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Thomas Carlyle Quotes (1795-1881)
Philosopher
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About Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle (December 4 1795 – February 5 1881) was a Scottish essayist, historian and philosopher of great prominence during the Victorian era. His wife was Jane Welsh Carlyle.
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Explore our curated collection of the most famous and impactful Thomas Carlyle quotes.
“The unspeakable Turk”
“A healthy hatred of scoundrels.”
“Every noble work is at first impossible.”
“Literary men are...a perpetual priesthood.”
“Literature is the Thought of thinking Souls.”
“To a shower of gold most things are penetrable.”
“History is the essence of innumerable biographies.”
“History a distillation of Rumour.”
“The barrenest of all mortals is the sentimentalist.”
Thomas Carlyle Quotes by Topic
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Thomas Carlyle on History 9 quotes
“History, a distillation of rumor.”
Thomas Carlyle on Silence 7 quotes
View all 7 quotes on Silence →Thomas Carlyle on Work 7 quotes
“All work, even cotton-spinning, is noble; work is alone noble.”
Thomas Carlyle on Journalism 5 quotes
View all 5 quotes on Journalism →Thomas Carlyle on Books 5 quotes
“The true University of these days is a collection of Books.”
Thomas Carlyle on Character 4 quotes
View all 4 quotes on Character →Thomas Carlyle on Government 4 quotes
“There are but two ways of paying debt—increase of industry in raising income, increase of thrift in laying out.”
Thomas Carlyle on Life 3 quotes
“A well-written life is almost as rare as a well-spent one.”
Thomas Carlyle on Heroes 3 quotes
“Worship of a hero is transcendent admiration of a great man.”
Thomas Carlyle on Religion 3 quotes
“His religion at best is an anxious wish; like that of Rabelais, "a great Perhaps".”
Thomas Carlyle on Man 3 quotes
“No sadder proof can be given by a man of his own littleness than disbelief in great men.”
Thomas Carlyle on Truth 3 quotes
“A man protesting against error is on the way to uniting himself with all men who believe in truth.”
What Thomas Carlyle Said About Others
Discover personal opinions Thomas Carlyle shared regarding contemporaries.
Thomas Carlyle on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 3 quotes
View all 3 quotes on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe →Thomas Carlyle on Edward Gibbon 3 quotes
“I read Gibbon, and then first clearly saw that Christianity was not true.”
Thomas Carlyle on Novalis 3 quotes
“Novalis is a figure of such importance in German Literature, that no student of it can pass him by without attention.”
Thomas Carlyle on Historian 2 quotes
“In a certain sense all men are historians.”
Thomas Carlyle on William Shakespeare 2 quotes
“If I say that Shakespeare is the greatest of intellects, I have said all concerning him. But there is more in Shakespeare's intellect than we have yet seen. It is what I call an unconscious intellect; there is more virtue in it than he himself is aware of.”
Thomas Carlyle on Alessandro Cagliostro 2 quotes
“Accordingly, what Century, since the end of the Roman world, which also was a time of skepticism, simulacra and universal decadence, so abounds with Quacks as that Eighteenth? Consider them, with their tumid sentimental vaporing about virtue, benevolence,—the wretched Quack-squadron, Cagliostro at the head of them!”
Thomas Carlyle on Muhammad 2 quotes
“How one man single-handedly, could weld warring tribes and Bedouins into a most powerful and civilized nation in less than two decades? The lies which well-meaning zeal has heaped round this man are disgraceful to ourselves only. A silent great soul, one of that who cannot but be in earnest. He was to kindle the world; the Worlds Maker had ordered so.”
Thomas Carlyle on Victor Hugo
“A glittering humbug.”
Thomas Carlyle on Maximilien Robespierre
“The seagreen Incorruptible.”
Thomas Carlyle on William Pitt, 1st Earl of Chatham
“It is a considerable fact in the history of the world, that he was for four years King of England.”
Thomas Carlyle on William Ewart Gladstone
“An almost spectral kind of phantasm of a man — nothing in him but forms and ceremonies and outside wrappings.”
Quotes About Thomas Carlyle
Gain deeper perspective through quotes about Thomas Carlyle from others.
Lord Acton on Thomas Carlyle 2 quotes
“[T]here is no English historian who has a right to be judged by a higher or severer test, for no one has spoken more deeply and truly on the character and dignity of history... He showed an intelligence of things which no other English historian has understood. He dwelt upon the invisible impersonal forces that act in history, and appreciated, often with rare sagacity, the true significance and sequence of events. But he was unable to follow the course he had pointed out, and failed even to maintain himself on the high ground he had reached. He could not distinguish in history what was unknown to him in religion: thus he fell to the exclusive contemplation of certain typical individuals, whose greatness appeared to supply what he wanted, an object of worship, and personified invisible elements in visible men. And now the belongings of his hero possess so great an importance that they distract his attention from him; he invests with an absurd dignity not only his relations, but their goods and chattels, and allows merely material things to eclipse the human interest of his subject. It is a history made up of eccentricities. This is the way that Mr. Dickens writes novels; for whom the spectacles of an elderly gentleman, a pair of mulberry coloured hose, or a wandering American pig, have greater attractions than any psychological problem.”
