We have not read an author till we have seen his object, whatever it may be, as he saw it.


Thomas Carlyle

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More Thomas Carlyle

One must verify or expel his doubts, and convert them into the certainty of Yes or NO.
THOMAS CARLYLE
Every day that is born into the world comes like a burst of music and rings the whole day through, a...
THOMAS CARLYLE
Respectable Professors of the Dismal Science.
THOMAS CARLYLE
On the whole we must repeat the often repeated saying, that it is unworthy a religious man to view ...
THOMAS CARLYLE
His religion at best is an anxious wish,--like that of Rabelais, a great Perhaps.
THOMAS CARLYLE
Everywhere the human soul stands between a hemisphere of light and another of darkness; on the con...
THOMAS CARLYLE
The eye sees what it brings the power to see.
THOMAS CARLYLE
Violence does even justice unjustly.
THOMAS CARLYLE
Midas-eared Mammonism, double-barrelled Dilettantism, and their thousand adjuncts and corollaries, ...
THOMAS CARLYLE
The tragedy of life is not so much what men suffer, but rather what they miss.
THOMAS CARLYLE
Youth is to all the glad reason of life; but often only by what it hopes, not by what it attains, o...
THOMAS CARLYLE
What is all Knowledge too but recorded Experience, and a product of History; of which, therefore, R...
THOMAS CARLYLE
For love is ever the beginning of Knowledge, as fire is of light.
THOMAS CARLYLE
A parliament speaking through reporters to Buncombe and the Twenty-seven millions, mostly fools.
THOMAS CARLYLE
Great is journalism. Is not every able editor a ruler of the world, being the persuader of it?
THOMAS CARLYLE
When you can do the common things of life in an uncommon way, you will command the attention of the...
THOMAS CARLYLE
Fame, we may understand, is no sure test of merit, but only a probability of such: it is an accide...
THOMAS CARLYLE
Scarcely two hundred years back can Fame recollect articulately at all; and there she but maunders ...
THOMAS CARLYLE
To us also, through every star, through every blade of grass, is not God made visible if we will op...
THOMAS CARLYLE
How much lies in Laughter: the cipher-key, wherewith we decipher the whole man.
THOMAS CARLYLE
Even in the meanest sorts of labor, the whole soul of a man is composed into a kind of real harmon...
THOMAS CARLYLE
What we become depends on what we read after all the professors have finished with us. The greatest ...
THOMAS CARLYLE
All comes out even at the end of the day.
THOMAS CARLYLE
Day of wrath that day of burning, Seer and Sibyl speak concerning, All the world to ashes turn...
THOMAS CARLYLE
My books are friends that never fail me."

(Letter to his mother, Margaret A. Carlyle THOMAS CARLYLE
If you look deep enough you will see music; the heart of nature being everywhere music.
THOMAS CARLYLE
One is hardly sensible of fatigue while he marches to music.
THOMAS CARLYLE
Song is the heroics of speech.
THOMAS CARLYLE
Music is well said to be the speech of angels.
THOMAS CARLYLE
Cash-payment never was, or could except for a few years be, the union-bond of man to man. Cash never...
THOMAS CARLYLE
Cash-payment is not the sole nexus of man with man.
THOMAS CARLYLE
A fair day's wages for a fair day's work.
THOMAS CARLYLE
The greatest of all faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none.
THOMAS CARLYLE
The past is all holy to us; the dead are all holy; even they that were wicked when alive.
THOMAS CARLYLE
Every new opinion, at its starting, is precisely in a minority of one.
THOMAS CARLYLE
Wonderful Force of Public Opinion! We must act and walk in all points as it prescribes; follow the t...
THOMAS CARLYLE
Little other than a red tape Talking-machine, and unhappy Bag of Parliamentary Eloquence.
THOMAS CARLYLE
It is a vain hope to make people happy by politics.
THOMAS CARLYLE
Permanence, perseverance and persistence in spite of all obstacle s, discouragement s, and impossibi...
