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Thomas Carlyle

Thomas Carlyle Quotes

Philosopher

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Famous Thomas Carlyle Quotes

“Happy season of childhood! Kind Nature, that art to all a bountiful mother; that visitest the poor man's hut With auroral radiance; and for thy nursling hast provided a soft swathing of love and infinite hope wherein he waxes and slumbers, danced round by sweetest dreams!”

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Book:Sartor Resartus: The Historian
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“Learn to be good readers, which is perhaps a more difficult thing than you imagine. Learn to be discriminative in your reading; to read faithfully, and with your best attention, all kinds of things which you have a real interest in,--a real, not an imaginary,--and which you find to be really fit for what you are engaged in.”

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Book:The Works of Thomas Carlyle
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“They have their belief, these poor Tibet people, that Providence sends down always an Incarnation of Himself into every generation. At bottom some belief in a kind of Pope! At bottom still better, a belief that there is a Greatest Man; that he is discoverable; that, once discovered, we ought to treat him with an obedience which knows no bounds. This is the truth of Grand Lamaism; the "discoverability" is the only error here.”

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Author:Thomas Carlyle
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“We are to remember what an umpire Nature is; what a greatness, composure of depth and tolerance there is in her. You take wheat to cast into the Earth's bosom; your wheat may be mixed with chaff, chopped straw, barn-sweepings, dust and all imaginable rubbish; no matter: you cast it into the kind just Earth; she grows the wheat, - the whole rubbish she silently absorbs, shrouds it in, says nothing of the rubbish.”

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Book:On Heroes, Hero-worship and the Heroic in History
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“There can be no acting or doing of any kind till it be recognized that there is a thing to be done; the thing once recognized, doing in a thousand shapes becomes possible.”

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Book:The Socialism and Unsocialism of Thomas Carlyle: Introduction, by the editor. Book I. Proem. Book II. The modern worker. Book III. Signs of the times. Book IV. Horoscope. Essay on the genius and tendency of the writings of Thomas Carlyle, by Joseph Mazzini. v. 2. Book V. The French revolution. Book VI. Horoscope. Essay on the genius and tendency of the writings of Thomas Carlyle, by Joseph Mazzini
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“The meaning of song goes deep. Who in logical words can explain the effect music has on us? A kind of inarticulate, unfathomable speech, which leads us to the edge of the infinite, and lets us for a moment gaze into that!”

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Book:On heroes, hero-worship, & the heroic in history: six lectures ; reported, with emendations and additions
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“The Great Man's sincerity is of the kind he cannot speak of, is not conscious of: nay, I suppose, he is conscious rather of insincerity; for what man can walk accurately by the law of truth for one day? No, the Great Man does not boast himself sincere, far from that; perhaps does not ask himself if he is so: I would say rather, his sincerity does not depend on himself; he cannot help being sincere!”

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Book:The Collected Works of Thomas Carlyle
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