Thomas Carlyle

All work, even cotton spinning, is noble; work is alone noble ... A life of ease is not for any man, nor for any god.

— Thomas Carlyle

Every noble crown is, and on earth will forever be, a crown of thorns.

— Thomas Carlyle

Blessed is he who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness.

— Thomas Carlyle

He who takes not counsel of the Unseen and Silent, from him will never come real visibility and speech.

— Thomas Carlyle

Captains of Industry.

— Thomas Carlyle

Here numerous persons, with big wigs many of them, and austere aspect, whom I take to be Professors of the Dismal Science, start up in an agitated vehement manner: but the Premier resolutely beckons them down again

— Thomas Carlyle

A Parliament speaking through reporters to Buncombe and the twenty-seven millions, mostly fools.

— Thomas Carlyle

A healthy hatred of scoundrels.

— Thomas Carlyle

Talk never yet could guide any man's or nation's affairs; nor will it yours, except towards the Limbus Patrum, where all talk, except a very select kind of it, lodges at last.

— Thomas Carlyle

Whatsoever is not beaverish seems to go forth in the shape of talk. To such length is human intellect wasted or suppressed in this world!

— Thomas Carlyle

"Genius" (which means transcendent capacity of taking trouble, first of all).

— Thomas Carlyle

Happy the people whose annals are blank in history books!

— Thomas Carlyle

The unspeakable Turk

— Thomas Carlyle

This great maxim of Philosophy he had gathered by the teaching of nature alone: That man was created to work, not to speculate, or feel, or dream.

— Thomas Carlyle

There are depths in man that go to the lowest hell, and heights that reach the highest heaven, for are not both heaven and hell made out of him, everlasting miracle and mystery that he is.

— Thomas Carlyle

A word spoken in season, at the right moment, is the mother of ages.

— Thomas Carlyle

For love is ever the beginning of Knowledge, as fire is of light.

— Thomas Carlyle

There are good and bad times, but our mood changes more often than our fortune.

— Thomas Carlyle

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

If time is precious, no book that will not improve by repeated readings deserves to be read at all.

— Thomas Carlyle

The real use of gunpowder is to make all men tall.

— Thomas Carlyle

Be not a slave of words.

— Thomas Carlyle

In the long-run every Government is the exact symbol of its People, with their wisdom and unwisdom; we have to say, Like People like Government.

— Thomas Carlyle

He who has health, has hope; and he who has hope, has everything.

— Thomas Carlyle

Imagination is a poor matter when it has to part company with understanding.

— Thomas Carlyle

I've got a great ambition to die of exhaustion rather than boredom.

— Thomas Carlyle

He who has health, has hope; and he who has hope, has everything.

— Thomas Carlyle

Imagination is a poor matter when it has to part company with understanding.

— Thomas Carlyle

Every poet... finds himself born in the midst of prose. He has to struggle from the littleness and obstruction of an actual world into the freedom and infinitude of an ideal.

— Thomas Carlyle

The first duty of man is to conquer fear; he must get rid of it, he cannot act till then.

— Thomas Carlyle

The only happiness a brave person ever troubles themselves in asking about, is happiness enough to get their work done.

— Thomas Carlyle

No great man lives in vain. The history of the world is but the biography of great men.

— Thomas Carlyle

The illimitable, silent, never-resting thing called Time, rolling, rushing on, swift, silent, like an all-embracing ocean-tide, on which we and all the Universe swim like exhalations, like apparitions which are, and then are not: this is forever very literally a miracle; a thing to strike us dumb—for we have no word to speak about it.

— Thomas Carlyle

Work alone is noble.

— Thomas Carlyle

There are good and bad times, but our mood changes more often than our fortune.

— Thomas Carlyle

True humor springs not more from the head than from the heart. It is not contempt; its essence is love. It issues not in laughter, but in still smiles, which lie far deeper.

— Thomas Carlyle

Not all his men may sever this,\xa0I have my own four walls.