THOMAS CARLYLE
It is the unseen and the spiritual in people that determines the outward and the actual.
THOMAS CARLYLE
Tell a person they are brave and you help them become so.
THOMAS CARLYLE
Laughter is the cipher key wherewith we decipher the whole man
THOMAS CARLYLE
The person who cannot laugh is not only ready for treason, and deceptions, their whole life is alrea...
THOMAS CARLYLE
No man who has once heartily and wholly laughed can be altogether irreclaimably bad.
THOMAS CARLYLE
In a controversy the instant we feel anger we have already ceased striving for the truth, and have b...
THOMAS CARLYLE
Talk that does not end in any kind of action is better suppressed altogether.
THOMAS CARLYLE
The only happiness a brave person ever troubles themselves in asking about, is happiness enough to g...
THOMAS CARLYLE
But the whim we have of happiness is somewhat thus. By certain valuations, and averages, of our own ...
THOMAS CARLYLE
Wondrous is the strength of cheerfulness, and its power of endurance -- the cheerful man will do mor...
THOMAS CARLYLE
Oh, give us the man who sings at his work.
THOMAS CARLYLE
In private life I never knew anyone interfere with other people's disputes but he heartily repented ...
THOMAS CARLYLE
Life is a little gleam of time between two eternity s.
THOMAS CARLYLE
Adversity is sometimes hard upon a man; but for one man who can stand prosperity, there are a hundre...
THOMAS CARLYLE
Action hangs, as it were, dissolved in speech, in thoughts whereof speech is the shadow; and precipi...
THOMAS CARLYLE
The end of man is action, and not thought, though it be of the noblest.
THOMAS CARLYLE
Everywhere in life, the true question is not what we gain, but what we do.
THOMAS CARLYLE
Narrative is linear, but action has breadth and depth as well as height and is solid.
THOMAS CARLYLE
Our grand business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand.
THOMAS CARLYLE
No man lives without jostling and being jostled; in all ways he has to elbow himself through the wor...
THOMAS CARLYLE
Only perhaps in the United States, which alone of countries can do without governing,every man being...
THOMAS CARLYLE
Of America it would ill beseem any Englishman, and me perhaps as little as another, to speak unkindl...
THOMAS CARLYLE
Democracy will prevail when men believe the vote of Judas as good as that of Jesus Christ.
THOMAS CARLYLE
The most unhappy of all men is the man who cannot tell what he is going to do, who has got no work c...
THOMAS CARLYLE
Manhood begins when we have in any way made truce with Necessity; begins even when we have surrender...
THOMAS CARLYLE
That a Parliament, especially a Parliament with Newspaper Reporters firmly established in it, is an ...
THOMAS CARLYLE
Parliament will train you to talk; and above all things to hear, with patience, unlimited quantities...
THOMAS CARLYLE
The battle that never ends is the battle of belief against unbelief.
THOMAS CARLYLE
The most fearful unbelief is unbelief in your self.
THOMAS CARLYLE
Conviction never so excellent, is worthless until it coverts itself into conduct.
THOMAS CARLYLE
No iron chain, or outward force of any kind, can ever compel the soul of a person to believe or to d...
THOMAS CARLYLE
Writing is a dreadful labor, yet not so dreadful as Idleness.
THOMAS CARLYLE
The dust of controversy is merely the falsehood flying off.
THOMAS CARLYLE
Scepticism, as I said, is not intellectual only; it is moral also; a chronic atrophy and disease of ...
THOMAS CARLYLE
Today is not yesterday: we ourselves change; how can our works and thoughts, if they are always to b...
THOMAS CARLYLE
By nature man hates change; seldom will he quit his old home till it has actually fallen around his ...
THOMAS CARLYLE
The true past departs not, no truth or goodness realized by man ever dies, or can die; but all is st...
THOMAS CARLYLE
The courage we desire and prize is not the courage to die decently, but to live manfully.
