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“The highest ensign that men ever met and embraced under, the Cross itself, had no meaning save an accidental extrinsic one.”

Thomas Carlyle

Bk. III, ch. 3.
1830s, Sartor Resartus (1833–1834)

“To reconcile Despotism with Freedom:—well, is that such a mystery? Do you not already know the way? It is to make your Despotism just. Rigorous as Destiny; but just too, as Destiny and its Laws. The Laws of God: all men obey these, and have no 'Freedom' at all but in obeying them. The way is already known, part of the way;—and courage and some qualities are needed for walking on it!”

Thomas Carlyle

1840s, Past and Present (1843)

“If we read History with any degree of thoughtfulness, we shall find that checks and balances of Profit and Loss have never been the grand agents with men, that they have never been roused into deep, thorough, all-pervading efforts by any computable prospect of Profit and Loss, for any visible, finite object; but always for some invisible and infinite one.”

Thomas Carlyle

1820s, Signs of the Times (1829)

“Why not? What is to hinder this Samson from governing? There is in him what far transcends all apprenticeships; in the man himself there exists a model of governing, something to govern by! There exists in him a heart-abhorrence of whatever is incoherent, pusillanimous, unveracious,—that is to say, chaotic, _un_governed; of the Devil, not of God. A man of this kind cannot help governing! He has the living ideal of a governor in him; and the incessant necessity of struggling to unfold the same out of him.”

Thomas Carlyle

1840s, Past and Present (1843)

“men's hearts ought not to be set against one another; but set with one another, and all against the Evil Thing only.”

Thomas Carlyle

1840s, Past and Present (1843)

“And wonderful it is to see how the Ideal or Soul, place it in what ugliest Body you may, will irradiate said Body with its own nobleness; will gradually, incessantly, mould, modify, new-form or reform said ugliest Body, and make it at last beautiful, and to a certain degree divine!”

Thomas Carlyle

1840s, Past and Present (1843)

“The Age of Miracles is forever here!”

Thomas Carlyle

1840s, Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840), The Hero as Priest

“Has any man, or any society of men, a truth to speak, a piece of spiritual work to do; they can nowise proceed at once and with the mere natural organs, but must first call a public meeting, appoint committees, issue prospectuses, eat a public dinner; in a word, construct or borrow machinery, wherewith to speak it and do it. Without machinery, they were hopeless, helpless.”

Thomas Carlyle

1820s, Signs of the Times (1829)

“For the Norse people, the Man now named Odin, and Chief Norse God, we fancy, was such a man. A Teacher, and Captain of soul and of body; a Hero, of worth immeasurable; admiration for whom, transcending the known bounds, became adoration. Has he not the power of articulate Thinking; and many other powers, as yet miraculous? So, with boundless gratitude, would the rude Norse heart feel. Has he not solved for them the sphinx-enigma of this Universe; given assurance to them of their own destiny there? By him they know now what they have to do here, what to look for hereafter. Existence has become articulate, melodious by him; he first has made Life alive!—We may call this Odin, the origin of Norse Mythology: Odin, or whatever name the First Norse Thinker bore while he was a man among men. His view of the Universe once promulgated, a like view starts into being in all minds; grows, keeps ever growing, while it continues credible there. In all minds it lay written, but invisibly, as in sympathetic ink; at his word it starts into visibility in all. Nay, in every epoch of the world, the great event, parent of all others, is it not the arrival of a Thinker in the world—!”

Thomas Carlyle

1840s, Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840), The Hero as Divinity

“Truly it is a sad thing for a people, as for a man, to fall into Scepticism, into dilettantism, insincerity; not to know Sincerity when they see it. For this world, and for all worlds, what curse is so fatal?”

Thomas Carlyle

1840s, Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840), The Hero As King

“For the Scepticism, as I said, is not intellectual only; it is moral also; a chronic atrophy and disease of the whole soul. A man lives by believing something; not by debating and arguing about many things.”