— Thomas Carlyle

The weakest living creature, by concentrating his powers on a single object, can accomplish something. The strongest, by dispensing his over many, may fail to accomplish anything. The drop, by continually falling, bores its passage through the hardest rock. The hasty torrent rushes over it with hideous uproar, and leaves no trace behind.

— Thomas Carlyle

A well-written Life is almost as rare as a well-spent one.

— Thomas Carlyle

Except by name, Jean Paul Friedrich Richter is little known out of Germany. The only thing connected with him, we think, that has reached this country is his saying,—imported by Madame de Staël, and thankfully pocketed by most newspaper critics, — "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

The great law of culture is: Let each become all that he was created capable of being.

— Thomas Carlyle

Originality is a thing we constantly clamour for, and constantly quarrel with; as if, observes our author himself, any originality but our own could be expected to content us! In fact all strange thing are apt, without fault of theirs, to estrange us at first view, and unhappily scarcely anything is perfectly plain, but what is also perfectly common.

— Thomas Carlyle

"Schiller", first published in Fraser's Magazine (1831).

— Thomas Carlyle

He who would write heroic poems should make his whole life a heroic poem.

— Thomas Carlyle

The three great elements of modern civilization, gunpowder, printing, and the Protestant religion.

— Thomas Carlyle

The fearful unbelief is unbelief in yourself.

— Thomas Carlyle

The work an unknown good man has done is like a vein of water flowing hidden underground, secretly making the ground green.

— Thomas Carlyle

Literary men are...a perpetual priesthood.

— Thomas Carlyle

I came hither [Craigenputtoch] solely with the design to simplify my way of life and to secure the independence through which I could be enabled to remain true to myself.

— Thomas Carlyle

No great man lives in vain. The history of the world is but the biography of great men.

— Thomas Carlyle

In every man's writings, the character of the writer must lie recorded.

— Thomas Carlyle

Clever men are good, but they are not the best.

— Thomas Carlyle

We are firm believers in the maxim that for all right judgment of any man or thing it is useful, nay, essential, to see his good qualities before pronouncing on his bad.

— Thomas Carlyle

A poet without love were a physical and metaphysical impossibility.

— Thomas Carlyle

No sadder proof can be given by a man of his own littleness than disbelief in great men.

— Thomas Carlyle

How does the poet speak to men with power, but by being still more a man than they?

— Thomas Carlyle

His religion at best is an anxious wish, — like that of Rabelais, a great Perhaps.

— Thomas Carlyle

We have oftener than once endeavoured to attach some meaning to that aphorism, vulgarly imputed to Shaftesbury, which however we can find nowhere in his works, that "ridicule is the test of truth."

— Thomas Carlyle

There is endless merit in a man's knowing when to have done.

— Thomas Carlyle

The eye of the intellect "sees in all objects what it brought with it the means of seeing."

— Thomas Carlyle

Love is ever the beginning of Knowledge as fire is of light.

— Thomas Carlyle

A mystic bond of brotherhood makes all men one.

— Thomas Carlyle

Everywhere the human soul stands between a hemisphere of light and another of darkness on the confines of two everlasting hostile empires, — Necessity and Free Will.

— Thomas Carlyle

History is the essence of innumerable biographies.

— Thomas Carlyle

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

The barrenest of all mortals is the sentimentalist.

— Thomas Carlyle

A loving heart is the beginning of all knowledge.

— Thomas Carlyle

Even in the meanest sorts of Labor, the whole soul of a man is composed into a kind of real harmony the instant he sets himself to work.

— Thomas Carlyle

The fine arts once divorcing themselves from truth are quite certain to fall mad, if they do not die.

— Thomas Carlyle

Music is well said to be the speech of angels.

— Thomas Carlyle

No solitary miscreant, scarcely any solitary maniac, would venture on such actions and imaginations, as large communities of sane men have, in such circumstances, entertained as sound wisdom.

