144 Quotes by Thomas Carlyle

• Silence is as deep as eternity, speech a shallow as time.
• Permanence, perseverance and persistence in spite of all obstacle s, discouragement s, and impossibilities: It is this, that in all things distinguishes the strong soul from the weak.
• Reform is not pleasant, but grievous; no person can reform themselves without suffering and hard work, how much less a nation.
• Sarcasm I now see to be, in general, the language of the devil; for which reason I have long since as good as renounced it.
• Science must have originated in the feeling that something was wrong.
• No iron chain, or outward force of any kind, can ever compel the soul of a person to believe or to disbelieve.
• Secrecy is the element of all goodness; even virtue, even beauty is mysterious.
• No great man lives in vain. The history of the world is but the biography of great men.
• Our main business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand.
• Show me the person you honor, for I know better by that the kind of person you are. For you show me what your idea of humanity is.
• Oh, give us the man who sings at his work.
• Silence is more eloquent than words.
• Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together.
• Speech is human, silence is divine, yet also brutish and dead: therefore we must learn both arts.
• Talk that does not end in any kind of action is better suppressed altogether.
• Teach a parrot the terms 'supply and demand' and you've got an economist.
• The block of granite which was an obstacle in the pathway of the weak, became a stepping-stone in the pathway of the strong.
• The courage we desire and prize is not the courage to die decently, but to live manfully.
• Show me the man you honor, and I will know what kind of man you are.
• Not brute force but only persuasion and faith are the kings of this world.
• To reform a world, to reform a nation, no wise man will undertake; and all but foolish men know, that the only solid, though a far slower reformation, is what each begins and perfects on himself.
• The cut of a garment speaks of intellect and talent and the color of temperament and heart.
• No man lives without jostling and being jostled; in all ways he has to elbow himself through the world, giving and receiving offence.
• No man who has once heartily and wholly laughed can be altogether irreclaimably bad.
• No person is important enough to make me angry.
• No pressure, no diamonds.
• No sadder proof can be given by a man of his own littleness than disbelief in great men.
• One must verify or expel his doubts, and convert them into the certainty of Yes or NO.
• None of us will ever accomplish anything excellent or commanding except when he listens to this whisper which is heard by him alone.
• Originality is a thing we constantly clamour for, and constantly quarrel with.
• Not what I have, but what I do is my kingdom.
• Nothing builds self-esteem and self-confidence like accomplishment.
• Nothing is more terrible than activity without insight.
• Nothing that was worthy in the past departs; no truth or goodness realized by man ever dies, or can die.
• Of all acts of man repentance is the most divine. The greatest of all faults is to be conscious of none.
• Old age is not a matter for sorrow. It is matter for thanks if we have left our work done behind us.
• No violent extreme endures.
• When the oak is felled the whole forest echoes with it fall, but a hundred acorns are sown in silence by an unnoticed breeze.
• Thought is the parent of the deed.
• 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.
• True humor springs not more from the head than from the heart. It is not contempt; its essence is love. It issues not in laughter, but in still smiles, which lie far deeper.
• 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.
• War is a quarrel between two thieves too cowardly to fight their own battle.
• Weak eyes are fondest of glittering objects.
• What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books.
• Thought once awakened does not again slumber; unfolds itself into a System of Thought; grows, in man after man, generation after generation, - till its full stature is reached, and such System of Thought can grow no farther, but must give place to another.
• No ghost was every seen by two pair of eyes.
• Woe to him that claims obedience when it is not due; woe to him that refuses it when it is.
• Wonder is the basis of worship.
• Wondrous is the strength of cheerfulness, and its power of endurance - the cheerful man will do more in the same time, will do it; better, will preserve it longer, than the sad or sullen.
• Work alone is noble.
• Worship is transcendent wonder.
• Writing is a dreadful labor, yet not so dreadful as Idleness.
• What you see, but can't see over is as good as infinite.
• The outer passes away; the innermost is the same yesterday, today, and forever.
• The end of man is action, and not thought, though it be of the noblest.
• The eye sees what it brings the power to see.
• The fearful unbelief is unbelief in yourself.
• The first duty of man is to conquer fear; he must get rid of it, he cannot act till then.
• The greatest of faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none.
• The merit of originality is not novelty; it is sincerity.
• The real use of gunpowder is to make all men tall.
• The difference between Socrates and Jesus? The great conscious and the immeasurably great unconscious.
• The spiritual is the parent of the practical.
• The true university of these days is a collection of books.
• The work an unknown good man has done is like a vein of water flowing hidden underground, secretly making the ground green.
• The world is a republic of mediocrities, and always was.
• There are good and bad times, but our mood changes more often than our fortune.
• There is a great discovery still to be made in literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write.
• This world, after all our science and sciences, is still a miracle wonderful, inscrutable, magical and more, to whosoever will think of it.
• The old cathedrals are good, but the great blue dome that hangs over everything is better.
