Top 500 Thomas Carlyle Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “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

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

— Thomas Carlyle

303. “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

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

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle

306. “Man is a tool-using animal.”

— Thomas Carlyle

307. “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

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

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle

310. “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

311. “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

312. “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

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

— Thomas Carlyle

314. “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

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

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle

318. “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

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

— Thomas Carlyle

320. “Violence does even justice unjustly.”

— Thomas Carlyle

321. “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

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

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle

325. “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

326. “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

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

— Thomas Carlyle

328. “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

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

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle

331. “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

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

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle

339. “The Persians are called the French of the East; we will call the Arabs Oriental Italians. A gifted noble people; a people of wildstrong feelings, and of iron restraint over these: the characteristic of noblemindedness, of genius.”

— Thomas Carlyle

340. “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

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

— Thomas Carlyle

342. “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

343. “A noble book! all men’s book!”

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle

345. “Love not Pleasure; love God.”

— Thomas Carlyle

346. “A man’s felicity consists not in the outward and visible blessing of fortune, but in the inward and unseen perfections and riches of the mind.”

— Thomas Carlyle

347. “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

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

— Thomas Carlyle

349. “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

350. “What an enormous magnifier is tradition! How a thing grows in the human memory and in the human imagination, when love, worship, and all that lies in the human heart, is there to encourage it.”

— Thomas Carlyle