THOMAS CARLYLE
Speech is human, silence is divine, yet also brutish and dead: therefore we must learn both arts.
THOMAS CARLYLE
Show me the man you honor, and I will know what kind of a man you are. It shows me what your ideal o...
THOMAS CARLYLE
It is not a lucky word, this name impossible; no good comes of those who have it so often in their m...
THOMAS CARLYLE
Imagination is a poor matter when it has to part company with understanding.
THOMAS CARLYLE
Not our logical faculty, but our imaginative one is king over us. I might say, priest and prophet to...
THOMAS CARLYLE
The outer passes away; the innermost is the same yesterday, today, and forever.
THOMAS CARLYLE
Nothing is more terrible than activity without insight.
THOMAS CARLYLE
If what you have done is unjust, you have not succeeded.
THOMAS CARLYLE
What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greate...
THOMAS CARLYLE
The fearful unbelief is unbelief in yourself.
THOMAS CARLYLE
Doubt, of whatever kind, can be ended by action alone.
THOMAS CARLYLE
We have our little theory on all human and divine things. Poetry, the workings of genius itself, whi...
THOMAS CARLYLE
No sadder proof can be given of a person's own tiny stature, than their disbelief in great people.
THOMAS CARLYLE
Fame, we may understand, is no sure test of merit, but only a probability of such; it is an accident...
THOMAS CARLYLE
To us also, through every star, through every blade of grass, is not God made visible if we will ope...
THOMAS CARLYLE
True humor springs not more from the head than from the heart. It is not contempt; its essence is lo...
THOMAS CARLYLE
Painful for a person is rebellious independence, only in loving companionship with his associates do...
THOMAS CARLYLE
Man is emphatically a proselytizing creature.
THOMAS CARLYLE
The whole past is the procession of the present.
THOMAS CARLYLE
The history of the world is but the biography of great men.
THOMAS CARLYLE
The devil has his elect.
THOMAS CARLYLE
All evil is like a nightmare; the instant you stir under it, the evil is gone.
THOMAS CARLYLE
Men are to be guided only by their self-interests. Good government is a good balancing of these; and...
THOMAS CARLYLE
In the long-run every Government is the exact symbol of its People, with their wisdom and unwisdom; ...
THOMAS CARLYLE
A man without a goal is like a ship without a rudder.
THOMAS CARLYLE
The first duty of man is to conquer fear; he must get rid of it, he cannot act till then.
THOMAS CARLYLE
Society is founded upon cloth.
THOMAS CARLYLE
If the cut of the costume indicates intellect and talent, then the color indicates temper and heart.
THOMAS CARLYLE
Genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains.
THOMAS CARLYLE
Of all acts of man repentance is the most divine. The greatest of all faults is to be conscious of n...
THOMAS CARLYLE
Wonder is the basis of worship.
THOMAS CARLYLE
The first sin in our universe was Lucifer's self conceit.
THOMAS CARLYLE
Silence is more eloquent than words.
THOMAS CARLYLE
Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves.
THOMAS CARLYLE
Silence is as deep as eternity, speech a shallow as time.
THOMAS CARLYLE
Under all speech that is good for anything there lies a silence that is better. Silence is deep as E...
THOMAS CARLYLE
When the oak is felled the whole forest echoes with it fall, but a hundred acorns are sown in silenc...
THOMAS CARLYLE
Speech is of time, silence is of eternity.
THOMAS CARLYLE
No sooner is your ocean filled, than he grumbles that it might have been of better vintage. Try him ...
THOMAS CARLYLE
Man's unhappiness, as I construe, comes of his greatness; it is because there is an Infinite in him,...
THOMAS CARLYLE
He that can work is born to be king of something.
THOMAS CARLYLE
No age seemed the age of romance to itself.
THOMAS CARLYLE
For suffering and enduring there is no remedy, but striving and doing.
THOMAS CARLYLE
The tragedy of life is not so much what men suffer, but rather what they miss.
