Thomas Carlyle Quotes
Thomas Carlyle was a Scottish essayist, historian, and philosopher and one of the most prominent Victorian moral voices. After early labors as the introducer of German Romantic and idealist literature to English readers, he produced Sartor Resartus, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, and a vast history of the French Revolution that has remained in print for nearly two centuries. The quotes below are attributed to Thomas Carlyle, organized by topic.
Browse Thomas Carlyle by topic
Thomas Carlyle on Death
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“Speech is human , silence is divine , yet also brutish and dead : therefore we must learn both arts .”
Notebooks (1830). -
“The fine arts once divorcing themselves from truth are quite certain to fall mad, if they do not die.”
Latter-Day Pamphlets(1850) | Latter Day Pamphlet , No. 8. -
“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.”
The French Revolution. A History(1837) | Pt. I, Bk. VII, ch. 4. -
“Nothing that was worthy in the past departs; no truth or goodness realized by man ever dies, or can die.”
Sir Walter Scott(1838)
Thomas Carlyle on Freedom
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“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 .”
Critical and Miscellaneous Essays(1827–1855) | Essays , Goethe's Works.
Thomas Carlyle on God
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“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.”
Sartor Resartus(1833–1834) | Bk. II, ch. 8. -
“The three great elements of modern civilization, gunpowder, printing, and the Protestant religion.”
Critical and Miscellaneous Essays(1827–1855) | The State of German Literature (1827). -
“His religion at best is an anxious wish, — like that of Rabelais , a great Perhaps.”
Critical and Miscellaneous Essays(1827–1855) | Burns ; compare: "The grand perhaps", Browning, Bishop Bloughram's Apology . -
“For is not a Symbol ever, to him who has eyes for it, some dimmer or clearer revelation of the God-like?”
Sartor Resartus(1833–1834) | Bk. III, ch. 3. -
“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.”
Signs of the Times(1829)
Thomas Carlyle on Happiness
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“It is the very joy of man's heart to admire, where he can; nothing so lifts him from all his mean imprisonments, were it but for moments, as true admiration.”
Past and Present(1843)
Thomas Carlyle on Justice
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“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.”
Critical and Miscellaneous Essays(1827–1855) | Goethe . -
“"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.”
Past and Present(1843) | Bk. I, ch. 3.
Thomas Carlyle on Knowledge
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“[I am] fast becoming a patriot of the most decided stamp. Scornfully as I used to speak and think of Scotland in my hours of bitterness and irritation, I never fail to stand up manfully in defence of it thro' thick and thin, whenever a renegade Scot takes upon him to abuse it.”
Letter to Thomas Murray (24 August 1824), quoted in Fred Kaplan, Thomas Carlyle: A Biography (1983), p. 100 -
“Not all his men may sever this, It yields to friends ', not monarchs ', calls; My whinstone house my castle is — I have my own four walls.”
My Own Four Walls” (c. 1825) Froude, James Anthony (1882). Thomas Carlyle: A history of the first forty years of his life, 1795-1835 . p. 189. OCLC 603024 . -
“A man's honest, earnest opinion is the most precious of all he possesses: let him communicate this, if he is to communicate anything. There is, doubtless a time to speak, and a time to keep silence; yet Fontenelle 's celebrated aphorism, I might have my hand full of truth, and would open only my little finger , may be practiced to excess, and the little finger itself kept closed. That reserve, and”
Review of Historic Survey of German Poetry, interspersed with Various Translations by W. Taylor, in The Edinburgh Review Vol. LIII (1831), p. 178. -
“(letter written in the summer of 1833), The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872 . Volume 1 (3rd ed.). Boston: James R. Osgood & Company. 1883. pp. 3–4. (edited by Charles Eliot Norton )”
Two days after Emerson's visit , Carlyle wrote to his mother:— "Three little happinesses have befallen us ... Our third happiness was the arrival of a certain young unknown friend, named Emerson, from Boston, in the United States, who turned aside so far from his British, French, and Italian travels to see me here! He had an introduction from Mill , and a Frenchman ( Baron d'Eichtal 's nephew) who -
“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.”
