Thomas Carlyle: Trending quotes (page 9)

“The English are a dumb people. They can do great acts, but not describe them.”

Thomas Carlyle

Bk. III, ch. 5.
1840s, Past and Present (1843)

People

“These are the two vices that beset Government Offices; both of them originating in insufficient Intellect,—that sad insufficiency from which, directly or indirectly, all evil whatsoever springs!”

Thomas Carlyle

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

Sadness , Spring , Evil

“War is a quarrel between two thieves too cowardly to fight their own battle; therefore they take boys from one village and another village, stick them into uniforms, equip them with guns, and let them loose like wild beasts against each other.”

Thomas Carlyle

Quoted by Emma Goldman in her essay, "Patriotism: A Menace to Liberty", chapter five of Anarchism and Other Essays (2nd revised edition, 1911).
Attributed

War , Boy , Fight

“Innumerable men had passed by, across this Universe, with a dumb vague wonder, such as the very animals may feel; or with a painful, fruitlessly inquiring wonder, such as men only feel;—till the great Thinker came, the original man, the Seer; whose shaped spoken Thought awakes the slumbering capability of all into Thought. It is ever the way with the Thinker, the spiritual Hero. What he says, all men were not far from saying, were longing to say. The Thoughts of all start up, as from painful enchanted sleep, round his Thought; answering to it, Yes, even so! Joyful to men as the dawning of day from night;—is it not, indeed, the awakening for them from no-being into being, from death into life? We still honor such a man; call him Poet, Genius, and so forth: but to these wild men he was a very magician, a worker of miraculous unexpected blessing for them; a Prophet, a God!”

Thomas Carlyle

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

Life , Death , Men , God

“in the whole world, that day, there was not a more entirely unimportant-looking pair of people than this Miner and his Wife. And yet what were all Emperors, Popes and Potentates, in comparison? There was born here, once more, a Mighty Man; whose light was to flame as the beacon over long centuries and epochs of the world; the whole world and its history was waiting for this man. It is strange, it is great.”

Thomas Carlyle

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

People , World , History , Light

“Work is the grand cure for all the maladies and miseries that ever beset mankind,—honest work, which you intend getting done.”

Thomas Carlyle

Address as Lord Rector of Edinburgh University, (April 2, 1866), reported in A dictionary of quotations in prose, edited by A. L. Ward (1889).
Attributed

“Here numerous persons, with big wigs many of them, and austere aspect, whom I take to be Professors of the Dismal Science, start up in an agitated vehement manner: but the Premier resolutely beckons them down again”

Thomas Carlyle

Latter Day Pamphlets http://www.ecn.bris.ac.uk/het/carlyle/latter.htm, No. 1 (1850).
1850s

Science , Personality

“the most remarkable piece of reading that you may be recommended to take and try if you can study is a book by Goethe—one of his last books, which he wrote when he was an old man, about seventy years of age—I think one of the most beautiful he ever wrote, full of mild wisdom, and which is found to be very touching by those who have eyes to discern and hearts to feel it. It is one of the pieces in "Wilhelm Meister's Travels." I read it through many years ago; and, of course, I had to read into it very hard when I was translating it (applause), and it has always dwelt in my mind as about the most remarkable bit of writing that I have known to be executed in these late centuries. I have often said, there are ten pages of that which, if ambition had been my only rule, I would rather have written than have written all the books that have appeared since I came into the world.”

Thomas Carlyle

1860s, On The Choice Of Books (1866)

Wisdom , Books , Age , World

“It is all work and forgotten work, this peopled, clothed, articulate-speaking, high-towered, wide-acred World. The hands of forgotten brave men have made it a World for us; they,— honour to them; they, in spite of the idle and the dastard. This English Land, here and now, is the summary of what was found of wise, and noble, and accordant with God's Truth, in all the generations of English Men. Our English Speech is speakable because there were Hero-Poets of our blood and lineage; speakable in proportion to the number of these. This Land of England has its conquerors, possessors, which change from epoch to epoch, from day to day; but its real conquerors, creators, and eternal proprietors are these following, and their representatives if you can find them: All the Heroic Souls that ever were in England, each in their degree; all the men that ever cut a thistle, drained a puddle out of England, contrived a wise scheme in England, did or said a true and valiant thing in England.”

Thomas Carlyle

1840s, Past and Present (1843)

Men , God , People , Truth

“Wise command, wise obedience: the capability of these two is the net measure of culture, and human virtue, in every man; all good lies in the possession of these two capabilities; all evil, wretchedness and ill-success in the want of these.”

Thomas Carlyle

1850s, Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850), The New Downing Street (April 15, 1850)

Evil , Success

“For is not a Symbol ever, to him who has eyes for it, some dimmer or clearer revelation of the God-like?”

Thomas Carlyle

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

God

“It is the property of every Hero, in every time, in every place and situation, that he come back to reality; that he stand upon things, and not shows of things. According as he loves, and venerates, articulately or with deep speechless thought, the awful realities of things, so will the hollow shows of things, however regular, decorous, accredited by Koreishes or Conclaves, be intolerable and detestable to him.”

Thomas Carlyle

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

Love , Reality , Time

“The force that had been lent my father he honorably expended in manful well-doing. A portion of this planet bears beneficent traces of his strong hand and strong head. Nothing that he undertook to do but he did it faithfully and like a true man. I shall look on the houses he built with a certain proud interest. They stand firm and sound to the heart all over his little district.”

Thomas Carlyle

1880s, Reminiscences (1881)

Strong , Heart , Housing

“The young generations of the world, who had in them the freshness of young children, and yet the depth of earnest men, who did not think that they had finished off all things in Heaven and Earth by merely giving them scientific names, but had to gaze direct at them there, with awe and wonder: they felt better what of divinity is in man and Nature; they, without being mad, could worship Nature, and man more than anything else in Nature.”

Thomas Carlyle

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

Men , Children , World , Nature

“Clever men are good, but they are not the best.”

Thomas Carlyle

Goethe.
1820s, Critical and Miscellaneous Essays (1827–1855)
Variant: Clever men are good, but they are not the best.

Men

“The work we desire and prize is not the courage to die decently, but to live manfully.”

Thomas Carlyle

1830s, Boswell's Life of Johnson (1832)

Courage

“For love is ever the beginning of Knowledge, as fire is of light.”

Thomas Carlyle

Carlyle, Essays, Death of Goethe. Quote reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 419-23.
1890s and attributed from posthumous publications

Love , Knowledge , Light

“Let us honor all honest human power of contrivance in its degree. The beaver intellect, so long as it steadfastly refuses to be vulpine, and answers the tempter pointing out short routes to it with an honest "No, no," is truly respectable to me; and many a highflying speaker and singer whom I have known, has appeared to me much less of a developed man than certain of my mill-owning, agricultural, commercial, mechanical, or otherwise industrial friends, who have held their peace all their days and gone on in the silent state. If a man can keep his intellect silent, and make it even into honest beaverism, several very manful moralities, in danger of wreck on other courses, may comport well with that, and give it a genuine and partly human character; and I will tell him, in these days he may do far worse with himself and his intellect than change it into beaverism, and make honest money with it.”

Thomas Carlyle

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

Money , Peace , Appearance , Change

“For being a man worth any thousand men, the response your Knox, your Cromwell gets, is an argument for two centuries whether he was a man at all. God's greatest gift to this Earth is sneeringly flung away.”

Thomas Carlyle

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

Men , God

“The barrenest of all mortals is the sentimentalist.”

Thomas Carlyle book Characteristics

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