THOMAS CARLYLE
It were a real increase of human happiness, could all young men from the age of nineteen be covered ...
THOMAS CARLYLE
A fundamental mistake to call vehemence and rigidity strength! A man is not strong who takes convuls...
THOMAS CARLYLE
The spiritual is the parent of the practical.
THOMAS CARLYLE
No ghost was every seen by two pair of eyes.
THOMAS CARLYLE
If an eloquent speaker speak not the truth, is there a more horrid kind of object in creation?
THOMAS CARLYLE
The soul gives unity to what it looks at with love.
THOMAS CARLYLE
History shows that the majority of people that have done anything great have passed their youth in s...
THOMAS CARLYLE
We call it a Society; and go about professing openly the totalest separation, isolation. Our life is...
THOMAS CARLYLE
The merit of originality is not novelty; it is sincerity.
THOMAS CARLYLE
The Great Man's sincerity is of the kind he cannot speak of, is not conscious of: nay, I suppose, he...
THOMAS CARLYLE
All men, if they work not as in the great taskmaster's eye, will work wrong, and work unhappily for ...
THOMAS CARLYLE
Cherish what is dearest while you have it near you, and wait not till it is far away. Blind and deaf...
THOMAS CARLYLE
Reform is not pleasant, but grievous; no person can reform themselves without suffering and hard wor...
THOMAS CARLYLE
To reform a world, to reform a nation, no wise man will undertake; and all but foolish men know, tha...
THOMAS CARLYLE
Popular opinion is the greatest lie in the world.
THOMAS CARLYLE
A person usually has two reasons for doing something: a good reason and the real reason.
THOMAS CARLYLE
Reality, if rightly interpreted, is grander than fiction.
THOMAS CARLYLE
We were wise indeed, could we discern truly the signs of our own time; and by knowledge of its wants...
THOMAS CARLYLE
Our main business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what clearly lies at hand.
THOMAS CARLYLE
Man is a tool-using Animal. Nowhere do you find him without tools; without tools he is nothing, with...
THOMAS CARLYLE
Battles, in these ages, are transacted by mechanism; with the slightest possible development of huma...
THOMAS CARLYLE
When we can drain the Ocean into mill-ponds, and bottle up the Force of Gravity, to be sold by retai...
THOMAS CARLYLE
A man cannot make a pair of shoes rightly unless he do it in a devout manner.
THOMAS CARLYLE
In a symbol there is concealment and yet revelation: here therefore, by silence and by speech acting...
THOMAS CARLYLE
Let one who wants to move and convince others, first be convinced and moved themselves. If a person ...
THOMAS CARLYLE
Not brute force but only persuasion and faith are the kings of this world.
THOMAS CARLYLE
The cut of a garment speaks of intellect and talent and the color of temperament and heart.
THOMAS CARLYLE
Good breeding differs, if at all, from high breeding only as it gracefully remembers the rights of o...
THOMAS CARLYLE
No conquest can ever become permanent which does not show itself beneficial to the conquered as well...
THOMAS CARLYLE
Variety is the condition of harmony.
THOMAS CARLYLE
I don't pretend to understand the Universe -- it's a great deal bigger than I am.
THOMAS CARLYLE
Men's hearts ought not to be set against one another, but set with one another, and all against evil...
THOMAS CARLYLE
No person was every rightly understood until they had been first regarded with a certain feeling, no...
THOMAS CARLYLE
The world is a republic of mediocrities, and always was.
THOMAS CARLYLE
It is a mathematical fact that the casting of this pebble from my hand alters the centre of gravity ...
THOMAS CARLYLE
For man is not the creature and product of Mechanism; but, in a far truer sense, its creator and pro...
THOMAS CARLYLE
Isolation is the sum total of wretchedness to a man.
THOMAS CARLYLE
Let each become all that he was created capable of being.
THOMAS CARLYLE
The condition of the most passionate enthusiast is to be preferred over the individual who, because ...
