"Thomas Carlyle" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... especial study of the great dramatist. It was perhaps at this time that he conceived the idea of translating the Agamemnon, which, he says in his preface, "was commanded of me by my venerated friend Thomas Carlyle, and rewarded it will be if I am permitted to dignify it by the prefatory insertion of his ...
— The Brownings - Their Life and Art • Lilian Whiting
... According to Thomas Carlyle, respectable people were those who kept a gig. In some towns the credential is that the family shall employ a "hired girl." In Fairhaven the condition was that you should have a washerwoman one day in the week. The soapy wash-water was saved for scrubbing purposes—this was in Massachusetts—and ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... ask, as a mere layman, what right has the Bible to usurp the title of "the word of God"? What evidence can be sharked up to show that it is any more a holy or an inspired book than any book of Thomas Carlyle's, or John Ruskin's, or William Morris'? What evidence is forthcoming that the Bible ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford
... all the Puritan qualities of sterling honesty (as well as some simplicities springing out of his faults) that the time spent in considering him shall not be lost. "Our Oliver was the last glimpse of the godlike vanishing from England," wrote Thomas Carlyle. Obscured in lurid twilight as the shadow of death, hated by somnambulant pedants, doleful dilettanti, phantasmagoric errors, bodeful inconceivabilities, trackless, behind pasteboard griffins, wiverns, chimeras, Carlyle had to search ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... hope which animates you. These are revolutionary times. Whole years of progress are now crowded into days. Who will venture to judge the future by any political almanac of by-gone times? I can say with old Thomas Carlyle, "One strong thing I find here below, the just thing, the true thing." And no man or party is strong enough, no earthly power is strong enough to stay the grand march of events through which the hand of God is visibly guiding the Republic to universal liberty, and through ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... the great type of this triumphant and dangerous sophistry of the emotions. The Rousseau of these times for English-speaking nations is Thomas Carlyle. An apology is perhaps needed for mentioning a man of such simple, veracious, disinterested, and wholly high-minded life, in the same breath with one of the least sane men that ever lived. Community of ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 2: Carlyle • John Morley
... Ltd. Three letters from "The Letters of Charles Dickens"; one letter by FitzGerald and one by Thomas Carlyle, from "Letters and Literary Remains of Edward FitzGerald"; one letter from "Charles Kingsley: his Letters and Memories of his Life"; and two extracts from "Further Records, 1848-1883," by ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... rubbed shoulders. Lord Shaftesbury, for instance, was on duty in Mount Street, Grosvenor Square, with a sallow young foreigner for companion, who was afterwards to create a more serious disturbance on his own account, and to spring to power as Napoleon III. Thomas Carlyle preferred to play the part of the untrammelled man in the street, and sallied forth in search of food for reflection. He wanted to see the 'revolution' for himself, and strode towards Hyde Park, determined, he tells us, to walk himself into a glow of heat in spite of the 'venomous cold wind' ...
— Lord John Russell • Stuart J. Reid
... about her," conceded Miss Cornelia. "You never see her but she's laughing, and somehow it always makes you want to laugh too. She can't even keep a straight face in church. Una is ten—she's a sweet little thing—not pretty, but sweet. And Thomas Carlyle is nine. They call him Carl, and he has a regular mania for collecting toads and bugs and frogs and bringing them into ...
— Rainbow Valley • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... The intense spiritual striving which was so foreign to Macaulay's practical nature first appears among the Victorians in the Scotsman Thomas Carlyle, a social and religious prophet, lay-preacher, and prose-poet, one of the most eccentric but one of the most stimulating of all English writers. The descendant of a warlike Scottish Border clan and the son of a stone-mason who is described as 'an awful fighter,' ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... have given in a chapter certain conversations with men of note, such as Thomas Carlyle, Lord Lytton, Mr. Roebuck, and others, on gypsies; an account of the first and family names and personal characteristics of English and American Romanys, prepared for me by a very famous old gypsy; and finally a ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland
... unsparing labor for the perfection of form. A human aim—to cheer, console, purify, or ennoble the life of the people. Without this aim literature has never sent an arrow close to the mark. It is only by good work that men of letters can justify their right to a place in the world. The father of Thomas Carlyle was a stonemason, whose walls stood true and needed no rebuilding. Carlyle's prayer was, "Let me write my books as ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter
... posterity has confirmed his judgement. Of all his works, it is the most characteristic of its author. It has all the peculiarities of his style, peculiarities that are reflected in the prose of Thomas Carlyle, his most eminent British admirer and interpreter. The book itself took ten years to write, and according to his correspondence, Richter intended to call it "Anti-Titan," having in view his attacks on the material selfishness of the age which, to gain its own ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VII • Various
... article has been compiled from the different works of THOMAS CARLYLE, and embodies all he has written, or at least published, about Napoleon Bonaparte. We offer it in the absence of a more elaborate work on this subject, which we hope one day to see from the pen of this ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various
... ever-encroaching nobility, transformed the once powerful and flourishing commonwealth into one "lying as if broken-backed on the public highway; a nation anarchic every fibre of it, and under the feet and hoofs of travelling neighbours." [Footnote: Thomas Carlyle, Frederick the Great, vol. viii., p. 105.] In the rottenness of the social organism, venality, unprincipled ambition, and religious intolerance found a congenial soil; and favoured by and favouring foreign intrigues and interferences, they bore deadly fruit—confederations, ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... others, and thinks no one else worth following, parades his own inferiority before the world. He puts his own character into bankruptcy just as surely as does that other sad camp follower of whom Thomas Carlyle wrote: "To recognize false merit, and crown it as true, because a long tail runs after it, is the saddest ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... is from one of the subtilest and most universal thinkers now living—Thomas Carlyle—chiefly known to the public as a German scholar and the friend of Goethe, but deeply respected by other leading intellects of the day, as a man who sees into the utmost recognized possibilities of knowledge. ...
