Thomas Carlyle (1795-12-04 – 1881-02-05) was a Scottish essayist, satirist, and historian, whose work was hugely influential during the Victorian era. He was the husband of Jane Welsh Carlyle.

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• Not all his men may sever this, It yields to friends', not monarchs', calls; My whinstone house my castle is— I have my own four walls.
  • “My Own Four Walls” (c. 1825)^[1]

• Speech is human, silence is divine, yet also brutish and dead: therefore we must learn both arts.
  • Notebooks (1830)

• It is now almost my sole rule of life to clear myself of cants and formulas, as of poisonous Nessus shirts.
  • Letter to His Wife (1835)

• The Public is an old woman. Let her maunder and mumble.
  • Journal (1835)

• A witty statesman said, you might prove anything by figures.
  • Chartism (1839), Ch. 2, Statistics

• Democracy is, by the nature of it, a self-canceling business; and it gives in the long run a net result of zero.
  • Chartism, Ch. 6, Laissez-Faire

• So here hath been dawning Another blue Day: Think wilt thou let it Slip useless away.
  • Today (1840)

• 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)

• 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
  • Latter Day Pamphlets, No. 1 (1850)

• A Parliament speaking through reporters to Buncombe and the twenty-seven millions, mostly fools.
  • Latter Day Pamphlets, No. 6

• A healthy hatred of scoundrels.
  • Latter Day Pamphlets, No. 12

• "Genius" (which means transcendent capacity of taking trouble, first of all).
  • Life of Fredrick the Great, Bk. IV, ch. 3 (1858–1865)

• Happy the people whose annals are blank in history books!
  • Life of Frederick the Great, Bk. XVI, ch. 1

• The unspeakable Turk
  • A phrase which came into common use after a letter by Carlyle on the Balkan crisis of 1875-76:
  • The only clear advice I have to give is, as I have stated, that the unspeakable Turk should be immediately struck out of the question, and the country left to honest European guidance.
    • Public letter to George Howard, published in the Times and other newspapers, 28 November 1876^[2]

• This great maxim of Philosophy he had gathered by the teaching of nature alone: That man was created to work, not to speculate, or feel, or dream.
  • Reminiscences (1881), referring to his father, James Carlyle.
  • Sometimes quoted as "Man was created to work, not to speculate, or feel, or dream; Every idle moment is treason". The second of those two clauses in fact comes from Thomas Arnold The Christian Life (1841), Lecture VI.

• A word spoken in season, at the right moment, is the mother of ages.
  • Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 561.

Critical and Miscellaneous Essays (1827–1855)

• A well-written Life is almost as rare as a well-spent one.
  • Richter (1827)

• Except by name, Jean Paul Friedrich Richter is little known out of Germany. The only thing connected with him, we think, that has reached this country is his saying,—imported by Madame de Staël, and thankfully pocketed by most newspaper critics,—"Providence has given to the French the empire of the land; to the English that of the sea; to the Germans that of—the air!"
  • Richter

• The great law of culture is: Let each become all that he was created capable of being.
  • Richter

• Originality is a thing we constantly clamour for, and constantly quarrel with; as if, observes our author himself, any originality but our own could be expected to content us ! In fact all strange thing are apt, without fault of theirs, to estrange us at first view, and unhappily scarcely anything is perfectly plain, but what is also perfectly common.
  • Richter

• He who would write heroic poems should make his whole life a heroic poem.
  • Life of Schiller

• The three great elements of modern civilization, gunpowder, printing, and the Protestant religion.
  • The State of German Literature (1827)

• Literary men are...a perpetual priesthood.
  • The State of German Literature

• I came hither [Craigenputtoch] solely with the design to simplify my way of life and to secure the independence through which I could be enabled to remain true to myself.
  • Letter to Goethe, (1828)

• In every man's writings, the character of the writer must lie recorded.
  • Goethe (1828)

• Clever men are good, but they are not the best.
  • Goethe

• We are firm believers in the maxim that for all right judgment of any man or thing it is useful, nay, essential, to see his good qualities before pronouncing on his bad.
  • Goethe

• A poet without love were a physical and metaphysical impossibility.
  • Burns (1828)

• How does the poet speak to men with power, but by being still more a man than they?
  • Burns

• His religion at best is an anxious wish,—like that of Rabelais, a great Perhaps.
  • Burns; compare: "The grand perhaps", Browning, Bishop Bloughram's Apology

• Our grand business undoubtedly is, not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand.
  • Signs of the Times (1829)

• We have oftener than once endeavoured to attach some meaning to that aphorism, vulgarly imputed to Shaftesbury, which however we can find nowhere in his works, that "ridicule is the test of truth."
  • Voltaire, Foreign Review, (1829); compare: "How comes it to pass, then, that we appear such cowards in reasoning, and are so afraid to stand the test of ridicule?", Shaftesbury, Characteristics. A Letter concerning Enthusiasm, sect. 2.; "Truth, 't is supposed, may bear all lights; and one of those principal lights or natural mediums by which things are to be viewed in order to a thorough recognition is ridicule itself", Shaftesbury, Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour, sect. 1.; "'T was the saying of an ancient sage [Gorgias Leontinus, apud Aristotle's "Rhetoric," lib. iii. c. 18], that humour was the only test of gravity, and gravity of humour. For a subject which would not bear raillery was suspicious; and a jest which would not bear a serious examination was certainly false wit", ibid. sect. 5

