Thomas Carlyle

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Thomas Carlyle, Scottish essayist, satirist, and historian

Thomas Carlyle (December 4, 1795 - February 5, 1881) was a Scottish essayist, satirist, and historian, whose work was hugely influential during the Victorian era.

1 Sourced
2 Attributed
3 Quotes about Carlyle
4 External links

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Sourced

It is now almost my sole rule of life to clear myself of cants and formulas, as of poisonous Nessus shirts.
- Letter to His Wife (1835)

The Public is an old woman. Let her maunder and mumble.
- Journal (1835)

Democracy is, by the nature of it, a self-canceling business; and it gives in the long run a net result of zero.
- Chartism, Ch. 6, Laissez-Faire (1839)

So here hath been dawning
Another blue Day:
Think wilt thou let it
Slip useless away.
- Today (1840)

There is endless merit in a man's knowing when to have done.
- Francia (1845)

He that works and does some Poem, not he that merely says one, is worthy of the name of Poet.
- Introduction to Cromwell's Letters and Speeches (1845)

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
- Latter Day Pamphlets, No. 1 (1850)

A Parliament speaking through reporters to Buncombe and the twenty-seven millions, mostly fools.
- Latter Day Pamphlets, No. 6

A healthy hatred of scoundrels.
- Latter Day Pamphlets, No. 12

"Genius" (which means transcendent capacity of taking trouble, first of all).
- Life of Fredrick the Great, Bk. IV, ch. 3 (1858-1865)

Happy the people whose annals are blank in history books!
- Life of Frederick the Great, Bk. XVI, ch. 1

… with what scientific stoicism he walks through the land of wonders, unwondering …
- Signs of the Times (1829)

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Critical and Miscellaneous Essays (1827-1838)

A well-written Life is almost as rare as a well-spent one.
- Richter (1827)

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

The three great elements of modern civilization, gunpowder, printing, and the Protestant religion.
- The State of German Literature (1827)

Literary men are...a perpetual priesthood.
- The State of German Literature

In every man's writings, the character of the writer must lie recorded.
- Goethe (1828)

A poet without love were a physical and metaphysical impossibility.
- Burns (1828)

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.
- Sir Walter Scott (1838)

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

Literature is the Thought of thinking Souls.
- Sir Walter Scott

All greatness is unconscious, or it is little and naught.
- Sir Walter Scott

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.
- Sir Walter Scott

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.
- Sir Walter Scott

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

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On Boswell's Life of Johnson (1832)

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

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

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

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

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

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Sartor Resartus (1833-1834)

No man who has once heartily and wholly laughed can be altogether irreclaimably bad.
- Bk. I, ch. 4

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.
- Bk. I, ch. 5

Man is a tool-using animal...Without tools he is nothing, with tools he is all.
- Bk. I, ch. 5

Be not the slave of Words.
- Bk. I, ch. 8

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.
- Bk. I, ch. 9

Close thy Byron; open thy Goethe.
- Bk. I, ch. 9

Wonder is the basis of worship.
- Bk. I, ch. 10

What you see, yet can not see over, is as good as infinite.
- Bk. II, ch. 1

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.
- Bk. II, ch. 4

With stupidity and sound digestion man may front much.
- Bk. II, ch. 4

Alas! the fearful Unbelief is unbelief in yourself.
- Bk. II, ch. 7

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.
- Bk. II, ch. 8

Love not Pleasure; love God.
- Bk. II, ch. 9

"Do the Duty which lies nearest thee," which thou knowest to be a Duty! Thy second Duty will already have become clearer.
- Bk. II, ch. 9

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.
- Bk. III, ch. 3

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The French Revolution. A History (1837)

France was long a despotism tempered by epigrams.
- Pt. I, Bk. I, ch. 1

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.
- Pt. I, Bk. III, ch. 1

To a shower of gold most things are penetrable.
- Pt. I, Bk. III, ch. 7

"The people may eat grass": hasty words, which fly abroad irrevocable—and will send back tidings.
- Pt. I, Bk. III, ch. 9

A whiff of grapeshot.
- Pt. I, Bk. V, ch. 3

O poor mortals, how ye make this earth bitter for each other.
- Pt. I, Bk. V, ch. 5

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.
- Pt. I, Bk. VII, ch. 4

History a distillation of rumor.
- Pt. I, Bk. VII, ch. 4

The difference between Orthodoxy or Mydoxy and Heterodoxy or Thy-doxy.
- Pt. II< Bk. IV, ch. 2

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Heroes and Hero Worship (1840)

No sadder proof can be given by a man of his own littleness than disbelief in great men.
- The Hero as Divinity

The history of the world is but the biography of great men.
- The Hero as Divinity

We must get rid of fear.
- The Hero as Divinity

A vein of poetry exists in the hearts of all men.
- The Hero as Poet

The Age of Miracles is forever here!
- The Hero as Priest

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.
- The Hero as Man of Letters

All that mankind has done, thought, gained or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books.
- The Hero as Man of Letters

What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books.
- The Hero as Man of Letters

The suffering man ought really to consume his own smoke; there is no good in emitting smoke till you have made it into fire.
- The Hero as Man of Letters

Adversity is sometimes hard upon a man; but for one man who can stand prosperity, there are a hundred that will stand adversity.
- The Hero as Man of Letters

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Past and Present (1843)

"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.
- Bk. I, ch. 3

Fire is the best of servents; but what a master!
- Bk. II, ch. 9

All work, even cotton spinning, is noble; work is alone noble...A life of ease is not for any man, nor for any god.
- Bk. III, ch. 4

Blessed is he who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness.
- Bk. III, ch. 4

Every pitifulest whipster that walks within a skin has had his head filled with the notion that he is, shall be, or by all human and divine laws ought to be, 'happy.' His wishes, the pitifulest whipster's, are to be fulfilled for him; his days, the pitifulest whipster's, are to flow on in an ever-gentle current of enjoyment, impossible even for the gods. The prophets preach to us, Thou shalt be happy; thou shalt love pleasant things, and find them. The people clamor, Why have we not found pleasant things? ...God's Laws are become a Greatest Happiness Principle. There is no religion; there is no God; man has lost his soul.
- Bk. III, ch. 4

Every noble crown is, and on earth will forever be, a crown of thorns.
- Bk. III, ch. 7

He who takes not counsel of the Unseen and Silent, from him will never come real visibility and speech.
- Bk. III, ch. 11

Captains of Industry.
- Bk. IV, ch. 4 (chapter title)

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Attributed

A man lives by believing something; not by debating and arguing about many things.

A person usually has two reasons for doing something: a good reason and the real reason.

A symbol is ever, to him who has eyes for it, some dimmer or clearer revelation of the God-like. Through all there glimmers something of a divine idea; nay, the highest ensign that men ever met and embraced under the cross itself, had no meaning, save an accidental extrinsic one.

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

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

Lord Bacon could as easily have created the planets as he could have written Hamlet.

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

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

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

The all of things is an infinite conjugation of the verb to do.

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

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

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.

No pressure, no diamonds.

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Quotes about Carlyle

It was very good of God to let Carlyle and Mrs Carlyle marry one another and so make only two people miserable instead of four.
- Samuel Butler, letter 21 November 1884

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