Thomas Carlyle: Trending quotes

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Thomas Carlyle: 962 quotes8 likes

“Undue cultivation of the inward or Dynamical province leads to idle, visionary, impracticable courses, and, especially in rude eras, to Superstition and Fanaticism, with their long train of baleful and well-known evils. Undue cultivation of the outward, again, though less immediately prejudicial, and even for the time productive of many palpable benefits, must, in the long-run, by destroying Moral Force, which is the parent of all other Force, prove not less certainly, and perhaps still more hopelessly, pernicious. This, we take it, is the grand characteristic of our age. By our skill in Mechanism, it has come to pass, that in the management of external things we excel all other ages; while in whatever respects the pure moral nature, in true dignity of soul and character, we are perhaps inferior to most civilised ages.”

Thomas Carlyle

1820s, Signs of the Times (1829)

“Not only was Thebes built by the music of an Orpheus; but without the music of some inspired Orpheus was no city ever built, no work that man glories in ever done.”

Thomas Carlyle

Bk. III http://books.google.com/books?id=8nI5AAAAcAAJ&amp;q=%22Not+only+was+Thebes+built+by+the+music+of+an+Orpheus+but+without+the+music+of+some+inspired+Orpheus+was+no+city+ever+built+no+work+that+man+glories+in+ever+done%22&amp;pg=PA182#v=onepage, ch. 8 http://books.google.com/books?id=m2IyAQAAMAAJ&amp;q=%22Not+only+was+Thebes+built+by+the+music+of+an+Orpheus+but+without+the+music+of+some+inspired+Orpheus+was+no+city+ever+built+no+work+that+man+glories+in+ever+done%22&amp;pg=PA86#v=onepage. <br class="br">1830s, Sartor Resartus (1833–1834)

“How does the poet speak to men with power, but by being still more a man than they?”

Thomas Carlyle

Burns.
1820s, Critical and Miscellaneous Essays (1827–1855)

“It is no longer the moral, religious, spiritual condition of the people that is our concern, but their physical, practical, economical condition, as regulated by public laws.”

Thomas Carlyle

1820s, Signs of the Times (1829)

“Tell me what kind of man governs a People, you tell me, with much exactness, what the net sum-total of social worth in that People has for some time been.”

Thomas Carlyle

1850s, Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850), Downing Street (April 1, 1850)

“The Noble in the high place, the Ignoble in the low; that is, in all times and in all countries, the Almighty Maker's Law.”

Thomas Carlyle

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

“"Genius" (which means transcendent capacity of taking trouble, first of all).”

Thomas Carlyle

Life of Fredrick the Great http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~spok/metabook/fgreat.html, Bk. IV, ch. 3 (1858–1865). Sometimes misreported as &quot;Genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains&quot;; see Paul F. Boller, Jr., and John George, They Never Said It: A Book of Fake Quotes, Misquotes, &amp; Misleading Attributions (1989), p. 12. <br class="br">1860s

“Great souls are always loyally submissive, reverent to what is over them.”

Thomas Carlyle

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

“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.”

Thomas Carlyle

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

“A well-written Life is almost as rare as a well-spent one.”

Thomas Carlyle

Richter (1827).
1820s, Critical and Miscellaneous Essays (1827–1855)

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

Thomas Carlyle

Bk. III, ch. 11.
1840s, Past and Present (1843)

“Such parliamentary bagpipes I myself have heard play tunes, much to the satisfaction of the people.”

Thomas Carlyle

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

“Speak to any small man of a high, majestic Reformation, of a high majestic Luther; and forthwith he sets about “accounting” for it; how the “circumstances of the time” called for such a character, and found him, we suppose, standing girt and road-ready, to do its errand; how the “circumstances of the time” created, fashioned, floated him quietly along into the result; how, in short, this small man, had he been there, could have per formed the like himself! For it is the “force of circumstances” that does everything; the force of one man can do nothing. Now all this is grounded on little more than a metaphor. We figure Society as a “Machine,” and that mind is opposed to mind, as body is to body; whereby two, or at most ten, little minds must be stronger than one great mind. Notable absurdity! For the plain truth, very plain, we think is, that minds are opposed to minds in quite a different way; and one man that has a higher Wisdom, a hitherto unknown spiritual Truth in him, is stronger, not than ten men that have it not, or than ten thousand, but than all men that have it not; and stands among them with a quite ethereal, angelic power, as with a sword out of Heaven's own armory, sky-tempered, which no buckler, and no tower of brass, will finally withstand.”

Thomas Carlyle

1820s, Signs of the Times (1829)

“Consider how, even in the meanest sorts of Labour, the whole soul of a man is composed into a kind of real harmony, the instant he sets himself to work! Doubt, Desire, Sorrow, Remorse, Indignation, Despair itself, all these like helldogs lie beleaguering the soul of the poor dayworker, as of every man: but he bends himself with free valour against his task, and all these are stilled, all these shrink murmuring far off into their caves. The man is now a man. The blessed glow of Labour in him, is it not as purifying fire, wherein all poison is burnt up, and of sour smoke itself there is made bright blessed flame!”

Thomas Carlyle

1840s, Past and Present (1843)

“Enjoying things which are pleasant; that is not the evil: it is the reducing of our moral self to slavery by them that is.”

Thomas Carlyle

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

“Except by name, Jean Paul Friedrich Richter is little known out of Germany. The only thing connected with him, we think, that has reached this country is his saying,—imported by Madame de Staël, and thankfully pocketed by most newspaper critics, — "Providence has given to the French the empire of the land; to the English that of the sea; to the Germans that of—the air!"”

Thomas Carlyle

Richter.
1820s, Critical and Miscellaneous Essays (1827–1855)

“But leaving this, let us remark one thing which is very plain: That whatever be the uses and duties, real or supposed, of a Secretary in Parliament, his faculty to accomplish these is a point entirely unconnected with his ability to get elected into Parliament, and has no relation or proportion to it, and no concern with it whatever.”

Thomas Carlyle

1850s, Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850), Downing Street (April 1, 1850)

“Civil government does by its nature include much that is mechanical, and must be treated accordingly. We term it indeed, in ordinary language, the Machine of Society, and talk of it as the grand working wheel from which all private machines must derive, or to which they must adapt, their movements.”

Thomas Carlyle

1820s, Signs of the Times (1829)

“Religion in most countries, more or less in every country, is no longer what it was, and should be,—a thousand-voiced psalm from the heart of Man to his invisible Father, the fountain of all Goodness, Beauty, Truth, and revealed in every revelation of these; but for the most part, a wise prudential feeling grounded on mere calculation; a matter, as all others now are, of Expediency and Utility; whereby some smaller quantum of earthly enjoyment may be exchanged for a far larger quantum of celestial enjoyment. Thus Religion too is Profit, a working for wages; not Reverence, but vulgar Hope or Fear.”

Thomas Carlyle

1820s, Signs of the Times (1829)

“Yet with every allowance, one feels it difficult to see how any mortal ever could consider this Koran as a Book written in Heaven, too good for the Earth; as a well-written book, or indeed as a book at all; and not a bewildered rhapsody; written, so far as writing goes, as badly as almost any book ever was!”

Thomas Carlyle

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