• He who has health, has hope; and he who has hope, has everything.
• Culture is the process by which a person becomes all that they were created capable of being.
• Do the duty which lies nearest to you, the second duty will then become clearer.
• Egotism is the source and summary of all faults and miseries.
• Every new opinion, at its starting, is precisely in a minority of one.
• Every noble work is at first impossible.
• Conviction is worthless unless it is converted into conduct.
• 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.
• Clever men are good, but they are not the best.
• For all right judgment of any man or things it is useful, nay, essential, to see his good qualities before pronouncing on his bad.
• For, if a good speaker, never so eloquent, does not see into the fact, and is not speaking the truth of that - is there a more horrid kind of object in creation?
• Genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains.
• Go as far as you can see; when you get there you'll be able to see farther.
• Good breeding differs, if at all, from high breeding only as it gracefully remembers the rights of others, rather than gracefully insists on its own rights.
• Happy the people whose annals are vacant.
• He who could foresee affairs three days in advance would be rich for thousands of years.
• A person who is gifted sees the essential point and leaves the rest as surplus.
• No amount of ability is of the slightest avail without honor.
• The three great elements of modern civilization, Gun powder, Printing, and the Protestant religion.
• A loving heart is the beginning of all knowledge.
• A man cannot make a pair of shoes rightly unless he do it in a devout manner.
• A man lives by believing something: not by debating and arguing about many things.
• A man willing to work, and unable to find work, is perhaps the saddest sight that fortune's inequality exhibits under this sun.
• Conviction never so excellent, is worthless until it coverts itself into conduct.
• A man's felicity consists not in the outward and visible blessing of fortune, but in the inward and unseen perfections and riches of the mind.
• Endurance is patience concentrated.
• A strong mind always hopes, and has always cause to hope.
• Adversity is the diamond dust Heaven polishes its jewels with.
• All great peoples are conservative.
• All that mankind has done, thought or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books.
• Be not a slave of words.
• Blessed is he who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness.
• A man without a goal is like a ship without a rudder.
• Make yourself an honest man, and then you may be sure there is one less rascal in the world.
• It is a strange trade that of advocacy. Your intellect, your highest heavenly gift is hung up in the shop window like a loaded pistol for sale.
• It is a vain hope to make people happy by politics.
• It is the heart always that sees, before the head can see.
• Laughter is one of the very privileges of reason, being confined to the human species.
• Let each become all that he was created capable of being.
• Long stormy spring-time, wet contentious April, winter chilling the lap of very May; but at length the season of summer does come.
• Isolation is the sum total of wretchedness to a man.
• Love is the only game that is not called on account of darkness.
• Man is a tool-using animal. Without tools he is nothing, with tools he is all.
• Man is, properly speaking, based upon hope, he has no other possession but hope; this world of his is emphatically the place of hope.
• Men do less than they ought, unless they do all that they can.
• Music is well said to be the speech of angels.
• Narrative is linear, but action has breadth and depth as well as height and is solid.
• Necessity dispenseth with decorum.
• Love is not altogether a delirium, yet it has many points in common therewith.
• If there be no enemy there's no fight. If no fight, no victory and if no victory there is no crown.
• Men seldom, or rather never for a length of time and deliberately, rebel against anything that does not deserve rebelling against.
• I do not believe in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.
• I don't like to talk much with people who always agree with me. It is amusing to coquette with an echo for a little while, but one soon tires of it.
• I don't pretend to understand the Universe - it's a great deal bigger than I am.
• I grow daily to honour facts more and more, and theory less and less. A fact, it seems to me, is a great thing; a sentence printed, if not by God, then at least by the Devil.
• In the long-run every Government is the exact symbol of its People, with their wisdom and unwisdom; we have to say, Like People like Government.
• If an eloquent speaker speak not the truth, is there a more horrid kind of object in creation?
• If what you have done is unjust, you have not succeeded.
• History, a distillation of rumour.
• In every phenomenon the beginning remains always the most notable moment.
• I've got a great ambition to die of exhaustion rather than boredom.
• In books lies the soul of the whole past time.
• If you are ever in doubt as to whether to kiss a pretty girl, always give her the benefit of the doubt.
• Imperfection clings to a person, and if they wait till they are brushed off entirely, they would spin for ever on their axis, advancing nowhere.
• Humor has justly been regarded as the finest perfection of poetic genius.
• Imagination is a poor matter when it has to part company with understanding.
• If you look deep enough you will see music; the heart of nature being everywhere music.
• If you do not wish a man to do a thing, you had better get him to talk about it; for the more men talk, the more likely they are to do nothing else.
• Adversity is the diamond dust that Heaven polishes its jewels with.
• Adversity is the diamond dust heaven polishes its gems with.
• Adversity is the diamond dust with which heaven polishes its gems.
• Adversity is the diamond dust with which Heaven polishes its jewels.
• Adversity is the diamond dust Heaven polishes its jewels with

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