Thomas Carlyle Men Quotations

Make yourself an honest man, and then you may be sure there is one less rascal in the world.

Isolation is the sum total of wretchedness to a man.

A man willing to work, and unable to find work, is perhaps the saddest sight that fortune's inequality exhibits under this sun.

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

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.

A man without a goal is like a ship without a rudder.

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

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

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

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.

To reform a world, to reform a nation, no wise man will undertake; and all but foolish men know, that the only solid, though a far slower reformation, is what each begins and perfects on himself.

Foolish men imagine that because judgment for an evil thing is delayed, there is no justice; but only accident here below. Judgment for an evil thing is many times delayed some day or two, some century or two, but it is sure as life, it is sure as death.

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

Of all acts of man repentance is the most divine. The greatest of all faults is to be conscious of none.

Man is a tool-using animal. Without tools he is nothing, with tools he is all.

A man's felicity consists not in the outward and visible blessing of fortune, but in the inward and unseen perfections and riches of the mind.

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.

The real use of gunpowder is to make all men tall.

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

The man of life upright has a guiltless heart, free from all dishonest deeds or thought of vanity.

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

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.

The courage we desire and prize is not the courage to die decently, but to live manfully.

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

Men do less than they ought, unless they do all that they can.

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

The end of man is action, and not thought, though it be of the noblest.

Man is, properly speaking, based upon hope, he has no other possession but hope; this world of his is emphatically the place of hope.

Foolish men imagine that because judgement for an evil thing is delayed, there is no justice; but only accident here below. Judgement for an evil thing is many times delayed some day or two, some century or two, but it is sure as life, it is sure as

What I loved in the man was his health, his unity with himself; all people and all things seemed to find their quite peaceable adjustment with him, not a proud domineering one, as after doubtful contest, but a spontaneous-looking peaceable, even humble one.

Silence is the eternal duty of man.

When I gaze into the stars, they look down upon me with pity from their serene and silent spaces, like eyes glistening with tears over the little lot of man. Thousands of generations, all as noisy as our own, have been swallowed up by time, and there remains no record of them any more. Yet Arcturus and Orion, Sirius and Pleiades, are still shining in their courses, clear and young, as when the shepherd first noted them in the plain of Shinar!

It is through symbols that man consciously or unconsciously lives, works and has his being.

Wise man was he who counselled that speculation should have free course, and look fearlessly towards all the thirty-two points of the compass, whithersoever and howsoever it listed.

Nakedness, hunger, distress of all kinds, death itself have been cheerfully suffered, when the heart was right. It is the feeling of injustice that is insupportable to all men.

Men are grown mechanical in head and in the heart, as well as in the hand. They have lost faith in individual endeavour, and in natural force of any kind.

Man's earthly interests,'are all hooked and buttoned together, and held up, by Clothes.

The great silent man! Looking round on the noisy inanity of the world,--words with little meaning, actions with little worth,--one loves to reflect on the great Empire of Silence.

Whoso has sixpence is sovereign (to the length of sixpence) over all men; commands cooks to feed him, philosophers to teach him, kings to mount guard over him,to the length of sixpence.

There is endless merit in a man's knowing when to have done.

Be a pattern to others, and then all will go well; for as a whole city is affected by the licentious passions and vices of great men, so it is likewise reformed by their moderation.

God gave you that gifted tongue of yours, and set it between your teeth, to make known your true meaning to us, not to be rattled like a muffin man's bell.

A man must indeed be a hero to appear such in the eyes of his valet.

It is well said, in every sense, that a man's religion is the chief fact with regard to him.

Fame, we may understand, is no sure test of merit, but only a probability of such; it is an accident, not a property of man.

I never heard tell of any clever man that came of entirely stupid people.

Not only was Thebes built by the music of an Orpheus; but without the music of some inspired Orpheus was no city ever built, no work that man glories in ever done.

Prayer is and remains always a native and deepest impulse of the soul of man.

In the poorest cottage are Books: is one Book, wherein for several thousands of years the spirit of man has found light, and nourishment, and an interpreting response to whatever is Deepest in him.

A man with a half volition goes backwards and forwards, and makes no way on the smoothest road; a man with a whole volition advances on the roughest, and will reach his purpose, if there be even a little worthiness in it. The man without a purpose is like a ship without a rudder - a waif, a nothing, a no man. Have a purpose in life and having it, throw such strength of mind and muscle into your work as God has given you.

Man always worships something; always he sees the Infinite shadowed forth in something finite; and indeed can and must so see it in any finite thing, once tempt him well to fix his eyes thereon.

A fair day's wage for a fair day's work": it is as just a demand as governed men ever made of governing. It is the everlasting right of man.

Worship of a hero is transcendent admiration of a great man.

Great men are the inspired texts of that divine Book of Revelations, whereof a chapter is completed from epoch to epoch, and by some named History.

Great men are the modelers, patterns, and in a wide sense creators, of whatsoever the general mass of men contrived to do and attain.

I have seen gleams in the face and eyes of the man that have let you look into a higher country.

No man sees far, most see no farther than their noses.

A man perfects himself by working. Foul jungles are cleared away, fair seed-fields rise instead, and stately cities; and with the man himself first ceases to be a jungle, and foul unwholesome desert thereby. The man is now a man.

