Thomas Carlyle quotes:

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  • It were a real increase of human happiness, could all young men from the age of nineteen be covered under barrels, or rendered otherwise invisible; and there left to follow their lawful studies and callings, till they emerged, sadder and wiser, at the age of twenty-five.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Adversity is the diamond dust Heaven polishes its jewels with.

  • One must verify or expel his doubts, and convert them into the certainty of Yes or NO.

  • 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.

  • No man lives without jostling and being jostled; in all ways he has to elbow himself through the world, giving and receiving offence.

  • There are good and bad times, but our mood changes more often than our fortune.

  • Foolish men imagine that because judgment for an evil thing is delayed, there is no justice; but only accident here below. Judgment for an evil thing is many times delayed some day or two, some century or two, but it is sure as life, it is sure as death.

  • If you are ever in doubt as to whether to kiss a pretty girl, always give her the benefit of the doubt.

  • Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together; that at length they may emerge, full-formed and majestic, into the delight of life, which they are thenceforth to rule.

  • The work an unknown good man has done is like a vein of water flowing hidden underground, secretly making the ground green.

  • 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?

  • For all right judgment of any man or things it is useful, nay, essential, to see his good qualities before pronouncing on his bad.

  • The first duty of man is to conquer fear; he must get rid of it, he cannot act till then.

  • I do not believe in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.

  • The true university of these days is a collection of books.

  • Music is well said to be the speech of angels.

  • 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.

  • No iron chain, or outward force of any kind, can ever compel the soul of a person to believe or to disbelieve.

  • Youth is to all the glad season of life; but often only by what it hopes, not by what it attains, or what it escapes.

  • He who has health, has hope; and he who has hope, has everything.

  • Every day that is born into the world comes like a burst of music and rings the whole day through, and you make of it a dance, a dirge, or a life march, as you will.

  • The spiritual is the parent of the practical.

  • Doubt, of whatever kind, can be ended by action alone.

  • Old age is not a matter for sorrow. It is matter for thanks if we have left our work done behind us.

  • Nothing that was worthy in the past departs; no truth or goodness realized by man ever dies, or can die.

  • The only happiness a brave person ever troubles themselves in asking about, is happiness enough to get their work done.

  • Speech is human, silence is divine, yet also brutish and dead: therefore we must learn both arts.

  • 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.

  • All great peoples are conservative.

  • Everywhere in life, the true question is not what we gain, but what we do.

  • If you look deep enough you will see music; the heart of nature being everywhere music.

  • In books lies the soul of the whole past time.

  • The world is a republic of mediocrities, and always was.

  • If an eloquent speaker speak not the truth, is there a more horrid kind of object in creation?

  • The eye sees what it brings the power to see.

  • He who could foresee affairs three days in advance would be rich for thousands of years.

  • Teach a parrot the terms 'supply and demand' and you've got an economist.

  • Not brute force but only persuasion and faith are the kings of this world.

  • The man of life upright has a guiltless heart, free from all dishonest deeds or thought of vanity.

  • If there be no enemy there's no fight. If no fight, no victory and if no victory there is no crown.

  • Woe to him that claims obedience when it is not due; woe to him that refuses it when it is.

  • 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.

  • The end of man is action, and not thought, though it be of the noblest.

  • Talk that does not end in any kind of action is better suppressed altogether.

  • A man willing to work, and unable to find work, is perhaps the saddest sight that fortune's inequality exhibits under this sun.

  • No great man lives in vain. The history of the world is but the biography of great men.

  • Love is the only game that is not called on account of darkness.

  • I've got a great ambition to die of exhaustion rather than boredom.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • The courage we desire and prize is not the courage to die decently, but to live manfully.

  • War is a quarrel between two thieves too cowardly to fight their own battle.

  • 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.

  • The difference between Socrates and Jesus? The great conscious and the immeasurably great unconscious.

  • The old cathedrals are good, but the great blue dome that hangs over everything is better.

  • War is a quarrel between two thieves too cowardly to fight their own battle; therefore they take boys from one village and another village, stick them into uniforms, equip them with guns, and let them loose like wild beasts against one other.

  • The word of Mohammad is a voice direct from nature's own heart - all else is wind in comparison.

  • Under all speech that is good for anything there lies a silence that is better.

  • Nature alone is antique, and the oldest art a mushroom."

  • Thus must the bewildered Wanderer stand, as so many have done, shouting question after question into the Sibyl-cave of Destiny, and receive no Answer but an Echo. It is all a grim howling of wild beasts, or the shrieks of despairing, hate-filled men...(The Everlasting No)"

  • Of all the acts of man, repentance is the most divine. The greatest of all faults . . . is to be conscious of none." (Thomas Carlyle)"

  • Of all acts of man repentance is the most divine. The greatest of all faults is to be conscious of none."

