Quotes About Thomas Carlyle

Our history is not a continuous line; it's a circle we draw over and over on a blotter. Chicago, Fall River, Chicago. Thomas Carlyle, the man from Arkansas, my own daughter, Thomas Carlyle. Work, not work. The terrors of the sleeper and the helplessness of the awake. [Walt Kaplan/Rachel Plotkin]

The depth of our despair measures what capability and height of claim we have to hope.

persons, with big wigs many of them and austere aspect, whom I take to be Professors of the Dismal Science… Coining "Dismal Science" as a nickname for Political Economy

On Easter Sunday, 18 April, the Te Deums were sung and the Lord was praised for removing the tyrant. 'Nap the Mighty is gone to pot,' wrote the nineteen-year-old Thomas Carlyle in amazement, with double underlining.

I first wrote a biography of Thomas Carlyle, and it turned out I loved writing biographies and had a talent for it. I believed I had a contribution to make.

There is no life of a man, faithfully recorded, but is a heroic poem of its sort, rhymed or unrhymed.

Humor has justly been regarded as the finest perfection of poetic genius.

True humor springs not more from the head than from the heart. It is not contempt; its essence is love. It issues not in laughter, but in still smiles, which lie far deeper.

"Love is not altogether a Delirium," says he elsewhere; "yet has it many points in common therewith."

Every year, I have my graduate students read the great works of history, from classical times to the present. They gamely tackle Tacitus, ponder Plutarch, plow through Gibbon. Then they get to Thomas Carlyle and feel like Dorothy when she touched down in Technicolor Oz.

Some years ago, I read Thomas Carlyle's history of the French Revolution, and I was very taken by the way he told the story, and it seemed as though I was right in the middle of things. And it took me a while to figure out how he achieved that effect, and one of the ways was to write it in the present tense.

Both Fascism and Communism thrived on social despair, on the huge gulf separating rich and poor. If the democracies were to recover, the 'condition of the people' question must be addressed. In the words of Thomas Carlyle a hundred years earlier, 'if something be not done, something will do itself one day, and in a fashion that will please nobody.

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.

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.

Respectable Professors of the Dismal Science.

True humor springs not more from the head than from the heart. It is not contempt its essence is love. It issues not in laughter, but in still smiles, which lie far deeper.

True humor springs not more from the head than from the heart. It is not contempt; its essence is love. It issues not in laugther, but in still smiles, which lie far deeper.

Well at ease are the Sleepers for whom Existence is a shallow Dream.

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?

Economics is not a gay science. It is a dreary, desolate, and indeed quite abject and distressing one; what we might call, by way of eminence, the dismal science.

Everywhere immeasurable Democracy rose monstrous, loud, blatant, inarticulate as the voice of Chaos.

you come to understand that history might be, as Thomas Carlyle put it, "a distillation of rumor," or, as Napoleon said, "a set of lies generally agreed upon

Or consider why economics is sometimes called "the dismal science." It's a derogatory description thought up by Thomas Carlyle in the 1800s, coined to draw a contrast with the "gay science" of music and poetry: "Not a 'gay science,' I should say, like some we have heard of; no, a dreary, desolate and, indeed, quite abject and distressing one; what we might call, by way of eminence, the dismal science.