Whatever opinion may be formed of the extent of his dissipation in Dumfries, one fact is unquestionable, that his powers remained unimpaired to the last; it was there he produced his finest lyrics, and they are the finest, as well as the purest, that ever delighted mankind.

— Thomas Carlyle

Thomas Carlyle Quotes

The Reality had swept the Formulas away before it.

— Thomas Carlyle

We called Dante the melodious Priest of Middle-Age Catholicism. May we not call Shakespeare the still more melodious Priest of a true Catholicism, the ‘Universal Church’ of the Future and of all times? No narrow superstition, harsh asceticism, intolerance, fanatical fierceness or perversion: a Revelation, so far as it goes, that such a thousandfold hidden beauty and divineness dwells in all Nature; which let all men worship as they can!

— Thomas Carlyle

Till thirty the Spartans did not suffer a man to marry: but how many men here under thirty; coming to produce not one sufficient citizen, but a nation and a world of such!

— Thomas Carlyle

Always moreover where the Millions are wretched, there are the Thousands straitened, unhappy; only the Units can flourish; or say rather, be ruined the last.

— Thomas Carlyle

What are you doing in God’s fair Earth and Task-garden; where whosoever is not working is begging or stealing? Wo, wo to themselves and to all, if they can only answer: Collecting tithes, Preserving game!

— Thomas Carlyle

To the wisest of them, what we must call the wisest, man is properly an Accident under the sky.

— Thomas Carlyle

Man is without Duty round him; except it be “to make the Constitution.” He is without Heaven above him, or Hell beneath him; he has no God in the world.

— Thomas Carlyle

Nay is it not rather the very murkiness, and atmospheric suffocation, that brings the lightning and the light? The new Evangel, as the old had been, was it to be born in the Destruction of a World?

— Thomas Carlyle

Resist the beginnings! Nay were resistance unadvisable, even dangerous, yet surely pause is very natural: pause, with Twenty-five Millions behind you, may become resistance enough.

— Thomas Carlyle

Folly is that wisdom which is wise only behindhand.

— Thomas Carlyle

Mercury descended in vain; now has the time come for Mars.

— Thomas Carlyle

Counsel dwells not under the plumed hat.

— Thomas Carlyle

O poor mortals, how ye make this Earth bitter for each other; this fearful and wonderful Life fearful and horrible; and Satan has his place in all hearts!

— Thomas Carlyle

Find a man whose words paint you a likeness, you have found a man worth something; mark his manner of doing it, as very characteristic of him.

— Thomas Carlyle

Great Men, taken up in any way, are profitable company.

— Thomas Carlyle

The thoughts they had were the parents of the actions they did; their feelings were parents of their thoughts:.

— Thomas Carlyle

All God’s works are still in a sense symbols of God. Do we not, as I urged, still account it a merit to recognize a certain inexhaustible significance, “poetic beauty” as we name it, in all natural objects whatsoever?

— Thomas Carlyle

What we call pure or impure, is not with her the final question. Not how much chaff is in you; but whether you have any wheat. Pure? I might say to many a man: Yes, you are pure; pure enough; but you are chaff, – insincere hypothesis, hearsay, formality; you never were in contact with the great heart of the Universe at all; you are properly neither pure nor impure; you are nothing, Nature has no business with you.

— Thomas Carlyle

Order is Truth, – each thing standing on the basis that belongs to it: Order and Falsehood cannot subsist together.

— Thomas Carlyle

It is an everlasting duty, valid in our day as in that, the duty of being brave. Valor is still value. The first duty for a man is still that of subduing Fear. We must get rid of Fear; we cannot act at all till then. A man’s acts are slavish, not true but specious; his very thoughts are false, he thinks too as a slave and coward, till he have got Fear under his feet.

— Thomas Carlyle
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