Thomas Carlyle: Trending quotes

Thomas Carlyle trending quotes. Read the latest quotes in collection

Thomas Carlyle: 962 quotes8 likes

“Mahomet can work no miracles; he often answers impatiently: I can work no miracles. I? "I am a Public Preacher;" appointed to preach this doctrine to all creatures. Yet the world, as we can see, had really from of old been all one great miracle to him. Look over the world, says he; is it not wonderful, the work of Allah; wholly "a sign to you," if your eyes were open!”

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

“The suffering man ought really 'to consume his own smoke'; there is no good in emitting smoke till you have made it into fire, — which, in the metaphorical sense too, all smoke is capable of becoming!”

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

“Every noble work is at first impossible.”

From Past and Present (1843), Chapter XI : Labour
The Wikipedia page for Thomas Carlyle has links to the Project Gutenberg version of this book
1840s

“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.”

Bk. I, ch. 5.
1830s, Sartor Resartus (1833–1834)

“He that works and does some Poem, not he that merely says one, is worthy of the name of Poet.”

Introduction to Cromwell's Letters and Speeches (1845).
1840s

“"Do the Duty which lies nearest thee," which thou knowest to be a Duty! Thy second Duty will already have become clearer.”

Bk. II, ch. 9.
1830s, Sartor Resartus (1833–1834)

“No Dilettantism in this Mahomet; it is a business of Reprobation and Salvation with him, of Time and Eternity: he is in deadly earnest about it! Dilettantism, hypothesis, speculation, a kind of amateur-search for Truth, toying and coquetting with Truth: this is the sorest sin. The root of all other imaginable sins. It consists in the heart and soul of the man never having been open to Truth; — "living in a vain show." Such a man not only utters and produces falsehoods, but is himself a falsehood. The rational moral principle, spark of the Divinity, is sunk deep in him, in quiet paralysis of life-death.”

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

“A witty statesman said, you might prove anything by figures.”

Source: 1840s, Chartism (1840), Ch. 2, Statistics.

“… I must say, it [the Koran] is as toilsome reading as I ever undertook. A wearisome confused jumble, crude, incondite; endless iterations, long-windedness, entanglement; most crude, incondite; — insupportable stupidity, in short! Nothing but a sense of duty could carry any European through the Koran … It is the confused ferment of a great rude human soul; rude, untutored, that cannot even read; but fervent, earnest, struggling vehemently to utter itself in words … We said "stupid:" yet natural stupidity is by no means the character of Mahomet's Book; it is natural uncultivation rather. The man has not studied speaking; in the haste and pressure of continual fighting, has not time to mature himself into fit speech … The man was an uncultured semi-barbarous Son of Nature, much of the Bedouin still clinging to him: we must take him for that. But for a wretched Simulacrum, a hungry Impostor without eyes or heart … we will not and cannot take him. Sincerity, in all senses, seems to me the merit of the Koran; what had rendered it precious to the wild Arab men … Curiously, through these incondite masses of tradition, vituperation, complaint, ejaculation in the Koran, a vein of true direct insight, of what we might almost call poetry, is found straggling.”

Thomas Carlyle book On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and The Heroic in History

Thomas Carlyle, "On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History" (1841), pg. 64-67
1840s

“there is an irrepressible tendency in every man to develop himself according to the magnitude which Nature has made him of; to speak out, to act out, what nature has laid in him. This is proper, fit, inevitable; nay it is a duty, and even the summary of duties for a man. The meaning of life here on earth might be defined as consisting in this: To unfold your self, to work what thing you have the faculty for.”

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

“It depends on what we read, after all manner of Professors have done their best for us.”

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

“Men, I say, never did believe idle songs, never risked their soul's life on allegories: men in all times, especially in early earnest times, have had an instinct for detecting quacks, for detesting quacks.”

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

“O poor mortals, how ye make this earth bitter for each other.”

Pt. I, Bk. V, ch. 5.
1830s, The French Revolution. A History (1837)

“History is the essence of innumerable biographies.”

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

“To the very last, he had a kind of idea; that, namely, of la carrière ouverte aux talents,—the tools to him that can handle them.”

On Napoleon; Carlyle in his essay on Mirabeau, 1837, quotes this from a "New England book".
1830s, Sir Walter Scott (1838)

“Great men are the inspired (speaking and acting) texts of that divine Book of Revelations, wherof a chapter is completed from epoch to epoch, and by some named History.”

Bk. II, ch. 8.
1830s, Sartor Resartus (1833–1834)

“Henry of Essex's religion was the Inner Light or Moral Conscience of his own soul; such as is vouchsafed still to all souls of men;—which Inner Light shone here 'through such intellectual and other media' as there were; producing 'Phantasms,' Kircherean Visual-Spectra, according to circumstances! It is so with all men. The clearer my Inner Light may shine, through the less turbid media; the fewer Phantasms it may produce,—the gladder surely shall I be, and not the sorrier! Hast thou reflected, O serious reader, Advanced- Liberal or other, that the one end, essence, use of all religion past, present and to come, was this only: To keep that same Moral Conscience or Inner Light of ours alive and shining.”

1840s, Past and Present (1843)

“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.”

On History.
1820s, Critical and Miscellaneous Essays (1827–1855)
Variant: 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.

“On the dust of our heroic ancestors we too sit ballot-boxing, saying to one another, It is well, it is well! By inheritance of their noble struggles, we have been permitted to sit slothful so long. By noble toil, not by shallow laughter and vain talk, they made this English Existence from a savage forest into an arable inhabitable field for us; and we, idly dreaming it would grow spontaneous crops forever,—find it now in too questionable a state.”

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

“The history of the world is but the biography of great men.”

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