— Thomas Carlyle

Not the external and physical alone is now managed by machinery, but the internal and spiritual also. Here too nothing follows its spontaneous course, nothing is left to be accomplished by old natural methods. Everything has its cunningly devised implements, its preestablished apparatus; it is not done by hand, but by machinery.

— Thomas Carlyle

Instruction, that mysterious communing of Wisdom with Ignorance, is no longer an indefinable tentative process, requiring a study of individual aptitudes, and a perpetual variation of means and methods, to attain the same end; but a secure, universal, straightforward business, to be conducted in the gross, by proper mechanism.

— Thomas Carlyle

Has any man, or any society of men, a truth to speak, a piece of spiritual work to do; they can nowise proceed at once and with the mere natural organs, but must first call a public meeting, appoint committees, issue prospectuses, eat a public dinner; in a word, construct or borrow machinery, wherewith to speak it and do it. Without machinery, they were hopeless, helpless.

— Thomas Carlyle

Consider, for example, the state of Science generally, in Europe, at this period. It is admitted, on all sides, that the Metaphysical and Moral Sciences are falling into decay, while the Physical are engrossing, every day, more respect and attention. In most of the European nations there is now no such thing as a Science of Mind; only more or less advancement in the general science, or the special sciences, of matter.

— Thomas Carlyle

We have the greatest admiration for this learned doctor: with what scientific stoicism he walks through the land of wonders, unwondering; like a wise man through some huge, gaudy, imposing Vauxhall, whose fire-works, cascades and symphonies, the vulgar may enjoy and believe in,—but where he finds nothing real but the saltpetre, pasteboard and catgut.

— Thomas Carlyle

Civil government does by its nature include much that is mechanical, and must be treated accordingly. We term it indeed, in ordinary language, the Machine of Society, and talk of it as the grand working wheel from which all private machines must derive, or to which they must adapt, their movements.

— Thomas Carlyle

It is no longer the moral, religious, spiritual condition of the people that is our concern, but their physical, practical, economical condition, as regulated by public laws.

— Thomas Carlyle

Consider the great elements of human enjoyment, the attainments and possessions that exalt man's life to its present height, and see what part of these he owes to institutions, to Mechanism of any kind; and what to the instinctive, unbounded force, which Nature herself lent him.

— Thomas Carlyle

If we read History with any degree of thoughtfulness, we shall find that checks and balances of Profit and Loss have never been the grand agents with men, that they have never been roused into deep, thorough, all-pervading efforts by any computable prospect of Profit and Loss, for any visible, finite object; but always for some invisible and infinite one.

— Thomas Carlyle

Man is not the creature and product of Mechanism; but, in a far truer sense, its creator and producer: it is the noble People that makes the noble Government; rather than conversely.

— Thomas Carlyle

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

Our true Deity is Mechanism. It has subdued external Nature for us, and we think it will do all other things. We are Giants in physical power: in a deeper than metaphorical sense, we are Titans, that strive, by heaping mountain on mountain, to conquer Heaven also.

— Thomas Carlyle

We are no longer instinctively driven to apprehend, and lay to heart, what is Good and Lovely, but rather to inquire, as onlookers, how it is produced, whence it comes, whither it goes. Our favourite Philosophers have no love and no hatred; they stand among us not to do, nor to create anything, but as a sort of Logic mills, to grind out the true causes and effects of all that is done and created.

— Thomas Carlyle

An intellectual dapperling of these times boasts chiefly of his irresistible perspicacity, his “dwelling in the daylight of truth,” and so forth; which, on examination, turns out to be a dwelling in the rush-light of “closet logic,” and a deep unconsciousness that there is any other light to dwell in or any other objects to survey with it.

— Thomas Carlyle

Wonder, indeed, is, on all hands, dying out: it is the sign of uncultivation to wonder.

— Thomas Carlyle

Our “Theories of Taste,” as they are called, wherein the deep, infinite, unspeakable Love of Wisdom and Beauty, which dwells in all men, is “explained,” made mechanically visible, from “Association” and the like, ...

