Thomas Carlyle Quotes

1795–1881 Scotland

Thomas Carlyle (4 December 1795 – 5 February 5 1881) was a Scottish essayist, historian and philosopher of great prominence during the Victorian era. His wife was Jane Welsh Carlyle.

Scotland
Academics
Activists
Conservatives
Essayists

Also known as: Carlyle, Thomas, Heroes and Hero-Worship, Latter-Day Pamphlets, Past and Present, Sartor Resartus

Random Thomas Carlyle quote

328 quotes

Can there be a more horrible object in existence than an eloquent man not speaking the truth?

Attributed Address as Lord Rector of Edinburgh University (1866)

Work is the grand cure for all the maladies and miseries that ever beset mankind,—honest work, which you intend getting done.

Attributed

A great man shows his greatness by the way he treats little men.

Disputed to Carlyle in Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends And Influence People (1936)

Democracy will prevail when men believe the vote of Judas as good as that of Jesus Christ.

Attributed

If they be inhabited, what a scope for misery and folly; if they be un-inhabited, what a waste of space.

Attributed

Lord Bacon could as easily have created this planet as he could have written Hamlet.

Attributed

War is a quarrel between two thieves too cowardly to fight their own battle; therefore they take boys from one village and another village, stick them into uniforms, equip them with guns, and let them loose like wild beasts against each other.

Attributed

The block of granite which was an obstacle in the path of the weak, becomes a steppingstone in the path of the strong.

Misattributed

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Thomas Carlyle (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.