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Thomas Carlyle

70 quotes

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) was a Scottish essayist, historian, and philosopher who became one of the most influential social commentators of the Victorian era. Known for his passionate writing style and moral seriousness, Carlyle wrote extensively on history, heroism, and the human condition.

“The old cathedrals are good, but the great blue dome that hangs over everything is better.”

— Thomas Carlyle

Good

All Quotes by Thomas Carlyle

“Good breeding differs, if at all, from high breeding only as it gracefully remembers the rights of others, rather than gracefully insists on its own rights.”

— Thomas Carlyle

Good

“History, a distillation of rumour.”

— Thomas Carlyle

History

“Sarcasm I now see to be, in general, the language of the devil for which reason I have long since as good as renounced it.”

— Thomas Carlyle

Good

“To reform a world, to reform a nation, no wise man will undertake and all but foolish men know, that the only solid, though a far slower reformation, is what each begins and perfects on himself.”

— Thomas Carlyle

Men

“Secrecy is the element of all goodness even virtue, even beauty is mysterious.”

— Thomas Carlyle

Beauty

“No sadder proof can be given by a man of his own littleness than disbelief in great men.”

— Thomas Carlyle

Great

“Wondrous is the strength of cheerfulness, and its power of endurance - the cheerful man will do more in the same time, will do it better, will preserve it longer, than the sad or sullen.”

— Thomas Carlyle

Power

“Our main business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand.”

— Thomas Carlyle

Business

“No great man lives in vain. The history of the world is but the biography of great men.”

— Thomas Carlyle

Great

“The real use of gunpowder is to make all men tall.”

— Thomas Carlyle

Men

“In the long-run every Government is the exact symbol of its People, with their wisdom and unwisdom we have to say, Like People like Government.”

— Thomas Carlyle

Government

“Every day that is born into the world comes like a burst of music and rings the whole day through, and you make of it a dance, a dirge, or a life march, as you will.”

— Thomas Carlyle

Music

“To us also, through every star, through every blade of grass, is not God made visible if we will open our minds and our eyes.”

— Thomas Carlyle

God

“I do not believe in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.”

— Thomas Carlyle

Wisdom

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

— Thomas Carlyle

Work

“Silence is as deep as eternity, speech a shallow as time.”

— Thomas Carlyle

Time

“Endurance is patience concentrated.”

— Thomas Carlyle

Patience

“I grow daily to honour facts more and more, and theory less and less. A fact, it seems to me, is a great thing a sentence printed, if not by God, then at least by the Devil.”

— Thomas Carlyle

God

“Man is, properly speaking, based upon hope, he has no other possession but hope this world of his is emphatically the place of hope.”

— Thomas Carlyle

Hope

“Nothing that was worthy in the past departs no truth or goodness realized by man ever dies, or can die.”

— Thomas Carlyle

Truth