— Thomas Carlyle

The true Church of England, at this moment, lies in the Editors of its Newspapers. These preach to the people daily, weekly; admonishing kings themselves; advising peace or war, with an authority which only the first Reformers, and a long-past class of Popes, were possessed of; inflicting moral censure; imparting moral encouragement, consolation, edification; in all ways diligently “administering the Discipline of the Church.”

— Thomas Carlyle

Our grand business undoubtedly is, not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand.

— Thomas Carlyle

With what scientific stoicism he walks through the land of wonders, unwondering.

— Thomas Carlyle

Speech is human, silence is divine, yet also brutish and dead: therefore we must learn both arts.

— Thomas Carlyle

Our main business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand.

— Thomas Carlyle

It is now almost my sole rule of life to clear myself of cants and formulas, as of poisonous Nessus shirts.

— Thomas Carlyle

The Public is an old woman. Let her maunder and mumble.

— Thomas Carlyle

A loving heart is the beginning of all knowledge.

— Thomas Carlyle

Aesop's Fly, sitting on the axle of the chariot, has been much laughed at for exclaiming: What a dust I do raise!

— Thomas Carlyle

Whoso belongs only to his own age, and reverences only its gilt Popinjays or smoot-smeared Mumbojumbos, must needs die with it.

— Thomas Carlyle

The stupendous Fourth Estate, whose wide world-embracing influences what eye can take in?

— Thomas Carlyle

All work is as seed sown; it grows and spreads, and sows itself anew.

— Thomas Carlyle

The work we desire and prize is not the courage to die decently, but to live manfully.

— Thomas Carlyle

There is no heroic poem in the world but is at bottom a biography, the life of a man; also, it may be said, there is no life of a man, faithfully recorded, but is a heroic poem of its sort, rhymed or unrhymed.

— Thomas Carlyle

A loving heart is the beginning of all knowledge.

— Thomas Carlyle

Under all speech that is good for anything there lies a silence that is better. Silence is deep as Eternity; speech is shallow as Time.

— Thomas Carlyle

No man lives without jostling and being jostled; in all ways he has to elbow himself through the world, giving and receiving offense.

— Thomas Carlyle

Literature is the Thought of thinking Souls.

— Thomas Carlyle

All greatness is unconscious, or it is little and naught.

— Thomas Carlyle

The uttered part of a man's life, let us always repeat, bears to the unuttered, unconscious part a small unknown proportion. He himself never knows it, much less do others.

— Thomas Carlyle

It can be said of him [Scott], when he departed he took a man's life along with him. No sounder piece of British manhood was put together in that eighteenth century of time.

— Thomas Carlyle

Nothing that was worthy in the past departs; no truth or goodness realized by man ever dies, or can die.

— Thomas Carlyle

To the very last, he had a kind of idea; that, namely, of la carrière ouverte aux talents,—the tools to him that can handle them.

— Thomas Carlyle

Blessed is the healthy nature; it is the coherent, sweetly co-operative, not incoherent, self-distracting, self-destructive one!

— Thomas Carlyle

Everywhere in life, the true question is not what we gain, but what we do.

— Thomas Carlyle

The Book had in a high degree excited us to self-activity, which is the best effect of any book.

— Thomas Carlyle

No man who has once heartily and wholly laughed can be altogether irreclaimably bad.

— Thomas Carlyle

He who first shortened the labor of copyists by device of movable types was disbanding hired armies, and cashiering most kings and senates, and creating a whole new democratic world: he had invented the art of printing.

— Thomas Carlyle

Man is a tool-using animal...Without tools he is nothing, with tools he is all.

— Thomas Carlyle

Be not the slave of Words.

— Thomas Carlyle

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

Close thy Byron; open thy Goethe.

— Thomas Carlyle

Wonder is the basis of worship.

— Thomas Carlyle

What you see, yet can not see over, is as good as infinite.

— Thomas Carlyle

Sarcasm I now see to be, in general, the language of the Devil; for which reason I have, long since, as good as renounced it.

— Thomas Carlyle

With stupidity and sound digestion man may front much.

