Thomas Carlyle Quotes
Page 7 of 10

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

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle

304. “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

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

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle

309. “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

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

— Thomas Carlyle

311. “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

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

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle

316. “Love not Pleasure; love God.”

— Thomas Carlyle

317. “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

318. “A noble book! all men’s book!”

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle

321. “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

322. “The mathematics of high achievement.”

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle

324. “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

325. “The thing is not only to avoid error, but to attain immense masses of truth.”

— Thomas Carlyle

326. “Friend, hast thou considered the “rugged, all-nourishing earth,” as Sophocles well names her; how she feeds the sparrow on the housetop, much more her darling man?”

— Thomas Carlyle

327. “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

328. “Rich as we are in biography, a well-written life is almost as rare as a well-spent one; and there are certainly many more men whose history deserves to be recorded than persons willing and able to record it.”

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— 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. “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

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

— Thomas Carlyle

333. “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

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

— Thomas Carlyle

335. “The essence of humor is sensibility; warm, tender fellow-feeling with all forms of existence.”

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle

338. “We call that fire of the black thunder-cloud “electricity,” and lecture learnedly about it, and grind the like of it out of glass and silk: but what is it? What made it? Whence comes it? Whither goes it?”

— Thomas Carlyle

339. “Cash-payment never was, or could except for a few years be, the union-bond of man to man. Cash never yet paid one man fully his deserts to another; nor could it, nor can it, now or henceforth to the end of the world.”

— Thomas Carlyle

340. “Conclusive facts are inseparable from inconclusive except by a head that already understands and knows.”

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle

342. “Virtue is like health: the harmony of the whole man.”

— Thomas Carlyle

343. “The steam-engine I call fire-demon and great; but it is nothing to the invention of fire.”

— Thomas Carlyle

344. “The highest ensign that men ever met and embraced under, the Cross itself, had no meaning save an accidental extrinsic one.”

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle

347. “No violent extreme endures.”

— Thomas Carlyle

348. “A pygmy standing on the outward crust of this small planet, his far-reaching spirit stretches outward to the infinite, and there alone finds rest.”

— Thomas Carlyle

349. “We arc the miracle of miracles, the great inscrutable mystery of God.”

— Thomas Carlyle

350. “The best effect of any book is that it excites the reader to self activity.”

— Thomas Carlyle