Top 500 Thomas Carlyle Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “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

352. “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

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

— Thomas Carlyle

354. “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

355. “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

356. “Fancy that thou deservest to be hangedthou wilt feel it happiness to be only shot: fancy that thou deservest to be hanged ina hair halter, it will be a luxury to die in hemp.”

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle

359. “Science has done much for us; but it is a poor science that would hide from us the great deep sacred infinitude of Nescience, on which all science swims as a mere superficial film.”

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle

363. “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

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

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle

366. “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

367. “Speak not at all, in any wise, till you have somewhat to speak; care not for the reward of your speaking, but simply and with undivided mind for the truth of your speaking.”

— Thomas Carlyle

368. “Infinite is the help man can yield to man.”

— Thomas Carlyle

369. “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

370. “The mathematics of high achievement.”

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle

372. “The word of Mohammad is a voice direct from nature’s own heart – all else is wind in comparison.”

— Thomas Carlyle

373. “If you are ever in doubt as to whether to kiss a pretty girl, always give her the benefit of the doubt.”

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle

375. “No violent extreme endures.”

— Thomas Carlyle

376. “A man should be encouraged to do what the Maker of him has intended by the making of him, according as the gifts have been bestowed on him for that purpose.”

— Thomas Carlyle

377. “No age seemed the age of romance to itself.”

— Thomas Carlyle

378. “To be true is manly, chivalrous, Christian; to be false is mean, cowardly, devilish.”

— Thomas Carlyle

379. “It is a vain hope to make people happy by politics.”

— Thomas Carlyle

380. “Good Christian people, here lies for you an inestimable loan; take all heed thereof, in all carefulness, employ it: with high recompense, or else with heavy penalty, will it one day be required back.”

— Thomas Carlyle

381. “Let him who wants to move and convince others, be first moved and convinced himself.”

— Thomas Carlyle

382. “If what you have done is unjust, you have not succeeded.”

— Thomas Carlyle

383. “Armed Soldier, terrible as Death, relentless as Doom; doing God’s judgement on the Enemies of God. It is a phenomenon not of joyful nature; no, but of awful, to be looked at with pious terror and awe.”

— Thomas Carlyle

384. “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

385. “Not only was Thebes built by the music of an Orpheus; but without the music of some inspired Orpheus was no city ever built, no work that man glories in ever done.”

— Thomas Carlyle

386. “The wise man is but a clever infant, spelling letters from a hieroglyphical prophetic book, the lexicon of which lies in eternity.”

— Thomas Carlyle

387. “The glory of a workman, still more of a master workman, that he does his work well, ought to be his most precious possession; like the honor of a soldier, dearer to him than life.”

— Thomas Carlyle

388. “Habit and imitation – there is nothing more perennial in us than these two. They are the source of all working, and all apprenticeship, of all practice, and all learning, in this world.”

— Thomas Carlyle

389. “They wrong man greatly who say he is to be seduced by ease. Difficulty, abnegation, martyrdom, death are the allurements that act on the heart of man.”

— Thomas Carlyle

390. “We have chosen Mahomet not as the most eminent Prophet; but as the one we are freest to speak of. He is by no means the truest of Prophets; but I do esteem him a true one.”

— Thomas Carlyle

391. “Piety does not mean that a man should make a sour face about things, and refuse to enjoy in moderation what his Maker has given.”

— Thomas Carlyle

392. “Biography is the most universally pleasant and profitable of all reading.”

— Thomas Carlyle

393. “I had a lifelong quarrel with God, but in the end we made up.”

— Thomas Carlyle

394. “Insurrection, never so necessary, is a most sad necessity; and governors who wait for that to instruct them are surely getting into the fatalest course.”

— Thomas Carlyle

395. “Man always worships something; always he sees the Infinite shadowed forth in something finite; and indeed can and must so see it in any finite thing, once tempt him well to fix his eyes thereon.”

— Thomas Carlyle

396. “The barrenest of all mortals is the sentimentalist.”

— Thomas Carlyle

397. “Of all God’s creatures, Man alone is poor.”

— Thomas Carlyle

398. “For all right judgment of any man or things it is useful, nay, essential, to see his good qualities before pronouncing on his bad.”

— Thomas Carlyle

399. “Histories are a kind of distilled newspapers.”

— Thomas Carlyle

400. “There is endless merit in a man’s knowing when to have done.”

— Thomas Carlyle