— Thomas Carlyle

Hadst thou not Greek enough to understand thus much: The end of man is an Action, and not a Thought, though it were the noblest.

— Thomas Carlyle

Alas! the fearful Unbelief is unbelief in yourself.

— Thomas Carlyle

Clever men are good, but they are not the best.

— Thomas Carlyle

Great men are the inspired (speaking and acting) texts of that divine Book of Revelations, wherof a chapter is completed from epoch to epoch, and by some named History.

— Thomas Carlyle

Love not Pleasure; love God.

— Thomas Carlyle

As the Swiss inscription says: Sprechen ist silbern, Schweigen ist golden— "Speech is silvern, Silence is golden"; or, as I might rather express it: speech is of time, silence is of eternity.

— Thomas Carlyle

For is not a Symbol ever, to him who has eyes for it, some dimmer or clearer revelation of the God-like?

— Thomas Carlyle

No sadder proof can be given by a man of his own littleness than disbelief in great men.

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle

That there should one Man die ignorant who had capacity for Knowledge, this I call a tragedy.

— Thomas Carlyle

Philosophy complains that Custom has hoodwinked us, from the first; that we do everything by Custom, even Believe by it; that our very Axioms, let us boast of Free-thinking as we may, are oftenest simply such Beliefs as we have never heard questioned. Nay, what is Philosophy throughout but a continual battle against Custom; an ever-renewed effort to transcend the sphere of blind Custom, and so become Transcendental?

— Thomas Carlyle

Innumerable are the illusions and legerdemain-tricks of Custom: but of all these, perhaps the cleverest is her knack of persuading us that the Miraculous, by simple repetition, ceases to be Miraculous.

— Thomas Carlyle

Ever, as before, does Madness remain a mysterious-terrific, altogether infernal boiling-up of the Nether Chaotic Deep, through this fair-painted Vision of Creation, which swims thereon, which we name the Real.

— Thomas Carlyle

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

France was long a despotism tempered by epigrams.

— Thomas Carlyle

No lie you can speak or act but it will come, after longer or shorter circulation, like a Bill drawn on Nature's Reality, and be presented there for payment, — with the answer, No effects.

— Thomas Carlyle

To a shower of gold most things are penetrable.

— Thomas Carlyle

"The people may eat grass": hasty words, which fly abroad irrevocable—and will send back tidings.

— Thomas Carlyle

Not brute force but only persuasion and faith are the kings of this world.

— Thomas Carlyle

A whiff of grapeshot.

— Thomas Carlyle

O poor mortals, how ye make this earth bitter for each other.

— Thomas Carlyle

Where this will end? In the Abyss, one may prophecy; whither all Delusions are, at all moments, travelling; where this Delusion has now arrived. For if there be a Faith, from of old, it is this, as we often repeat, that no Lie can live for ever. The very Truth has to change its vesture, from time to time; and be born again. But all Lies have sentence of death written down against them, and Heaven's Chancery itself; and, slowly or fast, advance incessantly towards their hour.

— Thomas Carlyle

Do nothing, only keep agitating, debating; and things will destroy themselves.

— Thomas Carlyle

Battles, in these ages, are transacted by mechanism; with the slightest possible development of human individuality or spontaneity: men now even die, and kill one another, in an artificial manner.

— Thomas Carlyle

History a distillation of Rumour.

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle

He that has a secret should not only hide it, but hide that he has it to hide.

— Thomas Carlyle

The All of Things is an infinite conjugation of the verb To do.

— Thomas Carlyle

The difference between Orthodoxy or Mydoxy and Heterodoxy or Thy-doxy.

— Thomas Carlyle

So here hath been dawningSlip useless away.

— Thomas Carlyle

Every noble work is at first impossible.

— Thomas Carlyle

He that works and does some Poem, not he that merely says one, is worthy of the name of Poet.

— Thomas Carlyle

A witty statesman said, you might prove anything by figures.