— Captain Sword and Captain Pen - A Poem • Leigh Hunt
... know that God, as he is, is past human knowledge and that until we see Him face to face we can not all mean just the same thing when we repeat this article of belief. But I realize also that this is not due to the mutability of the Almighty but to man's variability. The Gods of St. Jerome, of Thomas Carlyle and of William James are different; but that is because these men had different types of minds. Behind their human ideas stands God himself—"the same yesterday, to-day and forever." So we may go through the creed; so we may study, as you have been doing, ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... space enclosed by a block of four streets forming a square. At No. 4 Maclise had lived and died; at the same house George Eliot, after her marriage with Mr. Cross, had come to live; at No. 5, in the second street to the westward, Thomas Carlyle was still living, and a little beyond Cheyne Row stood the modest cottage wherein Turner died. Rossetti's house had to me the appearance of a plain Queen Anne erection, much mutilated by the introduction of unsightly ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... Thomas Carlyle, the poor Scotch tutor, dreamed he wanted to be a great author. His clothes were threadbare, his poverty apparent; friends taunted and ridiculed him until, goaded to indignation, he cried, "I have better books in me than you have ever read." The crowd laughed ...
— Evening Round Up - More Good Stuff Like Pep • William Crosbie Hunter
... The hands of Thomas Carlyle—stubborn, combative, mystical—which appear in the present paper, will amply repay the closest scrutiny. These hands are unwontedly realistic, and emphasize their distinctiveness in every vein and wrinkle. They appear to be themselves endowed with each of those various qualities which caused ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 27, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... story of how he went to see Thomas Carlyle in London, and sate with him in a room at the top of his house, with a wide prospect of house-backs and chimney-pots; and how the sage reviled and vituperated the horrors of city life, and yet left on FitzGerald's mind the impression that perhaps after all he did not really ...
— From a College Window • Arthur Christopher Benson
... later (1833) he went to Europe for a short year of travel. While abroad, he visited Walter Savage Landor, Coleridge and Wordsworth, and Thomas Carlyle. This visit to Carlyle was to both men a most interesting experience. They parted feeling that they had much intellectually in common. This belief fostered a sympathy which, by the time they had discovered how different ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... was a carpenter, Robert Burns a ploughman, Keats a druggist, Thomas Carlyle a mason, Hugh Miller a stone mason. Rubens, the artist, was a page, Swedenborg, a mining engineer. Dante and Descartes were soldiers. Ben Johnson was a brick layer and worked at building Lincoln Inn in London with trowel in hand and a book in his pocket. Jeremy Taylor was a barber. Andrew Johnson ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden
... opened the door. On it was a brass plate which would have told us, if we hadn't known already, that in this house Thomas Carlyle was born. Remembering what he grew to be and to mean in the big world, the three tiny rooms and the few simple relics were a thousand times more pathetic than if we'd been led through apartment after apartment of a palace, seeing christening cups and things ...
— The Heather-Moon • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... noble soul, and few know what a loss it is; but those few rate it high. As Captain Sterling (his brother) said, he had been accumulating wisdom all his life, and could he have lived twenty years more to pour it out he would indeed have left behind him a precious legacy.... Thomas Carlyle wrote a beautiful letter over him. His little son knows not at all what a father he has lost; and as for me, I want to tell him, but ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... Thomas Carlyle once said of man: "Stands he not thereby in the centre of Immensities, in the conflux of Eternities?" One day I saw the American army standing "in the centre of immensities, in the conflux of eternities," at the focus of histories. One day I saw the American army in France march in ...