• … with what scientific stoicism he walks through the land of wonders, unwondering …
  • Signs of the Times

• Aesop's Fly, sitting on the axle of the chariot, has been much laughed at for exclaiming: What a dust I do raise!
  • Boswell's Life of Johnson (1832)

• Whoso belongs only to his own age, and reverences only its gilt Popinjays or smoot-smeared Mumbojumbos, must needs die with it.
  • Boswell's Life of Johnson

• The stupendous Fourth Estate, whose wide world-embracing influences what eye can take in?
  • Boswell's Life of Johnson

• All work is as seed sown; it grows and spreads, and sows itself anew.
  • Boswell's Life of Johnson

• The work we desire and prize is not the courage to die decently, but to live manfully.
  • Boswell's Life of Johnson

• There is endless merit in a man's knowing when to have done.
  • Dr. Francia (1845)

• The eye of the intellect "sees in all objects what it brought with it the means of seeing."
  • Varnhagen von Ense's Memoirs

• Love is ever the beginning of Knowledge as fire is of light.
  • Essays, Death of Goethe

• Music is well said to be the speech of angels.
  • Essays, The Opera

• A mystic bond of brotherhood makes all men one.
  • Essays, Goethe's Works

• Everywhere the human soul stands between a hemisphere of light and another of darkness on the confines of two everlasting hostile empires,—Necessity and Free Will.
  • Essays, Goethe's Works

• History is the essence of innumerable biographies.
  • On History

• The barrenest of all mortals is the sentimentalist.
  • Characteristics

• A loving heart is the beginning of all knowledge.
  • Article on Biography

• Even in the meanest sorts of Labor, the whole soul of a man is composed into a kind of real harmony the instant he sets himself to work.
  • Past and Present

• Nature admits no lie.
  • Latter Day Pamphlet, No. 5. (1850)

• The fine arts once divorcing themselves from truth are quite certain to fall mad, if they do not die.
  • Latter Day Pamphlet, No. 8. (1850)

Sir Walter Scott (1838)

• There is no heroic poem in the world but is at bottom a biography, the life of a man; also, it may be said, there is no life of a man, faithfully recorded, but is a heroic poem of its sort, rhymed or unrhymed.

• Under all speech that is good for anything there lies a silence that is better. Silence is deep as Eternity; speech is shallow as Time.

• No man lives without jostling and being jostled; in all ways he has to elbow himself through the world, giving and receiving offense.

• Literature is the Thought of thinking Souls.

• All greatness is unconscious, or it is little and naught.

• The uttered part of a man's life, let us always repeat, bears to the unuttered, unconscious part a small unknown proportion. He himself never knows it, much less do others.

• It can be said of him [Scott], when he departed he took a man's life along with him. No sounder piece of British manhood was put together in that eighteenth century of time.

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

• 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"

• Blessed is the healthy nature; it is the coherent, sweetly co-operative, not incoherent, self-distracting, self-destructive one!
• Everywhere in life, the true question is not what we gain, but what we do.
  • Essays. Goethe's Helena.

Sartor Resartus (1833–1834)

• The Book had in a high degree excited us to self-activity, which is the best effect of any book.
  • Bk. I, ch. 4

• No man who has once heartily and wholly laughed can be altogether irreclaimably bad.
  • Bk. I, ch. 4

• 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

• Man is a tool-using animal...Without tools he is nothing, with tools he is all.
  • Bk. I, ch. 5

• Be not the slave of Words.
  • Bk. I, ch. 8

• Man's unhappiness, as I construe, comes of his greatness; it is because there is an Infinite in him, which with all his cunning he cannot quite bury under the Finite.
  • Bk. I, ch. 9

• Close thy Byron; open thy Goethe.
  • Bk. I, ch. 9

• Wonder is the basis of worship.
  • Bk. I, ch. 10

• What you see, yet can not see over, is as good as infinite.
  • Bk. II, ch. 1

• Sarcasm I now see to be, in general, the language of the Devil; for which reason I have, long since, as good as renounced it.
  • Bk. II, ch. 4

• With stupidity and sound digestion man may front much.
  • Bk. II, ch. 4

• Hadst thou not Greek enough to understand thus much: The end of man is an Action, and not a Thought, though it were the noblest.
  • Bk. II, ch. 5
  • The words Carlyle put in italics are a quotation from Book 1 of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics.

• Alas! the fearful Unbelief is unbelief in yourself.
  • Bk. II, ch. 7

• 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

• Love not Pleasure; love God.
  • Bk. II, ch. 9

• "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

• As the Swiss inscription says: Sprechen ist silbern, Schweigen ist golden— "Speech is silvern, Silence is golden"; or, as I might rather express it: speech is of time, silence is of eternity.
  • Bk. III, ch. 3

• For is not a Symbol ever, to him who has eyes for it, some dimmer or clearer revelation of the God-like?
  • Bk. III, ch. 3

• The highest ensign that men ever met and embraced under, the Cross itself, had no meaning save an accidental extrinsic one.
  • Bk. III, ch. 3

• That there should one Man die ignorant who had capacity for Knowledge, this I call a tragedy.
  • Bk. III, ch. 4

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