Top 500 Thomas Carlyle Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “Love not Pleasure; love God.”

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle

353. “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

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

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle

356. “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

357. “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

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

— Thomas Carlyle

359. “The mathematics of high achievement.”

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle

364. “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

365. “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

366. “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

367. “Of all the things which man can do or make here below, by far the most momentous, wonderful, and worthy are the things we call books.”

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle

369. “No violent extreme endures.”

— Thomas Carlyle

370. “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

371. “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

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

— Thomas Carlyle

373. “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

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

— Thomas Carlyle

375. “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

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

— Thomas Carlyle

377. “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

378. “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

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

— Thomas Carlyle

380. “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

381. “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

382. “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

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

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle

386. “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

387. “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

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

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle

391. “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

392. “The coldest word was once a glowing new metaphor.”

— Thomas Carlyle

393. “For man is not the creature and product of Mechanism; but, in a far truer sense, its creator and producer.”

— Thomas Carlyle

394. “Caution is the lower story of prudence.”

— Thomas Carlyle

395. “The hell of these days is the fear of not getting along, especially of not making money.”

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle

397. “Just in ratio as knowledge increases, faith diminishes.”

— Thomas Carlyle

398. “All deep things are song. It seems somehow the very central essence of us, song; as if all the rest were but wrappages and hulls!”

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle

400. “Misery which, through long ages, had no spokesman, no helper, will now be its own helper and speak for itself.”

— Thomas Carlyle