one of the best ways of self-education.”

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle

54. “No person is important enough to make me angry.”

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle

56. “Adversity is the diamond dust Heaven polishes its jewels with.”

— Thomas Carlyle

57. “Silence, the great Empire of Silence: higher than all stars; deeper than the Kingdom of Death! It alone is great; all else is small.”

— Thomas Carlyle

58. “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

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

— Thomas Carlyle

60. “The Present is the living sum-total of the whole Past.”

— Thomas Carlyle

61. “History is the essence of innumerable biographies.”

— Thomas Carlyle

62. “Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do that with all thy might and leave the issues calmly to God.”

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle

64. “Properly speaking, all true work is religion.”

— Thomas Carlyle

65. “A man lives by believing something: not by debating and arguing about many things.”

— Thomas Carlyle

66. “A strong mind always hopes, and has always cause to hope.”

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle

68. “Quackery gives birth to nothing; gives death to all things.”

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle

70. “One life; a little gleam of Time between two Eternities; no second chance to us for evermore!”

— Thomas Carlyle

71. “The times are very bad. Very well, you are there to make them better.”

— Thomas Carlyle

72. “Biography is the only true history.”

— Thomas Carlyle

73. “Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together; that at length they may emerge, full-formed and majestic, into the delight of life, which they are thenceforth to rule.”

— Thomas Carlyle

74. “A thought once awakened does not again slumber.”

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle

76. “Nothing is more terrible than activity without insight.”

— Thomas Carlyle

77. “Without kindness there can be no true joy.”

— Thomas Carlyle

78. “We remove mountains, and make seas our smooth highway; nothing can resist us. We war with rude Nature; and, by our resistless engines, come off always victorious, and loaded with spoils.”

— Thomas Carlyle

79. “Music is well said to be the speech of angels.”

— Thomas Carlyle

80. “Nature is the time-vesture of God that reveals Him to the wise, and hides him from the foolish.”

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle

82. “Happy the people whose annals are blank in the history books!”

— Thomas Carlyle

83. “The king is the man who can.”

— Thomas Carlyle

84. “Today is not yesterday: we ourselves change; how can our works and thoughts, if they are always to be the fittest, continue always the same? Change, indeed is painful; yet ever needful; and if memory have its force and worth, so also has hope.”

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle

86. “Close thy Byron ; open thy Goethe .”

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle

89. “Silence is as deep as eternity, speech a shallow as time.”

— Thomas Carlyle

90. “Men do less than they ought, unless they do all they can.”

— Thomas Carlyle

91. “The past is always attractive because it is drained of fear.”

— Thomas Carlyle

92. “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

93. “All work of man is as the swimmer’s: a vast ocean threatens to devour him; if he front it not bravely, it will keep its word.”

— Thomas Carlyle

94. “If you are looking at data over and over you better be taking away valuable insight every time. If you are constantly looking at data that isn’t leading to strategic action stop wasting your time and look for more Actionable Analytics.”

— Thomas Carlyle

95. “The eternal stars shine out as soon as it is dark enough.”

— Thomas Carlyle

96. “Not what you possess but what you do with what you have, determines your true worth.”

— Thomas Carlyle

97. “Out of the lowest depths there is a path to the loftiest heights.”

— Thomas Carlyle

98. “A laugh, to be joyous, must flow from a joyous heart, for without kindness, there can be no true joy.”

— Thomas Carlyle

99. “All work is as seed sown; it grows and spreads, and sows itself anew.”

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle