Top 500 Thomas Carlyle Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 6 of 10

251. “There is in man a higher than love of happiness; he can do without happiness, and instead thereof find blessedness.”

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle

255. “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

256. “Nothing that was worthy in the past departs; no truth or goodness realized by man ever dies, or can die.”

— Thomas Carlyle

257. “Thirty millions, mostly fools.”

— Thomas Carlyle

258. “A person who is gifted sees the essential point and leaves the rest as surplus.”

— 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. “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

261. “Rightly viewed no meanest object is insignificant; all objects are as windows through which the philosophic eye looks into infinitude itself.”

— Thomas Carlyle

262. “Democracy means despair of finding any heroes to govern you, and contented putting up with the want of them.”

— Thomas Carlyle

263. “Nature admits no lie.”

— Thomas Carlyle

264. “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

265. “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

266. “Stop a moment, cease your work, and look around you.”

— Thomas Carlyle

267. “The only happiness a brave person ever troubles themselves in asking about, is happiness enough to get their work done.”

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle

270. “The person who cannot wonder is but a pair of spectacles behind which there is no eye.”

— Thomas Carlyle

271. “Is not every meanest day the confluence of two eternities?”

— Thomas Carlyle

272. “The graceful minuet-dance of fancy must give place to the toilsome, thorny pilgrimage of understanding. On the transition from the age of romance to that of science.”

— Thomas Carlyle

273. “The latest gospel in this world is, know thy work and do it.”

— Thomas Carlyle

274. “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

275. “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

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

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle

278. “In every phenomenon the beginning remains always the most notable moment.”

— Thomas Carlyle

279. “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

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

— Thomas Carlyle

281. “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

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

— Thomas Carlyle

283. “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

284. “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

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

— Thomas Carlyle

286. “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

287. “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

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

— Thomas Carlyle

289. “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

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

— Thomas Carlyle

291. “Secrecy is the element of all goodness; even virtue, even beauty is mysterious.”

— Thomas Carlyle

292. “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

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

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle

296. “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

297. “Great souls are always loyally submissive, reverent to what is over them: only small mean souls are otherwise.”

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle

300. “History is a great dust heap.”

— Thomas Carlyle