Top 500 Thomas Carlyle Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Great is journalism. Is not every able editor a ruler of the world, being the persuader of it?”

— Thomas Carlyle

102. “The courage we desire and prize is not the courage to die decently, but to live manfully.”

— Thomas Carlyle

103. “The true past departs not, no truth or goodness realized by man ever dies, or can die; but all is still here, and, recognized or not, lives and works through endless change.”

— Thomas Carlyle

104. “All true work is sacred.”

— Thomas Carlyle

105. “The person who cannot laugh is not only ready for treason, and deceptions, their whole life is already a treason and deception.”

— Thomas Carlyle

106. “History: A distillation of rumor.”

— Thomas Carlyle

107. “Every noble crown is, and on Earth will forever be, a crown of thorns.”

— Thomas Carlyle

108. “By nature man hates change; seldom will he quit his old home till it has actually fallen around his ears.”

— Thomas Carlyle

109. “Poetry, therefore, we will call Musical Thought.”

— Thomas Carlyle

110. “Experience takes dreadfully high school-wages, but he teaches like no other.”

— Thomas Carlyle

111. “Speech is human, silence is divine, yet also brutish and dead: therefore we must learn both arts.”

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle

113. “Clever men are good, but they are not the best.”

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle

115. “Ill-health, of body or of mind, is defeat. Health alone is victory. Let all men, if they can manage it, contrive to be healthy!”

— Thomas Carlyle

116. “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.”

— Thomas Carlyle

117. “Under all speech that is good for anything there lies a silence that is better, Silence is deep as Eternity; speech is shallow as Time.”

— Thomas Carlyle

118. “Know what thou canst work at, and work at it like a Hercules.”

— Thomas Carlyle

119. “Instead of saying that man is the creature of circumstance, it would be nearer the mark to say that man is the architect of circumstance.”

— Thomas Carlyle

120. “Nothing ever happens but once in all this world. What I do now I do once for all. It is over and gone, with all its eternity of solemn meaning.”

— Thomas Carlyle

121. “The insignificant, the empty, is usually the loud; and after the manner of a drum, is louder even because of its emptiness.”

— Thomas Carlyle

122. “The archenemy is the arch stupid!”

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle

124. “O poor mortals, how ye make this earth bitter for each other.”

— Thomas Carlyle

125. “Time has only a relative existence.”

— Thomas Carlyle

126. “All great peoples are conservative.”

— Thomas Carlyle

127. “One is hardly sensible of fatigue while he marches to music.”

— Thomas Carlyle

128. “Before philosophy can teach by Experience, the Philosophy has to be in readiness, the Experience must be gathered and intelligibly recorded.”

— Thomas Carlyle

129. “Language is called the garment of thought: however, it should rather be, language is the flesh-garment, the body, of thought.”

— Thomas Carlyle

130. “Work is the grand cure of all the maladies and miseries that ever beset mankind.”

— Thomas Carlyle

131. “Blessed is he who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness. He has a work, a life-purpose; he has found it, and will follow it! How, as a free-flowing channel, dug and torn by noble force through the sour mudswamp of one’s existence, like an ever-deepening river there, it runs and flows.”

— Thomas Carlyle

132. “If I say that Shakespeare is the greatest of intellects, I have said all concerning him. But there is more in Shakespeare’s intellect than we have yet seen. It is what I call an unconscious intellect; there is more virtue in it that he himself is aware of.”

— Thomas Carlyle

133. “A man willing to work, and unable to find work, is perhaps the saddest sight that fortune’s inequality exhibits under this sun.”

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle

135. “There is a perennial nobleness, and even sacredness, in work. Were he never so benighted, forgetful of his high calling, there is always hope in a man that actually and earnestly works: in idleness alone there is perpetual despair.”

— Thomas Carlyle

136. “The lightning spark of thought generated in the solitary mind awakens its likeness in another mind.”

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle

138. “All comes out even at the end of the day.”

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle

140. “The great law of culture is, Let each become all that he was created capable of being; expand, if possible, to his full growth; resisting all impediments, casting off all foreign, especially all noxious adhesions, and show himself at length in his own shape and stature be these what they may.”

— Thomas Carlyle

141. “Cash-payment is not the sole nexus of man with man.”

— Thomas Carlyle

142. “I grow daily to honor facts more and more, and theory less and less.”

— Thomas Carlyle

143. “Isolation is the sum total of wretchedness to a man.”

— Thomas Carlyle

144. “A stammering man is never a worthless one. Physiology can tell you why. It is an excess of sensibility to the presence of his fellow creature, that makes him stammer.”

— Thomas Carlyle

145. “History is a mighty dramos, enacted upon the theatre of times, with suns for lamps and eternity for a background.”

— Thomas Carlyle

146. “Rest is a fine medicine. Let your stomachs rest, ye dyspeptics; let your brain rest, you wearied and worried people of business; let your limbs rest, ye children of toil!”

— Thomas Carlyle

147. “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

148. “I should say sincerity, a deep, great, genuine sincerity, is the first characteristic of all men in any way heroic.”

— Thomas Carlyle

149. “Experience is the best of school masters, only the school fees are heavy.”

— Thomas Carlyle

150. “Reality, if rightly interpreted, is grander than fiction.”

— Thomas Carlyle