Thomas Carlyle

1840s, Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840), The Hero as Man of Letters

“And yet I will venture to believe that in no time, since the beginnings of Society, was the lot of those same dumb millions of toilers so entirely unbearable as it is even in the days now passing over us. It is not to die, or even to die of hunger, that makes a man wretched; many men have died; all men must die,—the last exit of us all is in a Fire-Chariot of Pain. But it is to live miserable we know not why; to work sore and yet gain nothing; to be heart-worn, weary, yet isolated, unrelated, girt in with a cold universal Laissez-faire: it is to die slowly all our life long, imprisoned in a deaf, dead, Infinite Injustice, as in the accursed iron belly of a Phalaris' Bull! This is and remains forever intolerable to all men whom God has made. Do we wonder at French Revolutions, Chartisms, Revolts of Three Days? The times, if we will consider them, are really unexampled.”

Thomas Carlyle

1840s, Past and Present (1843)

“it is our fatalest misery just now, not easily alterable, and yet urgently requiring to be altered, That no British man can attain to be a Statesman, or Chief of Workers, till he has first proved himself a Chief of Talkers: which mode of trial for a Worker, is it not precisely, of all the trials you could set him upon, the falsest and unfairest?”

Thomas Carlyle

1850s, Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850), Stump Orator (May 1, 1850)

“Happy the people whose annals are blank in history books!”

Thomas Carlyle

Life of Frederick the Great, Bk. XVI, ch. 1.
1860s

“I purpose now, while the impression is more pure and clear within me, to mark down the main things I can recollect of my father. To myself, if I live to after-years, it may be instructive and interesting, as the past grows ever holier the farther we leave it. My mind is calm enough to do it deliberately, and to do it truly. The thought of that pale earnest face which even now lies stiffened into death in that bed at Scotsbrig, with the Infinite all of worlds looking down on it, will certainly impel me. It is good to know how a true spirit will vindicate itself with truth and freedom through what obstructions soever; how the acorn cast carelessly into the wilder-ness will make room for itself and grow to be an oak. This is one of the cases belonging to that class, "the lives of remarkable men," in which it has been said, "paper and ink should least of all be spared." I call a man remarkable who becomes a true workman in this vineyard of the Highest. Be his work that of palace-building and kingdom-founding, or only of delving and ditching, to me it is no matter, or next to none. All human work is transitory, small in itself, contemptible. Only the worker thereof, and the spirit that dwelt in him, is significant. I proceed without order, or almost any forethought, anxious only to save what I have left and mark it as it lies in me.”

Thomas Carlyle

1880s, Reminiscences (1881)

“This great maxim of philosophy he had gathered by the teaching of nature alone — that man was created to work, not to speculate or feel or dream. Accordingly, he set his whole heart thitherwards. He did work wisely and unweariedly, and perhaps performed more with the tools he had than any man I now know.”

Thomas Carlyle

1880s, Reminiscences (1881)

“Paris, which for sixty years past has been the City of Insurrections. The French People had plumed themselves on being, whatever else they were not, at least the chosen "soldiers of liberty," who took the lead of all creatures in that pursuit, at least; and had become, as their orators, editors and litterateurs diligently taught them, a People whose bayonets were sacred, a kind of Messiah People, saving a blind world in its own despite, and earning for themselves a terrestrial and even celestial glory very considerable indeed.”

Thomas Carlyle

1850s, Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850), The Present Time (February 1, 1850)

“Fire is the best of servents; but what a master!”

Thomas Carlyle

Bk. II, ch. 9.
1840s, Past and Present (1843)

“To this man life is already as earnest and awful, and beautiful and terrible, as death.”

Thomas Carlyle

1840s, Past and Present (1843)

“To a shower of gold most things are penetrable.”

Thomas Carlyle

Pt. I, Bk. III, ch. 7.
1830s, The French Revolution. A History (1837)