— Soldier Silhouettes on our Front • William L. Stidger
... Ecclefechan, much offended, says, "The poet must have been tipsy indeed to abuse sweet Ecclefechan at this rate." It was also the birthplace of the (p. 169) poet's friend Nicol, and of a greater than he. On the 4th of December in the very year on which Burns visited it, Mr. Thomas Carlyle was born in that village. Shortly after his visit, the poet beat his brains to find a rhyme for Ecclefechan, and to ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... This boy's name was Thomas Carlyle. His father was a stone-mason and had built with his own hands the house in which his son Thomas was born. The little village of Ecclefechan was about six miles from the Solway Firth, among the pasture lands of the bale ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... was called in those days a "wide-awake," and he leaned heavily on a stick which he carried in his right hand. I stood reverently aside to let him pass—the man who had first taught me to see, to feel, to think. Yes, it was Thomas Carlyle; and as he went by, looking neither to the right nor to the left, my heart stood still within me. What struck me most in that thought-furrowed face was the eyes. I had never, I have never since, seen a pair of eyes which,' etc., ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... his coat and boots to keep himself from absolute starvation, for he was too proud to beg. Thus did he preserve his dignity, and uncomplainingly endure his trials. At last he found means to support himself modestly by literature, and gradually made friends,—among them Thomas Carlyle. He gained social position as a man of genius, of unsullied moral character and of elevated patriotism, although his political opinions found but few admirers. Around his humble quarters the Italian exiles gathered, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume X • John Lord
... trepidation. It was new to me to meet men of Lord Houghton's social rank and fame on terms of friendly intimacy, and I confess that I was miserably shy when I made my first appearance among the company assembled in that pleasant morning room, where, long years before, Thomas Carlyle had been first introduced to the amenities of English country-house life. Carlyle has told the world, in a letter written to his wife, how much he was confounded by what seemed to him to be the splendours of ...
— Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842-1885 • Stuart J. Reid, ed.
... when following his trade of a mason, worked on Lincoln's Inn in London with trowel in hand and a book in his pocket. Joseph Hunter was a carpenter in youth, Robert Burns a plowman, Keats a druggist, Thomas Carlyle and Hugh Miller masons. Dante and Descartes were soldiers. Andrew Johnson was a tailor. Cardinal Wolsey, Defoe, and Kirke White were butchers' sons. Faraday was the son of a blacksmith, and his teacher, ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... interesting place around London to me is in Chelsea, where, on a narrow street, I entered the house of Thomas Carlyle. This great author was away from London at the time. Entering a narrow hall, on the left is the literary workshop, where some of the strongest thunderbolts of the world's literature have been forged. In the room, which has two front windows shaded from ...
— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage
... Woods and Braes" Robert Tannahill "Fare Thee Well" George Gordon Byron "Maid of Athens, Ere We Part" George Gordon Byron "When We Two Parted" George Gordon Byron "Go, Forget Me" Charles Wolfe Last Night George Darley Adieu Thomas Carlyle Jeanie Morrison William Motherwell The Sea-lands Orrick Johns Fair Ines Thomas Hood A Valediction Elizabeth Barrett Browning Farewell John Addington Symonds "I Do Not Love Thee" Caroline Elizabeth Sarah Norton The Palm-tree and the Pine Richard Monckton Milnes "O Swallow, Swallow Flying ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... devoted to the Normal Department, Prof. Salisbury was expected to address us on some educational topic. In his absence, Prof. Smith, of the chair of Greek in Vanderbilt University, kindly filled the place and gave us an excellent address on Thomas Carlyle. Prof. Smith is of Southern birth, but has manifested a cordial friendliness and an interest that has led him to really investigate the work of ...
— The American Missionary—Volume 39, No. 07, July, 1885 • Various
... masses by the force of their brains. Not one such had she ever met to look upon as an acquaintance; and here was this man telling off the honored names by the score, and saying, "My friend, Dr. Guthrie"—"My good friend, Thomas Carlyle"—"My dear brother, Newman Hall." How would it seem to stand in intimate relationship with one single gifted mind like these, and was she destined ever to know ...
— Four Girls at Chautauqua • Pansy
... precedence, came the Ploughman Poet and the Ettrick Shepherd, Boswell and Dr. Johnson, Dr. John Brown and Thomas Carlyle, Lady Nairne and Drummond of Hawthornden, Allan Ramsay and Sir Walter; and is it not a proof of the Wizard's magic art, that side by side with the wraiths of these real people walked, or seemed to walk, the Fair Maid of Perth, Jeanie Deans, Meg Merrilies, Guy Mannering, Ellen, Marmion, and a host ...
