Top 500 Thomas Carlyle Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “Success in life, in anything, depends upon the number of persons that one can make himself agreeable to.”

— Thomas Carlyle

302. “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

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

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle

305. “Man is a tool-using animal.”

— Thomas Carlyle

306. “Government is emphatically a machine: to the discontented a taxing machine, to the contented a machine for securing property.”

— Thomas Carlyle

307. “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

308. “The three great elements of modern civilization, Gun powder, Printing, and the Protestant religion.”

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle

310. “A false man found a religion? Why, a false man cannot build a brick house!”

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle

313. “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

314. “Prayer is and remains always a native and deepest impulse of the soul of man.”

— Thomas Carlyle

315. “He that can work is born to be king of something.”

— Thomas Carlyle

316. “The fearful unbelief is unbelief in yourself.”

— Thomas Carlyle

317. “It is not honest inquiry that makes anarchy; but it is error, insincerity, half belief and untruth that make it.”

— Thomas Carlyle

318. “The infinite, absolute character of Virtue has passed into a finite, conditional one; it is no longer a worship of the Beautiful and Good; but a calculation of the Profitable.”

— Thomas Carlyle

319. “Faith is loyalty to some inspired teacher, some spiritual hero.”

— Thomas Carlyle

320. “It is not a lucky word, this name impossible; no good comes of those who have it so often in their mouths.”

— Thomas Carlyle

321. “A Fourth Estate, of Able Editors, springs up.”

— Thomas Carlyle

322. “Providence has given to the French the empire of the land, to the English that of the sea, to the Germans that of – the air!”

— Thomas Carlyle

323. “No good book or good thing of any kind shows it best face at first. No the most common quality of in a true work of art that has excellence and depth, is that at first sight it produces a certain disappointment.”

— Thomas Carlyle

324. “Egotism is the source and summary of all faults and miseries.”

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle

326. “Oblivion is the dark page, whereon Memory writes her light-beam characters, and makes them legible; were it all light, nothing could be read there, any more than if it were all darkness.”

— Thomas Carlyle

327. “War is a quarrel between two thieves too cowardly to fight their own battle.”

— Thomas Carlyle

328. “The depth of our despair measures what capability and height of claim we have to hope.”

— Thomas Carlyle

329. “Love is not altogether a delirium, yet it has many points in common therewith.”

— Thomas Carlyle

330. “If Jesus Christ were to come today, people would not even crucify him. They would ask him to dinner, and hear what he had to say, and make fun of it.”

— Thomas Carlyle

331. “Statistics is a science which ought to be honourable, the basis of many most important sciences; but it is not to be carried on by steam, this science, any more than others are; a wise head is requisite for carrying it on.”

— Thomas Carlyle

332. “Fame, we may understand, is no sure test of merit, but only a probability of such; it is an accident, not a property of man.”

— Thomas Carlyle

333. “Without oblivion, there is no remembrance possible. When both oblivion and memory are wise, when the general soul of man is clear, melodious, true, there may come a modern Iliad as memorial of the Past.”

— Thomas Carlyle

334. “The world is an old woman, and mistakes any gilt farthing for a gold coin; whereby being often cheated, she will thenceforth trust nothing but the common copper.”

— Thomas Carlyle

335. “In a symbol there is concealment and yet revelation: here therefore, by Silence and by Speech acting together, comes a double significance.”

— Thomas Carlyle

336. “The mystery of a person, indeed, is ever divine to him that has a sense for the godlike.”

— Thomas Carlyle

337. “It is a strange trade that of advocacy. Your intellect, your highest heavenly gift is hung up in the shop window like a loaded pistol for sale.”

— Thomas Carlyle

338. “Lives the man that can figure a naked Duke of Windlestraw addressing a naked House of Lords?”

— Thomas Carlyle

339. “The modern majesty consists in work. What a man can do is his greatest ornament, and he always consults his dignity by doing it.”

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle

341. “Naps are a way of traveling painlessly through time into the future.”

— Thomas Carlyle

342. “Violence does even justice unjustly.”

— Thomas Carlyle

343. “A noble book! all men’s book!”

— Thomas Carlyle

344. “He that has a secret to hide should not only hide it but hide that he has to hide it.”

— Thomas Carlyle

345. “To say that we have a clear conscience is to utter a solecism; had we never sinned we should have had no conscience. Were defeat unknown, neither would victory be celebrated by songs of triumph.”

— Thomas Carlyle

346. “What is nature? Art thou not the living government of God? O Heaven, is it in very deed He then that ever speaks through thee, that lives and loves in thee, that lives and loves in me?”

— Thomas Carlyle

347. “All greatness is unconscious, or it is little and naught.”

— Thomas Carlyle

348. “The dust of controversy is merely the falsehood flying off.”

— Thomas Carlyle

349. “War is a quarrel between two thieves too cowardly to fight their own battle; therefore they take boys from one village and another village, stick them into uniforms, equip them with guns, and let them loose like wild beasts against one other.”

— Thomas Carlyle

350. “France was long a despotism tempered by epigrams.”

— Thomas Carlyle