Best 719 quotes of Thomas Carlyle on MyQuotes

A background of wrath, which can be stirred up to the murderous infernal pitch, does lie in every man.

A battle is a terrible conjugation of the verb to kill: I kill, thou killest, he kills, we kill, they kill, all kill.

A collection of books is the best of all universities.

Acorns are planted silently by some unnoticed breeze.

Action hangs, as it were, dissolved in speech, in thoughts whereof speech is the shadow; and precipitates itself therefrom. The kind of speech in a man betokens the kind of action you will get from him.

A dandy is a clothes-wearing man--a man whose trade, office, and existence consist in the wearing of clothes. Every faculty of his soul, spirit, person and purse is heroically consecrated to this one object--the wearing of clothes, wisely and well; so that, as others dress to live, he lives to dress.

Adversity is the diamond dust Heaven polishes its jewels with.

A force as of madness in the hands of reason has done all that was ever done in the world.

A Fourth Estate, of Able Editors, springs up.

A frightful dialect for the stupid, the pedant and dullard sort.

After all manner of professors have done their best for us, the place we are to get knowledge is in books.

A fundamental mistake to call vehemence and rigidity strength! A man is not strong who takes convulsion-fits; though six men cannot hold him then. He that can walk under the heaviest weight without staggering, he is the strong man . . . A man who cannot hold his peace, till the time come for speaking and acting, is no right man.

A good book is the purest essence of a human soul.

A greater number of God's creatures believe in Mahomet's word at this hour than in any other word whatever. Are we to suppose that it was a miserable piece of spiritual legerdemain, this which so many creatures of the almighty have lived by and died by?

A great man shows his greatness by the way he treats little men.

A heavenly awe overshadowed and encompassed, as it still ought, and must, all earthly business whatsoever.

A judicious man looks at Statistics, not to "get knowledge, but to save himself from having ignorance foisted 'on him".

Alas! we know that ideals can never be completely embodied in practice. Ideals must ever lie a great way off--and we will thankfully content ourselves with any not intolerable approximation thereto! Let no man, as Schiller says, too querulously "measure by a scale of perfection the meager product of reality" in this poor world of ours.

Alas! while the body stands so broad and brawny, must the soul lie blinded, dwarfed, stupefied, almost annihilated? Alas! this was, too, a breath of God, bestowed in heaven, but on earth never to be unfolded!

A laugh, to be joyous, must flow from a joyous heart, for without kindness, there can be no true joy.

A lie should be trampled on and extinguished wherever found. I am for fumigating the atmosphere when I suspect that falsehood, like pestilence, breathes around me.

All deep things are song. It seems somehow the very central essence of us, song; as if all the rest were but wrappages and hulls!

All destruction, by violent revolution or however it be, is but new creation on a wider scale.

All evil is like a nightmare; the instant you stir under it, the evil is gone.

All greatness is unconscious, or it is little and naught.

All history . . . is an inarticulate Bible.

All human souls, never so bedarkened, love light; light once kindled spreads till all is luminous.

All men, if they work not as in the great taskmaster's eye, will work wrong, and work unhappily for themselves and for you.

All reform except a moral one will prove unavailing.

All sorts of Heroes are intrinsically of the same material; that given a great soul, open to the Divine Significance of Life, then there is given a man fit to speak of this, to sing of this, to fight and work for this, in a great, victorious, enduring manner; there is given a Hero, -- the outward shape of whom will depend on the time and the environment he finds himself in.

All that a university or final highest school. can do for us is still but what the first school began doing--teach us to read. We learn to read in various languages, in various sciences; we learn the alphabet and letters of all manner of books. But the place where we are to get knowledge, even theoretic knowledge, is the books themselves. It depends on what we read, after all manner of professors have done their best for us. The true university of these days is a collection of books.

All that mankind has done, thought or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books.

All true work is sacred. In all true work, were it but true hand work, there is something of divineness. Labor, wide as the earth, has its summit in Heaven.

All work, even cotton-spinning, is noble; work is alone noble.

A loving heart is the beginning of all knowledge.

Also, what mountains of dead ashes, wreck and burnt bones, does assiduous pedantry dig up from the past time and name it History.

A man--be the heavens ever praised!--is sufficient for himself.

A man cannot make a pair of shoes rightly unless he do it in a devout manner.

A man must indeed be a hero to appear such in the eyes of his valet.

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

A man lives by believing something.

A man perfects himself by working. Foul jungles are cleared away, fair seed-fields rise instead, and stately cities; and with the man himself first ceases to be a jungle, and foul unwholesome desert thereby. The man is now a man.

A man protesting against error is on the way towards uniting himself with all men that believe in truth.

A man's felicity consists not in the outward and visible blessing of fortune, but in the inward and unseen perfections and riches of the mind.

A man's perfection is his work.

A man's religion consists, not of the many things he is in doubt of and tries to believe, but of the few he is assured of and has no need of effort for believing.

A man willing to work, and unable to find work, is perhaps the saddest sight that fortune's inequality exhibits under this sun.

A man without a goal is like a ship without a rudder.

And man's little Life has Duties that are great, that are alone great, and go up to Heaven and down to Hell.

And there are Ben [Jonson] and William Shakespeare in wit-combat, sure enough; Ben bearing down like a mighty Spanish war-ship, fraught with all learning and artillery; Shakespeare whisking away from him - whisking right through him, athwart the big bulk and timbers of him; like a miraculous Celestial Light-ship, woven all of sheet-lightning and sunbeams!