Quotes from Thomas Carlyle

France was long a despotism tempered by epigrams.

He who takes not counsel of the Unseen and Silent, from him will never come real visibility and speech.

The Everlasting Yea.

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.

All great peoples are conservative.

A healthy hatred of scoundrels.

For, if a good speaker, never so eloquent, does not see into the fact, and is not speaking the truth of that - is there a more horrid kind of object in creation?

All deep things are song. It seems somehow the very central essence of us, song; as if all the rest were but wrappages and hulls!

There is no heroic poem in the world but is at bottom a biography, the life of a man; also, it may be said, there is no life of a man, faithfully recorded, but is a heroic poem of its sort, rhymed or unrhymed.

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.

Every human being has a right to hear what other wise human beings have spoken to him. It is one of the Rights of Men; a very cruel injustice if you deny it to a man!

Work alone is noble.

A vein of poetry exists in the hearts of all men.

Clever men are good, but they are not the best.

What are your Axioms, and Categories, and Systems, and Aphorisms? Words, words.... Be not the slave of Words...

He that works and does some Poem, not he that merely says one, is worthy of the name of Poet.

Be not the slave of Words.

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.

As the Swiss inscription says: Sprechen ist silbern, Schweigen ist golden—"Speech is silvern, Silence is golden"; or, as I might rather express it, speech is of time, silence is of eternity.

It were a real increase of human happiness, could all young men from the age of nineteen be covered under barrels, or rendered otherwise invisible and there left to follow their lawful studies and callings, till they emerged, sadder and wiser, at the age of twenty-five.

Lord Bacon could as easily have created the planets as he could have written Hamlet.

The illimitable, silent, never-resting thing called Time, rolling, rushing on, swift, silent, like an all-embracing ocean-tide, on which we and all the universe swim like exhalations, like apparitions which are, and then are not....

A man cannot make a pair of shoes rightly unless he do it in a devout manner.

A man with a half volition goes backwards and forwards, and makes no way on the smoothest road a man with a whole volition advances on the roughest, and will reach his purpose, if there be even a little worthiness in it. 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.