Thomas Carlyle Quotes
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251. “A judicious man uses statistics, not to get knowledge, but to save himself from having ignorance foisted upon him.”

— Thomas Carlyle

252. “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

253. “When we can drain the Ocean into mill-ponds, and bottle up the Force of Gravity, to be sold by retail, in gas jars; then may we hope to comprehend the infinitudes of man’s soul under formulas of Profit and Loss; and rule over this too, as over a patent engine, by checks, and valves, and balances.”

— Thomas Carlyle

254. “There needs not a great soul to make a hero; there needs a god-created soul which will be true to its origin; that will be a great soul!”

— Thomas Carlyle

255. “Self-contemplation is infallibly the symptom of disease.”

— Thomas Carlyle

256. “Youth is to all the glad season of life; but often only by what it hopes, not by what it attains, or what it escapes.”

— Thomas Carlyle

257. “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

258. “Of a truth, men are mystically united: a mystic bond of brotherhood makes all men one.”

— Thomas Carlyle

259. “The all importance of clothes has sprung up in the intellect of the dandy without effort, like an instinct of genius; he is inspired with clothes, a poet of clothes.”

— Thomas Carlyle

260. “The All of Things is an infinite conjugation of the verb To do .”

— Thomas Carlyle

261. “The beginning of all wisdom is to look fixedly on clothes, or even with armed eyesight, till they become transparent.”

— Thomas Carlyle

262. “In books lies the soul fo the whole past time.”

— Thomas Carlyle

263. “The dead are all holy, even they that were base and wicked while alive. Their baseness and wickedness was not they, was but the heavy and unmanageable environment that lay round them.”

— Thomas Carlyle

264. “Long stormy spring-time, wet contentious April, winter chilling the lap of very May; but at length the season of summer does come.”

— Thomas Carlyle

265. “No amount of ability is of the slightest avail without honor.”

— Thomas Carlyle

266. “Democracy is, by the nature of it, a self-canceling business: and gives in the long run a net result of zero.”

— Thomas Carlyle

267. “There is a majesty and mystery in nature, take her as you will. The essence of poetry comes breathing to a mind that feels from every province of her empire.”

— Thomas Carlyle

268. “What this country needs is a man who knows God other than by heresay.”

— Thomas Carlyle

269. “Statistics, one may hope, will improve gradually, and become good for something. Meanwhile, it is to be feared the crabbed satirist was partly right, as things go: “A judicious man,” says he, “looks at Statistics, not to get knowledge, but to save himself from having ignorance foisted on him.””

— Thomas Carlyle

270. “Midas-eared Mammonism, double-barrelled Dilettantism, and their thousand adjuncts and corollaries, are not the Law by which God Almighty has appointed this His universe to go.”

— Thomas Carlyle

271. “It is great, and there is no other greatness-to make one nook of God’s Creation more fruitful, better, more worthy of God; to make some human heart a little wiser, manlier, happier-more blessed.”

— Thomas Carlyle

272. “The Bible is the truest utterance that ever came by alphabetic letters from the soul of man, through which, as through a window divinely opened, all men can look into the stillness of eternity, and discern in glimpses their far-distant, long-forgotten home.”

— Thomas Carlyle

273. “He that will not work according to his faculty, let him perish according to his necessity: there is no law juster than that.”

— Thomas Carlyle

274. “If Hero means sincere man, why may not every one of us be a Hero?”

— Thomas Carlyle

275. “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

276. “Everywhere the human soul stands between a hemisphere of light and another of darkness; on the confines of the two everlasting empires, necessity and free will.”

— Thomas Carlyle

277. “To a shower of gold most things are penetrable.”

— Thomas Carlyle

278. “Little other than a red tape Talking-machine, and unhappy Bag of Parliamentary Eloquence.”

— Thomas Carlyle

279. “The old cathedrals are good, but the great blue dome that hangs over everything is better.”

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle

281. “If a book comes from the heart, it will contrive to reach other hearts; all art and author-craft are of small amount to that.”

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle

283. “History is a great dust heap.”

— Thomas Carlyle

284. “Nature admits no lie.”

— Thomas Carlyle

285. “The first sin in our universe was Lucifer’s self conceit.”

— Thomas Carlyle

286. “Of our thinking it is but the upper surface that we shape into articulate thought; underneath the region of argument and conscious discourse lies the region of meditation.”

— Thomas Carlyle

287. “It is a mathematical fact that the casting of this pebble from my hand alters the centre of gravity of the universe.”

— Thomas Carlyle

288. “Thought will not work except in silence.”

— Thomas Carlyle

289. “Man is a tool-using animal.”

— Thomas Carlyle

290. “The secret of business is to know something that nobody else knows. The greatest of faults, I should say is to be conscious of none.”

— Thomas Carlyle

291. “Action hangs, as it were, dissolved in speech, in thoughts whereof speech is the shadow; and precipitates itself therefrom. The kind of speech in a man betokens the kind of action you will get from him.”

— Thomas Carlyle

292. “See deep enough, and you see musically.”

— Thomas Carlyle

293. “Wondrous is the strength of cheerfulness, altogether past calculation its powers of endurance.”

— Thomas Carlyle

294. “The greatest security against sin is to be shocked at its presence.”

— Thomas Carlyle

295. “Reform is not pleasant, but grievous; no person can reform themselves without suffering and hard work, how much less a nation.”

— Thomas Carlyle

296. “All reform except a moral one will prove unavailing.”

— Thomas Carlyle

297. “Dinners are defined as ‘the ultimate act of communion;’ men that can have communion in nothing else, can sympathetically eat together, can still rise into some glow of brotherhood over food and wine.”

— Thomas Carlyle

298. “No country can find eternal peace and comfort where the vote of Judas Iscariot is as good as the vote of the Saviour of mankind.”

— Thomas Carlyle

299. “Speech is too often not the art of concealing thought, but of quite stifling and suspending thought, so that there is none to conceal.”

— Thomas Carlyle

300. “They only are wise who know that they know nothing.”

— Thomas Carlyle