Top 500 Thomas Carlyle Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “In every object there is inexhaustible meaning; the eye sees in it what the eye brings means of seeing.”

— Thomas Carlyle

152. “Fire is the best of servants, but what a master!”

— Thomas Carlyle

153. “Society is founded upon Cloth;.”

— Thomas Carlyle

154. “An everlasting lodestar, that beams the brighter in the heavens the darker here on earth grows the night.”

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle

156. “Doubt, of whatever kind, can be ended by action alone.”

— Thomas Carlyle

157. “Men’s hearts ought not to be set against one another, but set with one another and all against evil only.”

— Thomas Carlyle

158. “We call it a Society; and go about professing openly the totalest separation, isolation. Our life is not a mutual helpfulness; but rather, cloaked under due laws-of-war, named fair competition and so forth, it is a mutual hostility.”

— Thomas Carlyle

159. “Weak eyes are fondest of glittering objects.”

— Thomas Carlyle

160. “Literature is the thought of thinking souls.”

— Thomas Carlyle

161. “A person with half volition goes backwards and forwards, but makes no progress on even the smoothest of roads.”

— Thomas Carlyle

162. “Every day that is born into the world comes like a burst of music and rings the whole day through, and you make of it a dance, a dirge, or a life march, as you will.”

— Thomas Carlyle

163. “There are good and bad times, but our mood changes more often than our fortune.”

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle

165. “All destruction, by violent revolution or however it be, is but new creation on a wider scale.”

— Thomas Carlyle

166. “Debt is a bottomless sea.”

— Thomas Carlyle

167. “Success in life, in anything, depends upon the number of persons that one can make himself agreeable to.”

— Thomas Carlyle

168. “Coining “Dismal Science” as a nickname for Political Economy.”

— Thomas Carlyle

169. “We have profoundly forgotten everywhere that Cash-payment is not the sole relation of human beings.”

— Thomas Carlyle

170. “Is man’s civilization only a wrappage, through which the savage nature of him can still burst, infernal as ever?”

— Thomas Carlyle

171. “Of all your troubles, great and small, the greatest are the ones that don’t happen at all.”

— Thomas Carlyle

172. “In the huge mass of evil as it rolls and swells, there is ever some good working toward deliverance and triumph.”

— Thomas Carlyle

173. “Old age is not a matter for sorrow. It is matter for thanks if we have left our work done behind us.”

— Thomas Carlyle

174. “Oh, give us the man who sings at his work.”

— Thomas Carlyle

175. “All evil is like a nightmare; the instant you stir under it, the evil is gone.”

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle

177. “Be a pattern to others, and then all will go well; for as a whole city is affected by the licentious passions and vices of great men, so it is likewise reformed by their moderation.”

— Thomas Carlyle

178. “All human souls, never so bedarkened, love light; light once kindled spreads till all is luminous.”

— Thomas Carlyle

179. “The merit of originality is not novelty; it is sincerity.”

— Thomas Carlyle

180. “Metaphysics is the attempt of the mind to rise above the mind.”

— Thomas Carlyle

181. “Ceea ce devenim depinde in mare masura de ce citim.”

— Thomas Carlyle

182. “The deadliest sin were the consciousness of no sin.”

— Thomas Carlyle

183. “No man is born without ambitious worldly desires.”

— Thomas Carlyle

184. “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.”

— Thomas Carlyle

185. “Love is ever the beginning of knowledge as fire is of light.”

— Thomas Carlyle

186. “Speech that leads not to action, still more that hinders it, is a nuisance on the earth.”

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle

188. “No nobler feeling than this, of admiration for one higher than himself, dwells in the breast of man. It is to this hour, and at all hours, the vivifying influence in man’s life.”

— Thomas Carlyle

189. “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.”

— Thomas Carlyle

190. “The deepest depth of vulgarism is that of setting up money as the ark of the covenant.”

— Thomas Carlyle

191. “The true eye for talent presupposes the true reverence for it.”

— Thomas Carlyle

192. “Life is a series of lessons that have to be understood.”

— Thomas Carlyle

193. “One must verify or expel his doubts, and convert them into the certainty of Yes or NO.”

— Thomas Carlyle

194. “Do nothing, only keep agitating, debating; and things will destroy themselves.”

— Thomas Carlyle

195. “Unity, agreement, is always silent or soft-voiced; it is only discord that loudly proclaims itself.”

— Thomas Carlyle

196. “Look to be treated by others as you have treated others.”

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle

198. “The eye sees what it brings the power to see.”

— Thomas Carlyle

199. “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.”

— Thomas Carlyle

200. “No sadder proof can be given by a man of his own littleness than disbelief in great men.”

— Thomas Carlyle