Thomas Carlyle Quotes

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Thomas Carlyle

Profession : Philosopher

Birth : December 4, 1795

Reform is not pleasant, but grievous; no person can reform themselves without suffering and hard work, how much less a nation.

Thomas Carlyle

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

Thomas Carlyle

Thought once awakened does not again slumber; unfolds itself into a System of Thought; grows, in man after man, generation after generation, - till its full stature is reached, and such System of Thought can grow no farther, but must give place to another.

Thomas Carlyle

Men seldom, or rather never for a length of time and deliberately, rebel against anything that does not deserve rebelling against.

Thomas Carlyle

No violent extreme endures.

Thomas Carlyle

It is a vain hope to make people happy by politics.

Thomas Carlyle

If you do not wish a man to do a thing, you had better get him to talk about it; for the more men talk, the more likely they are to do nothing else.

Thomas Carlyle

Love is the only game that is not called on account of darkness.

Thomas Carlyle

Originality is a thing we constantly clamour for, and constantly quarrel with.

Thomas Carlyle

War is a quarrel between two thieves too cowardly to fight their own battle.

Thomas Carlyle

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

Thomas Carlyle

Writing is a dreadful labor, yet not so dreadful as Idleness.

Thomas Carlyle

No man who has once heartily and wholly laughed can be altogether irreclaimably bad.

Thomas Carlyle

History, a distillation of rumour.

Thomas Carlyle

I don't pretend to understand the Universe - it's a great deal bigger than I am.

Thomas Carlyle

It were a real increase of human happiness, could all young men from the age of nineteen be covered under barrels, or rendered otherwise invisible; and there left to follow their lawful studies and callings, till they emerged, sadder and wiser, at the age of twenty-five.

Thomas Carlyle

Everywhere the human soul stands between a hemisphere of light and another of darkness; on the confines of the two everlasting empires, necessity and free will.

Thomas Carlyle

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

Thomas Carlyle

Narrative is linear, but action has breadth and depth as well as height and is solid.

Thomas Carlyle

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

Thomas Carlyle