Sartor Resartus(1833–1834) | Bk. II, ch. 5 The words Carlyle put in italics are a quotation from Book 1 of Aristotle 's Nicomachean Ethics . -
“That there should one Man die ignorant who had capacity for Knowledge, this I call a tragedy.”
Sartor Resartus(1833–1834) | Bk. III, ch. 4. -
“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?”
Carlyle, Essays , On History. Quote reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 419-23.
Thomas Carlyle on Life
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Attributed to Thomas Carlyle:
“No great man lives in vain.”
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Attributed to Thomas Carlyle:
“The tragedy of life is not so much what men suffer, but rather what they miss.”
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“My Own Four Walls” (c. 1825) Froude, James Anthony (1882). Thomas Carlyle: A history of the first forty years of his life, 1795-1835 . p. 189. OCLC 603024 .”
Not all his men may sever this, It yields to friends ', not monarchs ', calls; My whinstone house my castle is — I have my own four walls. -
“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.”
The life of Friedrich Schiller : Comprehending an examination of his works (1825). -
“The life of Friedrich Schiller : Comprehending an examination of his works (1825).”
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. -
“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). -
“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.”
Critical and Miscellaneous Essays(1827–1855) | Letter to Goethe , (1828). -
“All work, even cotton spinning, is noble; work is alone noble ... A life of ease is not for any man, nor for any god.”
Past and Present(1843) | Bk. III, ch. 4. -
“A spontaneous, passionate, yet just, true-meaning man! Full of wild faculty, fire and light; of wild worth, all uncultured; working out his life-task in the depths of the Desert there.”
The Hero as Prophet
Thomas Carlyle on Love
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Attributed to Thomas Carlyle:
“A loving heart is the truest wisdom.”
Thomas Carlyle on Mind
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“The eye of the intellect "sees in all objects what it brought with it the means of seeing."”
Critical and Miscellaneous Essays(1827–1855) | Varnhagen von Ense's Memoirs. -
“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.”
Sartor Resartus(1833–1834) | Bk. II, ch. 4.
Thomas Carlyle on Nature
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“Democracy is, by the nature of it, a self-canceling business; and it gives in the long run a net result of zero.”
Chartism(1840) | Ch. 6, Laissez-Faire .
Thomas Carlyle on Politics
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“The history of the world is but the biography of great men.”
On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History -
“The great law of culture is: Let each become all that he was created capable of being.”
Critical and Miscellaneous Essays(1827–1855) | Richter .
Thomas Carlyle on Time
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“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.”
Sartor Resartus(1833–1834) | Bk. III, ch. 3. -
“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 -
“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 .”
Sir Walter Scott(1838)
Thomas Carlyle on Truth
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Attributed to Thomas Carlyle:
“Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves.”
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“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 .”
The French Revolution. A History(1837) | Pt. I, Bk. III, ch. 1. -
“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 ."”
Critical and Miscellaneous Essays(1827–1855) | Voltaire , Foreign Review, (1829) Compare: "How comes it to pass, then, that we appear such cowards in reasoning, and are so afraid to stand the test of ridicule?", Shaftesbury, Characteristics. A Let -
“"Do the Duty which lies nearest thee," which thou knowest to be a Duty! Thy second Duty will already have become clearer.”
Sartor Resartus(1833–1834) | Bk. II, ch. 9.
Thomas Carlyle on Virtue
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“Work alone is noble.”
Bk. III, ch. 4. -
“These are the two vices that beset Government Offices; both of them originating in insufficient Intellect,—that sad insufficiency from which, directly or indirectly, all evil whatsoever springs!”
Downing Street (April 1, 1850) -
“In every man's writings, the character of the writer must lie recorded.”
Critical and Miscellaneous Essays(1827–1855) | Goethe (1828).