Top 500 Thomas Carlyle Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “The suffering man ought really to consume his own smoke; there is no good in emitting smoke till you have made it into fire.”

— Thomas Carlyle

202. “The real use of gunpowder is to make all men tall.”

— Thomas Carlyle

203. “Necessity dispenseth with decorum.”

— Thomas Carlyle

204. “With stupidity and sound digestion, man may front much.”

— Thomas Carlyle

205. “Labor, wide as the earth, has its summit in heaven.”

— Thomas Carlyle

206. “A man perfects himself by working. Foul jungles are cleared away, fair seed-fields rise instead, and stately cities; and with the man himself first ceases to be a jungle, and foul unwholesome desert thereby. The man is now a man.”

— Thomas Carlyle

207. “All work, even cotton-spinning, is noble; work is alone noble.”

— Thomas Carlyle

208. “Heroism is the divine relation which, in all times, unites a great man to other men.”

— Thomas Carlyle

209. “True friends, like ivy and the wall Both stand together, and together fall.”

— Thomas Carlyle

210. “He who could foresee affairs three days in advance would be rich for thousands of years.”

— Thomas Carlyle

211. “I call the book of Job, apart from all theories about it, one of the grandest things ever written with the pen.”

— Thomas Carlyle

212. “Universal history, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here.”

— Thomas Carlyle

213. “The great silent man! Looking round on the noisy inanity of the world, – words with little meaning, actions with little worth, – one loves to reflect on the great Empire of Silence.”

— Thomas Carlyle

214. “Enjoying things which are pleasant; that is not the evil; it is the reducing of our moral self to slavery by them that is.”

— Thomas Carlyle

215. “Labor is life: from the inmost heart of the worker rises his God-given force, the sacred celestial life-essence breathed into him by Almighty God!”

— Thomas Carlyle

216. “Work earnestly at anything, you will by degrees learn to work at all things.”

— Thomas Carlyle

217. “That monstrous tuberosity of civilised life, the capital of England.”

— Thomas Carlyle

218. “So here hath been dawning Another blue day; Think, wilt thou let it Slip useless away? Out of eternity This new day is born, Into eternity At night will return.”

— Thomas Carlyle

219. “Man is, and was always, a block-head and dullard; much readier to feel and digest, than to think and consider.”

— Thomas Carlyle

220. “The healthy know not of their health, but only the sick: this is the physician’s aphorism, and applicable in a far wider sense than he gives it.”

— Thomas Carlyle

221. “You can make even a parrot into a learned political economist – all he must learn are the two words “supply” and “demand.””

— Thomas Carlyle

222. “In idleness there is a perpetual despair.”

— Thomas Carlyle

223. “In private life I never knew anyone interfere with other people’s disputes but he heartily repented of it.”

— Thomas Carlyle

224. “Men are grown mechanical in head and in the heart, as well as in the hand. They have lost faith in individual endeavour, and in natural force of any kind.”

— Thomas Carlyle

225. “It is through symbols that man consciously or unconsciously lives, works and has his being.”

— Thomas Carlyle

226. “Leaders: Captains of industry.”

— Thomas Carlyle

227. “Democracy will prevail when men believe the vote of Judas as good as that of Jesus Christ.”

— Thomas Carlyle

228. “Shakespeare says, we are creatures that look before and after; the more surprising that we do not look around a little, and see what is passing under our very eyes.”

— Thomas Carlyle

229. “The work an unknown good man has done is like a vein of water flowing hidden underground, secretly making the ground green.”

— Thomas Carlyle

230. “The greatest mistake is to imagine that we never err.”

— Thomas Carlyle

231. “Popular opinion is the greatest lie in the world.”

— Thomas Carlyle

232. “Everywhere in life, the true question is not what we gain, but what we do.”

— Thomas Carlyle

233. “Why did not somebody teach me the constellations, and make me at home in the starry heavens, which are always overhead, and which I don’t half know to this day?”

— Thomas Carlyle

234. “Burke said there were Three Estates in Parliament; but, in the Reporter’s gallery yonder, there sat a fourth estate more important far than they all.”

— Thomas Carlyle

235. “There are depths in man that go to the lowest hell, and heights that reach the highest heaven, for are not both heaven and hell made out of him, everlasting miracle and mystery that he is.”

— Thomas Carlyle

236. “Silence is the eternal duty of man.”

— Thomas Carlyle

237. “There is but one temple in this Universe: The Body. We speak to God whenever we lay our hands upon it.”

— Thomas Carlyle

238. “The Christian must be consumed by the conviction of the infinite beauty of holiness and the infinite damnability of sin.”

— Thomas Carlyle

239. “Laissez-faire, supply and demand-one begins to be weary of all that. Leave all to egotism, to ravenous greed of money, of pleasure, of applause-it is the gospel of despair.”

— Thomas Carlyle

240. “He who first shortened the labor of Copyists by device of Movable Types was disbanding hired armies and cashiering most Kings and Senates, and creating a whole new Democratic world: he had invented the Art of printing.”

— Thomas Carlyle

241. “To the vulgar eye, few things are wonderful that are not distant.”

— Thomas Carlyle

242. “Trust not the heart of that man for whom old clothes are not venerable.”

— Thomas Carlyle

243. “Hero-worship exists, has existed, and will forever exist, universally, among mankind.”

— Thomas Carlyle

244. “The situation that has not its duty, its ideal, was never yet occupied by man. Yes, here, in this poor, miserable, hampered, despicable actual, wherein thou even now standest, here or nowhere is thy ideal; work it out therefrom, and, working, believe, live, be free. Fool! the ideal is in thyself.”

— Thomas Carlyle

245. “My whinstone house my castle is, I have my own four walls.”

— Thomas Carlyle

246. “The eye of the intellect “sees in all objects what it brought with it the means of seeing.””

— Thomas Carlyle

247. “The age of miracles is forever here.”

— Thomas Carlyle

248. “Laughter is the cipher key wherewith we decipher the whole man.”

— Thomas Carlyle

249. “History, as it lies at the root of all science, is also the first distinct product of man’s spiritual nature, his earliest expression of what may be called thought.”

— Thomas Carlyle

250. “Let one who wants to move and convince others, first be convinced and moved themselves. If a person speaks with genuine earnestness the thoughts, the emotion and the actual condition of their own heart, others will listen because we all are knit together by the tie of sympathy.”

— Thomas Carlyle