— Penelope's Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... mich thaetig angeschlossen, mich durch eine mitschreitende Theilnahme zum Handeln und Wirken aufgemuntert, und durch ein edles, reines wohlgerichtetes Bestreben wieder selbst verjuengt, mich, der ich sie heranzog, mit sich fortgezogen haben. Es ist der Verfasser des hier uebersetzten Werkes, Herr Thomas Carlyle, ein Schotte, von dessen Thaetigkeit und Vorzuegen, so wie von dessen naeheren Zustaenden nachstehende Blaetter ein Mehreres ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... Thomas Carlyle, in his history of the stout and sagacious Monk of St. Edmunds, has given us a fine picture of the actual life of Englishmen in the middle centuries. The dim cell-lamp of the somewhat apocryphal Jocelin ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... limitations, an allowable and advantageous thing. That exception is assuredly a most illustrious one, perhaps the strongest head and stoutest heart in the British dominions, and our living writer of the most exalted and durable fame,—Thomas Carlyle. His "Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question," published some years ago, ruffled and outraged the anti-slavery mind, which then, and for some while before and since, might fairly be termed the mind of all England. That ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... THOMAS CARLYLE loved to have me trotting in and out of his house in Cheyne Row, and we had endless talks on the desirability of silence. "Yon wee Meg," he used to say, for he refused to call me "Margot," declaring it was a Frenchified name—"yon ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, August 11, 1920 • Various
... incentives to action. Poverty thrust them forward instead of keeping them back. Therefore, if you are poor make your circumstances a means to an end. Have ambition, keep a goal in sight and bend every energy to reach that goal. A story is told of Thomas Carlyle the day he attained the highest honor the literary world could confer upon him when he was elected Lord Rector of Edinburgh University. After his installation speech, in going through the halls, he met a student seemingly deep in study. In his ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin
... Fixlein, Schmelzle's Journey to Flaetz, Analects from Richter, and Miscellaneous Pieces. The Life of Quintus Fixlein and Schmelzle's Journey to Flaetz are both translated by that ardent admirer of Richter's genius, Thomas Carlyle; a sufficient guarantee that the spirit and beauty of the original are fully rendered. The Analects are translated by the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... fiction—fairy tale and legend, Greek myth or Icelandic saga, episodes from Walter Scott, from Cooper, from Dumas; to be followed perhaps on the next evening by the terse and vigorous biography of some man of the people—of Stephenson or Cobden, of Thomas Cooper or John Bright, or even of Thomas Carlyle. ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... their knowledge of the modern realist schools of Germany. For I cannot but see, that a revulsion is taking place in the thoughts of our nation upon metaphysic subjects, and that Scotland, as usual, is taking the lead therein. That most illustrious Scotchman, Mr. Thomas Carlyle, first vindicated the great German Realists from the vulgar misconceptions about them which were so common at the beginning of this century, and brought the minds of studious men to a more just appreciation of the philosophic severity, the moral grandeur, of such thinkers as Emmanuel ...
— Alexandria and her Schools • Charles Kingsley
... England. Nay, Gentlemen of the Jury, it required the greatest efforts of her noblest sons to vindicate for you and me the right to print, to speak, to think. Milton's "Speech for the Liberty of unlicensed Printing" is one monument of the warfare which lasted from Wicliffe to Thomas Carlyle. But other monuments are the fines and imprisonment, the exile and the beheading of men and women! Words are "sedition," "rebellion," "treason;" nay, even now at least in New England, a true word is a "Misdemeanor," ...
— The Trial of Theodore Parker • Theodore Parker
... young nobility of promise have learned the important truth, ably enforced by Thomas Carlyle, that work is not only man's appointed lot, but his highest blessing and safeguard. The rising members of various noble families have laid this axiom to heart; and, when not engaged in public business, have come grandly forward ...
— Beaux and Belles of England • Mary Robinson
... occasion at least this practice had important literary consequences. One day he happened to read that a Mrs. Robert Hanning had died in Toronto, the account casually mentioning the fact that Mrs. Hanning was the youngest sister of Thomas Carlyle. Page handed this clipping to a young assistant, and told him to take the first train to Canada. The editor could easily divine that a sister of Carlyle, expatriated for forty-six years on this side of the Atlantic, must ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick
... add, were written by the poet (in losing whom Mr. Thomas Carlyle lost one of his oldest and most valued friends) many, many years before the Education Acts now in force came into existence. As many parents might not like the idea of Gipsy children attending the same ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith |
