Thomas Carlyle Quotes on Life
Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus (1833–34), On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841), and the late Past and Present (1843) gave Victorian British literature its most influential prophetic engagement with the question of how to live in the disenchanted conditions of industrial modernity. The central thesis — developed through the fictional autobiography of Diogenes Teufelsdröckh in Sartor Resartus and the heroic-historical analyses of the lectures — is that the everlasting Yea of authentic life is recovered from the everlasting No of modern unbelief through disciplined work and the recognition of the heroic figures whose lives supply the standing pattern of human possibility. The framework, drawing on German Romantic philosophy and the Calvinist inheritance of Carlyle’s Scottish childhood, shaped Victorian moral seriousness through Ruskin, Emerson, and the broader Anglo-American reception of Continental philosophical literature.
Quotes
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“Work alone is noble.”
Bk. III, ch. 4. -
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