— Thomas Carlyle

Democracy is, by the nature of it, a self-canceling business; and it gives in the long run a net result of zero.

— Thomas Carlyle

O reader, to what shifts is poor Society reduced, struggling to give still some account of herself, in epochs when Cash Payment has become the sole nexus of man to men!

— Thomas Carlyle

Cash Payment the sole nexus; and there are so many things which cash will not pay! Cash is a great miracle; yet it has not all power in Heaven, nor even on Earth. 'Supply and demand' we will honour also; and yet how many 'demands' are there, entirely indispensable, which have to go elsewhere than to the shops, and produce quite other than cash, before they can get their supply? On the whole, what astonishing payments does cash make in this world!

— Thomas Carlyle

No sadder proof can be given by a man of his own littleness than disbelief in great men.

— Thomas Carlyle

The history of the world is but the biography of great men.

— Thomas Carlyle

The greatest of faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none.

— Thomas Carlyle

Mahomet can work no miracles; he often answers impatiently: I can work no miracles. I? "I am a Public Preacher;" appointed to preach this doctrine to all creatures. Yet the world, as we can see, had really from of old been all one great miracle to him. Look over the world, says he; is it not wonderful, the work of Allah; wholly "a sign to you," if your eyes were open!

— Thomas Carlyle

His Religion is not an easy one: with rigorous fasts, lavations, strict complex formulas, prayers five times a day, and abstinence from wine, it did not "succeed by being an easy religion." As if indeed any religion, or cause holding of religion, could succeed by that! It is a calumny on men to say that they are roused to heroic action by ease, hope of pleasure, recompense, — sugar-plums of any kind, in this world or the next! In the meanest mortal there lies something nobler.

— Thomas Carlyle

Enjoying things which are pleasant; that is not the evil: it is the reducing of our moral self to slavery by them that is.

— Thomas Carlyle

We will not praise Mahomet's moral precepts as always of the superfinest sort; yet it can be said that there is always a tendency to good in them; that they are the true dictates of a heart aiming towards what is just and true.

— Thomas Carlyle

Can the man say, Fiat lux, Let there be light; and out of chaos make a world? Precisely as there is light in himself, will he accomplish this.

— Thomas Carlyle

The Age of Miracles is forever here!

— Thomas Carlyle

In books lies the soul of the whole Past Time; the articulate audible voice of the Past, when the body and material substance of it has altogether vanished like a dream.

— Thomas Carlyle

Certainly the Art of Writing is the most miraculous of all things man has devised.

— Thomas Carlyle

All that Mankind has done, thought, gained or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of Books.

— Thomas Carlyle

It depends on what we read, after all manner of Professors have done their best for us.

— Thomas Carlyle

The suffering man ought really 'to consume his own smoke'; there is no good in emitting smoke till you have made it into fire, — which, in the metaphorical sense too, all smoke is capable of becoming!

— Thomas Carlyle

Adversity is sometimes hard upon a man; but for one man who can stand prosperity, there are a hundred that will stand adversity.

— Thomas Carlyle

The true University of these days is a Collection of Books.

— Thomas Carlyle

Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together; that at length they may emerge, full-formed and majestic, into the daylight of Life, which they are thenceforth to rule. Not William the Silent only, but all the considerable men I have known, and the most undiplomatic and unstrategic of these, forbore to babble of what they were creating and projecting. Nay, in thy own mean perplexities, do thou thyself but hold thy tongue for one day: on the morrow, how much clearer are thy purposes and duties; what wreck and rubbish have those mute workmen within thee swept away, when intrusive noises were shut out! Speech is too often not, as the Frenchman defined it, the art of concealing Thought; but of quite stifling and suspending Thought, so that there is none to conceal. Speech too is great, but not the greatest. As the Swiss Inscription says: Sprecfien ist silbern, Schweigen ist golden (Speech is silvern, Silence is golden); or as I might rather express it: Speech is of Time, Silence is of Eternity.

— Thomas Carlyle

One life; a little gleam of Time between two Eternities; no second chance to us for evermore!

