Quotes from Thomas Carlyle

It is part of my creed that the only poetry is history, could we tell it right.

The courage we desire and prize is not the courage to die decently, but to live manfully.

Men do less than they ought, unless they do all that they can.

[W]hat mountains of dead ashes, wreck and burnt bones, does assiduous pedantry dig up from the past time and name it History.

If Jesus Christ were to come today people would not even crucify him. They would ask him to dinner, and hear what he has to say, and make fun of it.

There is a great discovery still to be made in literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write.

A stammering man is never a worthless one. Physiology can tell you why. It is an excess of sensibility to the presence of his fellow creature, that makes him stammer.

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

In a certain sense all men are historians.

Aristocracy of the Moneybag.

Every noble crown is, and on earth will forever be, a crown of thorns.

Science must have originated in the feeling that something was wrong.

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

No man sees far; the most see no farther than their noses.

History, a distillation of rumour.

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

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.

History shows that the majority of people that have done anything great have passed their youth in seclusion.

No sooner is your ocean filled, than he grumbles that it might have been of better vintage. Try him with half of a Universe, of an Omnipotence, he sets to quarrelling with the proprietor of the other half, and declares himself the most maltreated of men.—Always there is a black spot in our sunshine: it is even, as I said, the Shadow of Ourselves.

If an eloquent speaker speak not the truth, is there a more horrid kind of object in creation?

The eye sees what it brings the power to see.

No man who has once heartily and wholly laughed can be altogether irreclaimably bad.

Respectable Professors of the Dismal Science.

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.