THOMAS CARLYLE
If there be no enemy there's no fight. If no fight, no victory and if no victory there is no crown.
THOMAS CARLYLE
The barrenest of all mortals is the sentimentalist.
THOMAS CARLYLE
Egotism is the source and summary of all faults and miseries.
THOMAS CARLYLE
Do the duty which lies nearest to you, the second duty will then become clearer.
THOMAS CARLYLE
Clever men are good, but they are not the best.
THOMAS CARLYLE
Pin your faith to no ones sleeves, haven't you two eyes of your own.
THOMAS CARLYLE
I do not believe in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.
THOMAS CARLYLE
The actual well seen is ideal.
THOMAS CARLYLE
Secrecy is the element of all goodness; even virtue, even beauty is mysterious.
THOMAS CARLYLE
For the superior morality, of which we hear so much, we too would desire to be thankful: at the same...
THOMAS CARLYLE
The eternal stars shine out as soon as it is dark enough.
THOMAS CARLYLE
The depth of our despair measures what capability and height of claim we have to hope.
THOMAS CARLYLE
The block of granite which was an obstacle in the pathway of the weak becomes a stepping-stone in th...
THOMAS CARLYLE
There are but two ways of paying debt: Increase of industry in raising income, increase of thrift in...
THOMAS CARLYLE
Sarcasm I now see to be, in general, the language of the devil; for which reason I have long since a...
THOMAS CARLYLE
The difference between Socrates and Jesus? The great conscious and the immeasurably great unconsciou...
THOMAS CARLYLE
Nothing that was worthy in the past departs; no truth or goodness realized by man ever dies, or can ...
THOMAS CARLYLE
Make yourself an honest man, and then you may be sure there is one less rascal in the world.
THOMAS CARLYLE
History is the distillation of rumor.
THOMAS CARLYLE
Stern accuracy in inquiring, bold imagination in describing, these are the cogs on which history soa...
THOMAS CARLYLE
Heroism is the divine relation which, in all times, unites a great man to other men.
THOMAS CARLYLE
Hero-worship is the deepest root of all; the tap-root, from which in a great degree all the rest wer...
THOMAS CARLYLE
All sorts of Heroes are intrinsically of the same material; that given a great soul, open to the Div...
THOMAS CARLYLE
The hell of these days is the fear of not getting along, especially of not making money.
THOMAS CARLYLE
The heart always sees before than the head can see.
THOMAS CARLYLE
Ill-health, of body or of mind, is defeat. Health alone is victory. Let all men, if they can manage ...
THOMAS CARLYLE
A well-written life is almost as rare as a well-spent one.
THOMAS CARLYLE
History is the essence of innumerable biographies.
THOMAS CARLYLE
If those gentlemen would let me alone I should be much obliged to them. I would say, as Shakespeare ...
THOMAS CARLYLE
No sooner does a great man depart, and leave his character as public property, than a crowd of littl...
THOMAS CARLYLE
Laughter is one of the very privileges of reason, being confined to the human species.
THOMAS CARLYLE
Even in the meanest sorts of labor, the whole soul of a man is composed into a kind of real harmony ...
THOMAS CARLYLE
For all right judgment of any man or things it is useful, nay, essential, to see his good qualities ...
THOMAS CARLYLE
The real use of gunpowder is to make all men tall.
THOMAS CARLYLE
The Mystic Bond of Brotherhood makes all men one.
THOMAS CARLYLE
No violent extreme endures.
THOMAS CARLYLE
What are your historical Facts; still more your biographical? Wilt thou know a man by stringing-toge...
THOMAS CARLYLE
I grow daily to honor facts more and more, and theory less and less. A fact, it seems to me, is a gr...
THOMAS CARLYLE
Conclusive facts are inseparable from inconclusive except by a head that already understands and kno...
THOMAS CARLYLE
Weak eyes are fondest of glittering objects.
THOMAS CARLYLE