The quotations of

Thomas Carlyle

Scottish essayist, historian and philosopher

1795–1881

43 quotes, most often on Character, Reading and Knowledge.

Burke said there were Three Estates in Parliament; but, in the Reporter’s Gallery yonder, there sat a Fourth Estate more important far than they all.
On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841), “The Hero as Man of Letters”
- Journalism
Everywhere the human soul stands between a hemisphere of light and another of darkness on the confines of two everlasting hostile empires, — Necessity and Free Will.
Critical and Miscellaneous Essays (1827–1855), Essays, Goethe’s Works.
- Freedom
- Philosophy
Man’s unhappiness, as I construe, comes of his greatness; it is because there is an Infinite in him, which with all his cunning he cannot quite bury under the Finite.
Sartor Resartus (1833–1834), Bk. II, ch. 9
- Happiness
We are firm believers in the maxim that for all right judgment of any man or thing it is useful, nay, essential, to see his good qualities before pronouncing on his bad.
Critical and Miscellaneous Essays (1827–1855), Goethe.
- Character
In books lies the soul of the whole Past Time; the articulate audible voice of the Past, when the body and material substance of it has altogether vanished like a dream.
The Hero as Man of Letters
- History
- Reading
The infinite, absolute character of Virtue has passed into a finite, conditional one; it is no longer a worship of the Beautiful and Good; but a calculation of the Profitable.
Signs of the Times (1829)
- Virtue
What is all Knowledge too but recorded Experience, and a product of History; of which, therefore, Reasoning and Belief, no less than Action and Passion, are essential materials?
Carlyle, Essays, On History. Quote reported in Hoyt’s New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 419-23.
- Experience
- Knowledge
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.
Sartor Resartus (1833–1834), Bk. I, ch. 5.
- Democracy
- Technology
The man of Humor sees common life, even mean life, under the new light of sportfulness and love; whatever has existence has a charm for him. Humor has justly been regarded as the finest perfection of poetic genius.
“Schiller”, first published in Fraser’s Magazine (1831).
- Genius
- Humor
Originality is a thing we constantly clamour for, and constantly quarrel with.
Critical and Miscellaneous Essays (1827–1855), Richter.
- Ideas
Speech is human, silence is divine, yet also brutish and dead: therefore we must learn both arts.
Notebooks (1830).
- Talking
It is now almost my sole rule of life to clear myself of cants and formulas, as of poisonous Nessus shirts.
Letter to His Wife (1835).
- Truth & Lies
There are depths in man which go down the length of the lowest Hell, as there are heights which reach the highest Heaven; — for are not both Heaven and Hell made out of him, everlasting Miracle and Mystery that he is?
The French Revolution. A History (1837), Pt. III, Bk. I, ch. 4.
- Good & Evil

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