Thomas Carlyle Soul Quotations

Permanence, perseverance and persistence in spite of all obstacles, discouragements, and impossibilities: It is this, that in all things distinguishes the strong soul from the weak.

All human souls, never so bedarkened, love light; light once kindled spreads till all is luminous.

Alas! while the body stands so broad and brawny, must the soul lie blinded, dwarfed, stupefied, almost annihilated? Alas! this was, too, a breath of God, bestowed in heaven, but on earth never to be unfolded!

A good book is the purest essence of a human soul.

The soul gives unity to what it looks at with love.

Skepticism . . . is not intellectual only it is moral also, a chronic atrophy and disease of the whole soul.

Does it ever give thee pause that men used to have a soul? Not by hearsay alone, or as a figure of speech, but as a thruth that they knew and acted upon. Verily it was another world then, but yet it is a pity we have lost the tidings of our souls. We shall have to go in search of them again or worse in all ways shall befall us.

Every man has a coward and hero in his soul.

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

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.

The Builder of this Universe was wise, He plann'd all souls, all systems, planets, particles: The Plan He shap'd all Worlds and Æons by, Was-Heavens!-was thy small Nine-and-thirty Articles!

Literature is the thought of thinking souls.

There needs not a great soul to make a hero; there needs a god-created soul which will be true to its origin; that will be a great soul!

Skepticism, as I said, is not intellectual only; it is moral also; a chronic atrophy and disease of the whole soul. A man lives by believing something; not by debating and arguing about many things. A sad case for him when all that he can manage to believe is something he can button in his pocket, and with one or the other organ eat and digest! Lower than that he will not get.

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

The choking, sweltering, deadly, and killing rule of no rule; the consecration of cupidity and braying of folly, and dim stupidity and baseness, in most of the affairs of men. Slopshirts attainable three-halfpence cheaper by the ruin of living bodies and immortal souls.

This we take it is the grand characteristic of our age. By our skill in Mechanism, it has come to pass, that in the management ofexternal things we excel all other ages; while in whatever respects the pure moral nature, in true dignity of soul and character, we are perhaps inferior to most civilised ages.

All human things do require to have an ideal in them; to have some soul in them.

The great soul of this world is just.

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

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