Thomas Carlyle Mean Quotations

Skepticism means, not intellectual doubt alone, but moral doubt.

We are to take no counsel with flesh and blood; give ear to no vain cavils, vain sorrows and wishes; to know that we know nothing, that the worst and cruelest to our eyes is not what it seems, that we have to receive whatsoever befalls us as sent from God above, and say, "It is good and wise,--God is great! Though He slay me, yet I trust in Him." Islam means, in its way, denial of self. This is yet the highest wisdom that heaven has revealed to our earth.

If Hero means sincere man, why may not every one of us be a Hero?

'Genius' which means transcendent capacity of taking trouble, first of all.

Taste, if it mean anything but a paltry connoisseurship, must mean a general susceptibility to truth and nobleness, a sense to discern, and a heart to love and reverence all beauty, order, goodness, wheresoever, or in whatsoever forms and accompaniments they are to be seen. This surely implies, as its chief condition, not any given external rank or situation, but a finely-gifted mind, purified into harmony with itself, into keenness and justness of vision; above all, kindled into love and generous admiration.

We have chosen Mahomet not as the most eminent Prophet; but as the one we are freest to speak of. He is by no means the truest of Prophets; but I do esteem him a true one.

The eye of the intellect "sees in all objects what it brought with it the means of seeing."

Happy season of virtuous youth, when shame is still an impassable barrier, and the sacred air-cities of hope have not shrunk into the mean clay hamlets of reality; and man, by his nature, is yet infinite and free.

Laughter means sympathy.

How, without clothes, could we possess the master organ, soul's seat and true pineal gland of the body social--I mean a purse?

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.

As there is no danger of our becoming, any of us, Mahometans (i.e. Muslim), I mean to say all the good of him I justly can...

Force, force, everywhere force; we ourselves a mysterious force in the centre of that. "There is not a leaf rotting on the highway but has Force in it: how else could it rot?" [As used in his time, by the word force, Carlyle means energy.]

Great souls are always loyally submissive, reverent to what is over them: only small mean souls are otherwise.

To be true is manly, chivalrous, Christian; to be false is mean, cowardly, devilish.

In every object there is inexhaustible meaning; the eye sees in it what the eye brings means of seeing.

Democracy means despair of finding any heroes to govern you, and contented putting up with the want of them.

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.

To the mean eye all things are trivial, as certainly as to the jaundiced they are yellow.