Matthew Arnold on Thomas Carlyle 4 quotes
“These are damned times—everything is against one—the height to which knowledge is come, the spread of luxury, our physical enervation, the absence of great natures, the unavoidable contact with millions of small ones, newspapers, cities, light profligate friends, moral desperadoes like Carlyle.”
Walter Besant on Thomas Carlyle
“The influence of Carlyle and Maurice was nothing less than socialistic. Those who at one-and-twenty pored over the Sartor Resartus, Past and Present, and Chartism, became distinctly Socialists—not such gentry as bawl the Gospel of Destruction and break club windows, but Socialists of the highest type, to whom nothing of humanity is common or unclean.”
Otto von Bismarck on Thomas Carlyle
“As you introduced Schiller to your countrymen, so you have placed before the Germans our great Prussian King in his full figure; like a living statue. What you said long years ago of the "Hero as Man of Letters"—that he is under the noble obligation to be true,—has been fulfilled in yourself; but, more fortunate than those of whom you then spoke, you may rejoice in what you have accomplished, and continue your work in full vigour, which may God long preserve to you. Accept with my cordial congratulations the assurance of my sincere respect.”
Robert Blatchford on Thomas Carlyle
“One book especially, given to me by a sergeant of ours, had a strong influence on me. This was Carlyle's Heroes and Hero Worship. I read that over and over and then bought a cheap copy of Sartor Resartus. I remember one evening, after reading the famous meditation on the sleeping city, I threw the book across the room. I felt I should never be able to write like that.”
J. W. Burrow on Thomas Carlyle
“Carlyle, to the modern reader, is a paradox, an extraordinary compound of the archaic, or, worse, the deeply unfashionable, and elements we think of as distinctly modern. Swift and Rabelais before him suggest parallels, as does Whitman after. Carlyle's classmates nicknamed him "the Dean" in recognition of a Swiftian quality. Relations to earlier historiography are harder to see, though Carlyle greatly admired Schiller and came towards the end of a long period of erosion of the idea of the dignity of history. Carlyle has much time for the sublime, none for dignity. It is not surprising that the classical republican historians make no figure in his work, despite the French revolutionaries' devotion to them. The chief borrowing is, rather surprisingly, from Florence: Carlyle a number of times employs the carroccio...as an image of a symbolic rallying point. For the rest, no humanist he, or philosophe, but an Old Testament-nurtured Puritan, at home with the mundane and the transcendental. Humorous, hectoring and at times almost frenzied, he found one guide to his monumental task in Homer's epic realism, and for the rest he went his own way. At his best – and he has more than one kind of best – his history and his prose have enormous imaginative energy, whose degenerations into bombast are the price the reader pays.”
Samuel Butler on Thomas Carlyle
G. K. Chesterton on Thomas Carlyle 4 quotes
“He came and spoke a word, and the chatter of rationalism stopped, and the sums would no longer work out and be ended. He was a breath of Nature turning in her sleep under the load of civilisation, a stir in the very stillness of God to tell us He was still there.”
George Eliot on Thomas Carlyle
Ralph Waldo Emerson on Thomas Carlyle 2 quotes
“As a literary artist he has great merits, beginning with the main one that he never wrote one dull line. How well-read, how adroit, what thousand arts in his one art of writing.”
Friedrich Engels on Thomas Carlyle 3 quotes
“Search as you will, Carlyle's book is the only one which strikes a human chord, presents human relations and shows traces of a human point of view.”
E. M. Forster on Thomas Carlyle
“They (the Nazis) would put it to our young people that our best writers were Nazis at heart, and so try to warp their minds. It is interesting, in this connextion, to read what Nazi critics have been saying lately about Shakespeare and Carlyle. They have not got a bad case over Carlyle - he had something of the Nazi about him: he despised individualism and liberty and worshipped the dictator-hero. However, Carlyle also said "Thought is stronger than artillery-parks", and this side of him the Nazis don't mention.”
Disputed Quotes
Quotes attributed to Thomas Carlyle that are questionable.
About Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle (December 4 1795 – February 5 1881) was a Scottish essayist, historian and philosopher of great prominence during the Victorian era. His wife was Jane Welsh Carlyle.