180 Famous Quotes by Thomas Carlyle
12/4/1795 - 2/5/1881
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About Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle was a Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher during the Victorian era. He called economics "the dismal science", wrote articles for the Edinburgh Encyclopedia, and became a controversial social commentator.
Coming from a strict Calvinist family, Carlyle was expected to become a preacher by his parents, but while at the University of Edinburgh he lost his Christian faith. Calvinist values, however, remained with him throughout his life. His combination of a religious temperament with loss of faith in traditional Christianity, made Carlyle's work appealing to many Victorians who were grappling with scientific and political changes that threatened the traditional social order. He brought a trenchant style to his social and political criticism and a complex literary style to works such as The French Revolution: A History. Dickens used Carlyle's work as a primary source for the events of the French Revolution in his novel A Tale of Two Cities.
It is a mathematical fact that the casting of this pebble from my
hand alters the centre of gravity of the universe.
Gravity
Quotes, by Thomas Carlyle , Source: Sartor Resartus III
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Arrestment, sudden really as a bolt out of the blue has hit
strange victims.
Sky
Quotes, by Thomas Carlyle , Source: French Revolution (vol. III, p. 347)
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To us also, through every star, through every blade of grass, is not God made visible if we will open our minds and our eyes.
Faith
Quotes, by Thomas Carlyle
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Under all speech that is good for anything there lies a silence that is better. Silence is deep as Eternity; speech is shallow as Time.
Speech
Quotes, by Thomas Carlyle
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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.
Labor
Quotes, by Thomas Carlyle
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Everywhere the human soul stands between a hemisphere of light and another of darkness; on the confines of the two everlasting empires, necessity and free will.
Necessity
Quotes, by Thomas Carlyle
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The merit of originality is not novelty; it is sincerity. The believing man is the original man; whatsoever he believes, he believes it for himself, not for another.
Originality
Quotes, by Thomas Carlyle
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Commemoration of Martyrs of Japan, 1597 The Christian must be consumed with the infinite beauty of holiness and the infinite damnability of sin.
Christianity
Quotes, by Thomas Carlyle
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Commemoration of Martin Luther, Teacher, Reformer, 1546 It must have been a most blessed discovery, that of an old Latin Bible which he found in the Erfurt Library about this time. He had never seen the Book before. It taught him another lesson than that of fasts and vigils... Luther learned now that a man was saved not by singing masses, but by the infinite grace of God: a more credible hypothesis. He gradually got himself founded, as on the rock. No wonder he should venerate the Bible, which had brought this blessed help to him. He prized it as the Word of the Highest must be prized by such a man. He determined to hold by that, as through life and to death he firmly did.
Christianity
Quotes, by Thomas Carlyle
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