Thomas Carlyle Quotes

A great man shows his greatness by the way he treats little men.

If Jesus Christ were to come today, people would not even crucify him. They would ask him to dinner, and hear what he had to say, and make fun of it.

All reform except a moral one will prove unavailing.

Maid-servants, I hear people complaining, are getting instructed in the ‘ologies’.

Transcendental moonshine.

A Parliament speaking through reporters to Buncombe and the twenty-seven millions mostly fools.

Respectable Professors of the Dismal Science.

Nature admits no lie.

Captains of Industry.

Work earnestly at anything, you will by degrees learn to work at all things.

Heaven’s splendour over his head, Hell’s darkness under his feet.

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.

I hope we English will long maintain our grand talent pour le silence.

It is well said, in every sense, that a man’s religion is the chief fact with regard to him.

Books are written by martyr-men, not for rich men alone but for all men. If we consider it, every human being has, by the nature of the case, a right to hear what other wise human beings have spoken to him. It is one of the Rights of Men; a very cruel injustice if you deny it to a man!

The English are used to suffrage; it is their panacea for all that goes wrong with them.

In epochs when cash payment has become the sole nexus of man to man.

Surely of all ‘rights of man’, this right of the ignorant man to be guided by the wiser, to be, gently or forcibly, held in the true course by him, is the indisputablest.