Thomas Carlyle Quotes on Truth
Thomas Carlyle, the Scottish essayist and Victorian moral prophet, treated truth as a force woven into the structure of reality itself, and the quotes gathered here express that conviction. A lie, for Carlyle, is never merely a private fault: like a worthless bill drawn on Nature's Reality, it will sooner or later be presented for payment and returned marked No effects. He held that the arts must remain bound to truth or fall into madness, and that nothing genuinely true or good is ever finally lost, since no truth or goodness realized by man ever dies. Drawn from Sartor Resartus, The French Revolution, and his lectures on heroes, these passages show Carlyle's characteristically prophetic and uncompromising voice.
Quotes
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Attributed to Thomas Carlyle:
“Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves.”
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“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). -
“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. -
“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. -
“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. -
“Nothing that was worthy in the past departs; no truth or goodness realized by man ever dies, or can die.”
Sir Walter Scott(1838) -
“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 -
“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 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) -
“In every man's writings, the character of the writer must lie recorded.”
Critical and Miscellaneous Essays(1827–1855) | Goethe (1828). -
“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)