Thomas Carlyle Quotes on God
Thomas Carlyle was a Scottish essayist, historian, and philosopher and one of the most prominent Victorian moral voices. This page collects quotes attributed to Thomas Carlyle on the topic of god, drawn from across the philosopher's works.
Quotes
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“Speech is human , silence is divine , yet also brutish and dead : therefore we must learn both arts .”
Notebooks (1830). -
“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. -
“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. -
“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. -
“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. -
“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 -
“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)