113 Quotes By Thomas Carlyle


The work an unknown good man has done is like a vein of water flowing hidden underground, secretly making the ground green.
Thomas Carlyle on good

Clever men are good, but they are not the best.
Thomas Carlyle on good

For all right judgment of any man or things it is useful, nay, essential, to see his good qualities before pronouncing on his bad.
Thomas Carlyle on good

Good breeding differs, if at all, from high breeding only as it gracefully remembers the rights of others, rather than gracefully insists on its own rights.
Thomas Carlyle on good

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.
Thomas Carlyle on good

What you see, but can't see over is as good as infinite.
Thomas Carlyle on good

For, if a good speaker, never so eloquent, does not see into the fact, and is not speaking the truth of that - is there a more horrid kind of object in creation?
Thomas Carlyle on good

In the long-run every Government is the exact symbol of its People, with their wisdom and unwisdom we have to say, Like People like Government.
Thomas Carlyle on government

I've got a great ambition to die of exhaustion rather than boredom.
Thomas Carlyle on great

The three great elements of modern civilization, Gun powder, Printing, and the Protestant religion.
Thomas Carlyle on great

No great man lives in vain. The history of the world is but the biography of great men.
Thomas Carlyle on great

The old cathedrals are good, but the great blue dome that hangs over everything is better.
Thomas Carlyle on great

Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together.
Thomas Carlyle on great

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

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

All great peoples are conservative.
Thomas Carlyle on great

There is a great discovery still to be made in literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write.
Thomas Carlyle on great

History shows that the majority of people that have done anything great have passed their youth in seclusion.
Thomas Carlyle on great

No sadder proof can be given by a man of his own littleness than disbelief in great men.
Thomas Carlyle on great

I grow daily to honour facts more and more, and theory less and less. A fact, it seems to me, is a great thing a sentence printed, if not by God, then at least by the Devil.
Thomas Carlyle on great