Thomas Carlyle quotes

“Speech is human, silence is divine, yet also brutish and dead: therefore we must learn both arts.”

— Thomas Carlyle

“Talk that does not end in any kind of action is better suppressed altogether.”

— Thomas Carlyle

“The real use of gunpowder is to make all men tall.”

— Thomas Carlyle

“The spiritual is the parent of the practical.”

— Thomas Carlyle

“The world is a republic of mediocrities, and always was.”

— Thomas Carlyle

“When the oak is felled the whole forest echoes with it fall, but a hundred acorns are sown in silence by an unnoticed breeze.”

— Thomas Carlyle

“Be not a slave of words.”

— Thomas Carlyle

“Conviction never so excellent, is worthless until it coverts itself into conduct.”

— Thomas Carlyle

“Every new opinion, at its starting, is precisely in a minority of one.”

— Thomas Carlyle

“Everywhere in life, the true question is not what we gain, but what we do.”

— Thomas Carlyle

“History, a distillation of rumour.”

— Thomas Carlyle

“Not brute force but only persuasion and faith are the kings of this world.”

— Thomas Carlyle

“Nothing that was worthy in the past departs; no truth or goodness realized by man ever dies, or can die.”

— Thomas Carlyle

“Silence is as deep as eternity, speech a shallow as time.”

— Thomas Carlyle

“Teach a parrot the terms 'supply and demand' and you've got an economist.”

— Thomas Carlyle

“The cut of a garment speaks of intellect and talent and the color of temperament and heart.”

— Thomas Carlyle

“The difference between Socrates and Jesus? The great conscious and the immeasurably great unconscious.”

— Thomas Carlyle

“The true university of these days is a collection of books.”

— Thomas Carlyle

“To us also, through every star, through every blade of grass, is not God made visible if we will open our minds and our eyes.”

— Thomas Carlyle

“Weak eyes are fondest of glittering objects.”

— Thomas Carlyle

“Woe to him that claims obedience when it is not due; woe to him that refuses it when it is.”

— Thomas Carlyle

“Do the duty which lies nearest to you, the second duty will then become clearer.”

— Thomas Carlyle

“Happy the people whose annals are vacant.”

— Thomas Carlyle

“If an eloquent speaker speak not the truth, is there a more horrid kind of object in creation?”

— Thomas Carlyle

“Imagination is a poor matter when it has to part company with understanding.”

— Thomas Carlyle

“In books lies the soul of the whole past time.”

— Thomas Carlyle

“Isolation is the sum total of wretchedness to a man.”

— Thomas Carlyle

“It is a strange trade that of advocacy. Your intellect, your highest heavenly gift is hung up in the shop window like a loaded pistol for sale.”

— Thomas Carlyle

“Laughter is one of the very privileges of reason, being confined to the human species.”

— Thomas Carlyle

“Let each become all that he was created capable of being.”

— Thomas Carlyle