Quotes from Thomas Carlyle

Skepticism means, not intellectual doubt alone, but moral doubt.

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

The soul gives unity to what it looks at with love.

France was a long despotism tempered by epigrams.

The man of life upright has a guiltless heart, free from all dishonest deeds or thought of vanity.

Work is the grand cure for all the maladies and miseries that ever beset mankind,honest work, which you intend getting done.

The history of the world is but the biography of great men.

The man without a purpose is like a ship without a rudder--a waif, a nothing, a no man. Have a purpose in life and having it, throw such strength of mind and muscle into your work as God has given you.

Be not a slave of words.

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.

The sea-green Incorruptible [Robespierre].

"Genius" (which means transcendent capacity of taking trouble, first of all).

Little dew-drops of celestial melody.

Burke said there were Three Estates in Parliament; but, in the Reporters' gallery yonder, there sat a Fourth Estate more important far than they all.

Have not I myself known five hundred living soldiers sabred into crows' meat for a piece of glazed cotton, which they call their flag; which had you sold it at any market-cross, would not have brought above three groschen?

There is but one temple in this Universe: The Body. We speak to God whenever we lay our hands upon it.

Is man's civilization only a wrappage, through which the savage nature of him can still burst, infernal as ever?

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.

We have profoundly forgotten everywhere that Cash-payment is not the sole relation of human beings.

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.

Doubt, of whatever kind, can be ended by action alone.

Whoso belongs only to his own age, and reverences only its gilt Popinjays or soot-smeared Mumbojumbos, must needs die with it.

History is a mighty dramos, enacted upon the theatre of times, with suns for lamps and eternity for a background.

A whiff of grapeshot.