Quotes / Thinkers / Thomas Carlyle
Thinker · 44 quotes
44 sourced quotes by Thomas Carlyle on economy, development & poverty, work, excellence & success, leadership, science, technology & innovation, ethics & morality, with a use case for each in GS4, Essay and interviews.
✓ Attributions checked against Wikiquote's sourced list
We are firm believers in the maxim that for all right judgment of any man or thing it is useful, nay, essential, to see his good qualities before pronouncing on his bad.
The infinite, absolute character of Virtue has passed into a finite, conditional one; it is no longer a worship of the Beautiful and Good; but a calculation of the Profitable.
I should say sincerity, a deep, great, genuine sincerity, is the first characteristic of all men in any way heroic.
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.
Adversity is sometimes hard upon a man; but for one man who can stand prosperity, there are a hundred that will stand adversity.
In a valiant suffering for others, not in a slothful making others suffer for us, did nobleness ever lie.
If you find many people who are hard and indifferent to you in a world that you consider to be unhospitable and cruel—as often, indeed, happens to a tender-hearted, stirring young creature—you will also find there are noble hearts who will look kindly on you, and their help will be precious to you beyond price.
Our grand business undoubtedly is, not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand.
Every noble crown is, and on earth will forever be, a crown of thorns.
Who would govern that can get along without governing? He that is fittest for it, is of all men the unwillingest unless constrained.
Tell me what kind of man governs a People, you tell me, with much exactness, what the net sum-total of social worth in that People has for some time been.
Wise command, wise obedience: the capability of these two is the net measure of culture, and human virtue, in every man; all good lies in the possession of these two capabilities; all evil, wretchedness and ill-success in the want of these.
a matter in regard to which if something be not done, something will do itself one day, and in a fashion that will please nobody
Oceans of horse-hair, continents of parchment, and learned-sergeant eloquence, were it continued till the learned tongue wore itself small in the indefatigable learned mouth, cannot make unjust just.
Man is not the creature and product of Mechanism; but, in a far truer sense, its creator and producer: it is the noble People that makes the noble Government; rather than conversely.
For love is ever the beginning of Knowledge, as fire is of light.
That there should one Man die ignorant who had capacity for Knowledge, this I call a tragedy.
Fire is the best of servents; but what a master!
Man is a tool-using animal...Without tools he is nothing, with tools he is all.
He who first shortened the labor of copyists by device of movable types was disbanding hired armies, and cashiering most kings and senates, and creating a whole new democratic world: he had invented the art of printing.
O reader, to what shifts is poor Society reduced, struggling to give still some account of herself, in epochs when Cash Payment has become the sole nexus of man to men!
In brief, all this Mammon-Gospel, of Supply-and-demand, Competition, Laissez-faire, and Devil take the hindmost, begins to be one of the shabbiest Gospels ever preached on Earth; or altogether the shabbiest.
Money is miraculous. What miraculous facilities has it yielded, will it yield us; but also what never-imagined confusions, obscurations has it brought in; down almost to total extinction of the moral-sense in large masses of mankind!
The crop of spiritual talent that is born to you, of human nobleness and intellect and heroic faculty, this is infinitely more important than your crops of cotton or corn, or wine or herrings or whale-oil, which the Newspapers record with such anxiety every season.
Probably some ninety-nine out of every hundred of our gifted souls, who have to seek a career for themselves, go this beaver road. Whereby the first half-result, national wealth namely, is plentifully realized; and only the second half, or wisdom to guide it, is dreadfully behindhand.
Happy the people whose annals are blank in history books!
Nothing that was worthy in the past departs; no truth or goodness realized by man ever dies, or can die.
To a shower of gold most things are penetrable.
The stupendous Fourth Estate, whose wide world-embracing influences what eye can take in?
Speech is human, silence is divine, yet also brutish and dead: therefore we must learn both arts.
The history of the world is but the biography of great men.
The great law of culture is: Let each become all that he was created capable of being.
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.
A man perfects himself by work much more than by reading.
Everywhere in life, the true question is not what we gain, but what we do.
All work, even cotton spinning, is noble; work is alone noble ... A life of ease is not for any man, nor for any god.
Hadst thou not Greek enough to understand thus much: The end of man is an Action, and not a Thought, though it were the noblest.
The weakest living creature, by concentrating his powers on a single object, can accomplish something. The strongest, by dispensing his over many, may fail to accomplish anything. The drop, by continually falling, bores its passage through the hardest rock. The hasty torrent rushes over it with hideous uproar, and leaves no trace behind.
The suffering man ought really 'to consume his own smoke'; there is no good in emitting smoke till you have made it into fire, — which, in the metaphorical sense too, all smoke is capable of becoming!
Blessed is he who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness.
One life; a little gleam of Time between two Eternities; no second chance to us for evermore!
When the oak-tree is felled, the whole forest echoes with it; but a hundred acorns are planted silently by some unnoticed breeze.
The greatest of faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none.
Enjoying things which are pleasant; that is not the evil: it is the reducing of our moral self to slavery by them that is.