21 Thomas Carlyle Quotes

Blessed be the God's voice; for it is true, and falsehoods have to cease before it!

Blessed is he who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness. He has a work, a life-purpose; he has found it, and will follow it! Labor is life.

A man's religion consists, not of the many things he is in doubt of and tries to believe, but of the few he is assured of and has no need of effort for believing.

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.

For a hundred that can bear adversity there is hardly one that can bear prosperity.

Labor is life: from the inmost heart of the worker rises his God-given force, the sacred celestial life-essence breathed into him by Almighty God!

If time is precious, no book that will not improve by repeated readings deserves to be read at all.

The eternal stars shine out as soon as it is dark enough.

Piety does not mean that a man should make a sour face about things, and refuse to enjoy in moderation what his Maker has given.

What is nature? Art thou not the living government of God? O Heaven, is it in very deed He then that ever speaks through thee, that lives and loves in thee, that lives and loves in me?

In idleness there is a perpetual despair.

Good Christian people, here lies for you an inestimable loan; take all heed thereof, in all carefulness, employ it: with high recompense, or else with heavy penalty, will it one day be required back.

He walked into Judaea eighteen hundred years ago; His sphere melody, flowing in wild native tones, took captive the ravished souls of men, and, being of a truth sphere melody, still flows and sounds, though now with thousandfold accompaniments and rich symphonies, through all our hearts, and modulates and divinely leads them.

A man cannot make a pair of shoes rightly unless he do it in a devout manner.

The devil has his elect.

No iron chain, or outward force of any kind, could ever compel the soul of man to believe or to disbelieve: it is his own indefeasible light, that judgment of his; he will reign and believe there by the grace of God alone!

We are the miracle of miracles, the great inscrutable mystery of God.

Show me the person you honor, for I know better by that the kind of person you are. For you show me what your idea of humanity is.

Men's hearts ought not to be set against one another, but set with one another and all against evil only.

All men, if they work not as in the great taskmaster's eye, will work wrong, and work unhappily for themselves and for you.

Intellect is the soul of man, the only immortal part of him.