No sooner does a great man depart, and leave his character as public property, than a crowd of little men rushes towards it. There they are gathered together, blinking up to it with such vision as they have, scanning it from afar, hovering round it this way and that, each cunningly endeavoring, by all arts, to catch some reflex of it in the little mirror of himself.

What, in the devil's name, is the use of respectability, with never so many gigs and silver spoons, if thou inwardly art the pitifulness of all men?

Statistics, one may hope, will improve gradually, and become good for something. Meanwhile, it is to be feared the crabbed satirist was partly right, as things go: "A judicious man," says he, "looks at Statistics, not to get knowledge, but to save himself from having ignorance foisted on him."

Is man’s civilization only a wrappage, through which the savage nature of him can still burst, infernal as ever?

The purpose of man is in action not thought.

For man is not the creature and product of Mechanism; but, in a far truer sense, its creator and producer.

Man is emphatically a proselytizing creature.

Dinners are defined as 'the ultimate act of communion;' men that can have communion in nothing else, can sympathetically eat together, can still rise into some glow of brotherhood over food and wine.

Battles, in these ages, are transacted by mechanism; with the slightest possible development of human individuality or spontaneity; men now even die, and kill one another, in an artificial manner.

Let a man try faithfully, manfully to be right, he will daily grow more and more right. It is at the bottom of the condition on which all men have to cultivate themselves.

Infinite is the help man can yield to man.

The suffering man ought really to consume his own smoke; there is no good in emitting smoke till you have made it into fire.

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

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!

The mystical bond of brotherhood makes all men brothers.

Friendship, in the old heroic sense of that term, no longer exists. It is in reality no longer expected or recognized as a virtue among men.

Action hangs, as it were, dissolved in speech, in thoughts whereof speech is the shadow; and precipitates itself therefrom. The kind of speech in a man betokens the kind of action you will get from him.

The most unhappy of all men is the man who cannot tell what he is going to do, who has got no work cut-out for him in the world, and does not go into it. For work is the grand cure of all the maladies and miseries that ever beset mankind,honest work, which you intend getting done.

Only perhaps in the United States, which alone of countries can do without governing,every man being at least able to live, and move off into the wilderness, let Congress jargon as it will,can such a form of so-called Government continue for any length of time to torment men with the semblance, when the indispensable substance is not there.

Does not every true man feel that he is himself made higher by doing reverence to what is really above him?

... There is always hope in a man who actually and earnestly works.

I should say sincerity, a deep, great, genuine sincerity, is the first characteristic of all men in any way heroic.

There is something in man which your science cannot satisfy.

The Great Man's sincerity is of the kind he cannot speak of, is not conscious of: nay, I suppose, he is conscious rather of insincerity; for what man can walk accurately by the law of truth for one day? No, the Great Man does not boast himself sincere, far from that; perhaps does not ask himself if he is so: I would say rather, his sincerity does not depend on himself; he cannot help being sincere!

In the true Literary Man there is thus ever, acknowledged or not by the world, a sacredness: he is the light of the world; the world's Priest; -- guiding it, like a sacred Pillar of Fire, in its dark pilgrimage through the waste of Time.

All sorts of Heroes are intrinsically of the same material; that given a great soul, open to the Divine Significance of Life, then there is given a man fit to speak of this, to sing of this, to fight and work for this, in a great, victorious, enduring manner; there is given a Hero, -- the outward shape of whom will depend on the time and the environment he finds himself in.

Hero-worship is the deepest root of all; the tap-root, from which in a great degree all the rest were nourished and grown . . . Worship of a Hero is transcendent admiration of a Great Man. I say great men are still admirable; I say there is, at bottom, nothing else admirable! No nobler feeling than this of admiration for one higher than himself dwells in the breast of men.

A man should be encouraged to do what the Maker of him has intended by the making of him, according as the gifts have been bestowed on him for that purpose.

Courtesy is the due of man to man; not of suit-of-clothes to suit-of-clothes.

A background of wrath, which can be stirred up to the murderous infernal pitch, does lie in every man.

Man is, and was always, a block-head and dullard; much readier to feel and digest, than to think and consider.

No man at bottom means injustice; it is always for some obscure distorted image of a right that he contends: an obscure image diffracted, exaggerated, in the wonderfulest way by natural dimness and selfishness; getting tenfold more diffracted by exasperation of contest, till at length it become all but irrecognis-able.

Men worship the shows of great men; the most disbelieve that there is any reality of great men to worship.

Our very walking is an incessant falling; a falling and a catching of ourselves before we come actually to the pavement. It is emblematic of all things a man does.

Pin thy faith to no man's sleeve. Hast thou not two eyes of thy own?

What unknown seas of feeling lie in man, and will from time to time break through!

God Almighty never created a man half as wise as he looks.

The true epic of our times is not "Arm's and the Man," but "Tools and the Man"--an infinitely wider kind of epic.

Blessed is he who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness. He has a work, a life-purpose. ... Get your happiness out of your work or you will never know what real happiness is. ... 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.

Every man is my superior in that I may learn from him.

If a man was great while living, he becomes tenfold greater when dead.

One is weary of hearing about the omnipotence of money. I will say rather that, for a genuine man, it is not evil to be poor.