— Thomas Carlyle

Burke said there were Three Estates in Parliament; but, in the Reporter's Gallery yonder, there sat a Fourth Estate more important far than they all.

— Thomas Carlyle

Genius is 'the inspired gift of God.' It is the clearer presence of God Most High in a man. Dim, potential in all men; in this man it has become clear, actual.

— Thomas Carlyle

To this man life is already as earnest and awful, and beautiful and terrible, as death.

— Thomas Carlyle

To reconcile Despotism with Freedom:—well, is that such a mystery? Do you not already know the way? It is to make your Despotism just. Rigorous as Destiny; but just too, as Destiny and its Laws. The Laws of God: all men obey these, and have no 'Freedom' at all but in obeying them. The way is already known, part of the way;—and courage and some qualities are needed for walking on it!

— Thomas Carlyle

Humor has justly been regarded as the finest perfection of poetic genius.

— Thomas Carlyle

The Soldier is perhaps one of the most difficult things to realise; but Governments, had they not realised him, could not have existed: accordingly he is here.

— Thomas Carlyle

Unless some Hero-worship, in its new appropriate form, can return, this world does not promise to be very habitable long.

— Thomas Carlyle

Man, little as he may suppose it, is necessitated to obey superiors. He is a social being in virtue of this necessity; nay he could not be gregarious otherwise. He obeys those whom he esteems better than himself, wiser, braver; and will forever obey such; and even be ready and delighted to do it.

— Thomas Carlyle

Democracy, which means despair of finding any Heroes to govern you, and contented putting up with the want of them,—alas, thou too, mein Lieber, seest well how close it is of kin to Atheism, and other sad Isms: he who discovers no God whatever, how shall he discover Heroes, the visible Temples of God?

— Thomas Carlyle

The latest Gospel in this world is, Know thy work and do it. 'Know thyself:' long enough has that poor 'self' of thine tormented thee; thou wilt never get to 'know' it, I believe! Think it not thy business, this of knowing thyself; thou art an unknowable individual: know what thou canst work at; and work at it, like a Hercules! That will be thy better plan.

— Thomas Carlyle

Money is miraculous. What miraculous facilities has it yielded, will it yield us; but also what never-imagined confusions, obscurations has it brought in; down almost to total extinction of the moral-sense in large masses of mankind!

— Thomas Carlyle

No great man lives in vain. The history of the world is but the biography of great men.

— Thomas Carlyle

And wonderful it is to see how the Ideal or Soul, place it in what ugliest Body you may, will irradiate said Body with its own nobleness; will gradually, incessantly, mould, modify, new-form or reform said ugliest Body, and make it at last beautiful, and to a certain degree divine!

— Thomas Carlyle

The inventive genius of great England will not forever sit patient with mere wheels and pinions, bobbins, straps and billy-rollers whirring in the head of it. The inventive genius of England is not a Beaver's, or a Spinner's or Spider's genius: it is a Man's genius, I hope, with a God over him!

— Thomas Carlyle

In brief, all this Mammon- Gospel, of Supply-and-demand, Competition, Laissez-faire, and Devil take the hindmost, begins to be one of the shabbiest Gospels ever preached on Earth; or altogether the shabbiest.

— Thomas Carlyle

In a valiant suffering for others, not in a slothful making others suffer for us, did nobleness ever lie.

— Thomas Carlyle

The spoken Word, the written Poem, is said to be an epitome of the man; how much more the done Work. Whatsoever of morality and of intelligence; what of patience, perseverance, faithfulness, of method, insight, ingenuity, energy; in a word, whatsoever of Strength the man had in him will lie written in the Work he does. To work: why, it is to try himself against Nature, and her everlasting unerring Laws; these will tell a true verdict as to the man.

— Thomas Carlyle

"A fair day's wages for a fair day's work": it is as just a demand as governed men ever made of governing. It is the everlasting right of man.

— Thomas Carlyle

Fire is the best of servents; but what a master!

— Thomas Carlyle