Top 500 Thomas Carlyle Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “What is all Knowledge too but recorded Experience, and a product of History; of which, therefore, Reasoning and Belief, no less than Action and Passion, are essential materials?”

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle

403. “The choking, sweltering, deadly, and killing rule of no rule; the consecration of cupidity and braying of folly, and dim stupidity and baseness, in most of the affairs of men. Slopshirts attainable three-halfpence cheaper by the ruin of living bodies and immortal souls.”

— Thomas Carlyle

404. “Rare benevolence, the minister of God.”

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle

407. “Show me the person you honor, for I know better by that the kind of person you are. For you show me what your idea of humanity is.”

— Thomas Carlyle

408. “A lie should be trampled on and extinguished wherever found. I am for fumigating the atmosphere when I suspect that falsehood, like pestilence, breathes around me.”

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle

410. “It is the feeling of injustice that is insupportable to all men.”

— Thomas Carlyle

411. “A man cannot make a pair of shoes rightly unless he do it in a devout manner.”

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle

414. “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

415. “Man is emphatically a proselytizing creature.”

— Thomas Carlyle

416. “The English are a dumb people. They can do great acts, but not describe them.”

— Thomas Carlyle

417. “Happy season of childhood! Kind Nature, that art to all a bountiful mother; that visitest the poor man’s hut With auroral radiance; and for thy nursling hast provided a soft swathing of love and infinite hope wherein he waxes and slumbers, danced round by sweetest dreams!”

— Thomas Carlyle

418. “The scandalous bronze-lacquer age of hungry animalisms, spiritual impotences, and mendacities, will have to run its course, till the pit follow it.”

— Thomas Carlyle

419. “Friendship, in the old heroic sense of that term, no longer exists. It is in reality no longer expected or recognized as a virtue among men.”

— Thomas Carlyle

420. “A word spoken in season, at the right moment; is the mother of ages.”

— Thomas Carlyle

421. “A battle is a terrible conjugation of the verb to kill: I kill, thou killest, he kills, we kill, they kill, all kill.”

— Thomas Carlyle

422. “To believe practically that the poor and luckless are here only as a nusiance to be abraded and abated, and in some permissable manner made away with, and swept out of sight, is not an amiable faith.”

— Thomas Carlyle

423. “No conquest can ever become permanent which does not show itself beneficial to the conquered as well as to the conquerors.”

— Thomas Carlyle

424. “The first duty of man is that of subduing fear.”

— Thomas Carlyle

425. “To us also, through every star, through every blade of grass, is not God made visible if we will open our minds and our eyes.”

— Thomas Carlyle

426. “Imperfection clings to a person, and if they wait till they are brushed off entirely, they would spin for ever on their axis, advancing nowhere.”

— Thomas Carlyle

427. “Freedom is the one purport, wisely aimed at, or unwisely, of all man’s struggles, toilings and sufferings, in this earth.”

— Thomas Carlyle

428. “O thou who art able to write a book which once in the two centuries or oftener there is a man gifted to do, envy not him whom they name city-builder, and inexpressibly pity him whom they name conqueror or city-burner.”

— Thomas Carlyle

429. “Painful for a person is rebellious independence, only in loving companionship with his associates does a person feel safe: Only in reverently bowing down before the higher does a person feel exalted.”

— Thomas Carlyle

430. “Wealth has more and more increased, and at the same time gathered itself more and more into masses, strangely altering the old relations, and increasing the distance between the rich and the poor.”

— Thomas Carlyle

431. “Hunger whets everything, especially Suspicion and Indignation.”

— Thomas Carlyle

432. “It is part of my creed that the only poetry is history, could we tell it right.”

— Thomas Carlyle

433. “Economics is not a gay science. It is a dreary, desolate, and indeed quite abject and distressing one; what we might call, by way of eminence, the dismal science.”

— Thomas Carlyle

434. “What is all knowledge except recorded experience, and a product of history?”

— Thomas Carlyle

435. “The authentic insight and experience of any human soul, were it but insight and experience in hewing of wood and drawing of water, is real knowledge, a real possession and acquirement.”

— Thomas Carlyle

436. “At worst, is not this an unjust world, full of nothing but beasts of prey, four-footed or two-footed?”

— Thomas Carlyle

437. “Not one false man but doth uncountable evil.”

— Thomas Carlyle

438. “He that has done nothing has known nothing.”

— Thomas Carlyle

439. “Authors are the vanguard in the march of mind, the intellectual backwoodsmen, reclaiming from the idle wilderness new territories for the thought and activity of their happier brethren.”

— Thomas Carlyle

440. “Money will buy money’s worth; but the thing men call fame, what is it?”

— Thomas Carlyle

441. “Custom doth make dotards of us all.”

— Thomas Carlyle

442. “A collection of books is the best of all universities.”

— Thomas Carlyle

443. “Every human being has a right to hear what other wise human beings have spoken to him. It is one of the Rights of Men; a very cruel injustice if you deny it to a man!”

— Thomas Carlyle

444. “To each is given a certain inward talent, a certain outward environment or fortune; to each by wisest combination of these two, a certain maximum capacity.”

— Thomas Carlyle

445. “Not on morality, but on cookery, let us build our stronghold: there brandishing our frying-pan, as censer, let us offer sweet incense to the Devil, and live at ease on the fat things he has provided for his elect!”

— Thomas Carlyle

446. “Laughter is one of the very privileges of reason, being confined to the human species.”

— Thomas Carlyle

447. “Dishonesty is the raw material not of quacks only, but also in great part dupes.”

— Thomas Carlyle

448. “Genuine Work alone, what thou workest faithfully, that is eternal, as the Almighty Founder and World-Builder himself.”

— Thomas Carlyle

449. “The difference between Socrates and Jesus? The great conscious and the immeasurably great unconscious.”

— Thomas Carlyle

450. “Man’s unhappiness, as I construe, comes of his greatness; it is because there is an Infinite in him, which with all his cunning he cannot quite bury under the Finite.”

— Thomas Carlyle