  • They wrong man greatly who say he is to be seduced by ease. Difficulty, abnegation, martyrdom, death are the allurements that act on the heart of man.

  • When the oak is felled the whole forest echoes with it fall, but a hundred acorns are sown in silence by an unnoticed breeze.

  • Acorns are planted silently by some unnoticed breeze.

  • Every noble work is at first impossible.

  • No sooner does a great man depart, and leave his character as public property, than a crowd of little men rushes towards it. There they are gathered together, blinking up to it with such vision as they have, scanning it from afar, hovering round it this way and that, each cunningly endeavoring, by all arts, to catch some reflex of it in the little mirror of himself.

  • He who talks much about virtue in the abstract, begins to be suspected; it is shrewdly guessed that where there is great preaching there will be little almsgiving.

  • 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.

  • A person who is gifted sees the essential point and leaves the rest as surplus.

  • The scandalous bronze-lacquer age of hungry animalisms, spiritual impotences, and mendacities, will have to run its course, till the pit follow it.

  • That great mystery of TIME, were there no other; the illimitable, silent, never-resting thing called Time, rolling, rushing on, swift, silent, like an all-embracing ocean tide, on which we and all the Universe swim like exhalations, like apparitions which are, and then are not: this is forever very literally a miracle; a thing to strike us dumb,-for we have no word to speak about it.

  • The deepest depth of vulgarism is that of setting up money as the ark of the covenant.

  • 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.

  • Originality is a thing we constantly clamour for, and constantly quarrel with.

  • Blessed is he who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness.

  • There is in man a higher than love of happiness; he can do without happiness, and instead thereof find blessedness.

  • The block of granite which was an obstacle in the pathway of the weak, became a stepping-stone in the pathway of the strong.

  • Great men are the inspired texts of that divine Book of Revelations, whereof a chapter is completed from epoch to epoch, and by some named History.

  • Painful for a person is rebellious independence, only in loving companionship with his associates does a person feel safe: Only in reverently bowing down before the higher does a person feel exalted.

  • Great men are the modelers, patterns, and in a wide sense creators, of whatsoever the general mass of men contrived to do and attain.

  • Nothing builds self-esteem and self-confidence like accomplishment.

  • Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together.

  • Leaders: Captains of industry.

  • Good Christian people, here lies for you an inestimable loan; take all heed thereof, in all carefulness, employ it: with high recompense, or else with heavy penalty, will it one day be required back.

  • 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 is the cipher key wherewith we decipher the whole man

  • Originality is a thing we constantly clamour for, and constantly quarrel with; as if, observes our author himself, any originality but our own could be expected to content us! In fact all strange thing are apt, without fault of theirs, to estrange us at first view, and unhappily scarcely anything is perfectly plain, but what is also perfectly common.

  • To say that we have a clear conscience is to utter a solecism; had we never sinned we should have had no conscience. Were defeat unknown, neither would victory be celebrated by songs of triumph.

  • Clever men are good, but they are not the best.

  • Stern accuracy in inquiring, bold imagination in describing, these are the cogs on which history soars or flutters and wobbles.

  • Not what you possess but what you do with what you have, determines your true worth.

  • Long stormy spring-time, wet contentious April, winter chilling the lap of very May; but at length the season of summer does come.

  • The dust of controversy is merely the falsehood flying off.

  • Conviction is worthless unless it is converted into conduct.

  • Not on morality, but on cookery, let us build our stronghold: there brandishing our frying-pan, as censer, let us offer sweet incense to the Devil, and live at ease on the fat things he has provided for his elect!

  • The world is an old woman, and mistakes any gilt farthing for a gold coin; whereby being often cheated, she will thenceforth trust nothing but the common copper.

  • Every noble crown is, and on Earth will forever be, a crown of thorns.

  • A man lives by believing something: not by debating and arguing about many things.

  • The first purpose of clothes... was not warmth or decency, but ornament.... Among wild people, we find tattooing and painting even prior to clothes. The first spiritual want of a barbarous man is decoration; as indeed we still see among the barbarous classes in civilized countries.

  • Necessity dispenseth with decorum.

  • These Arabs, the man Mahomet, and that one century, - is it not as if a spark had fallen, one spark, on a world of what proves explosive powder, blazes heaven-high from Delhi to Granada! I said, the Great man was always as lightning out of Heaven; the rest of men waited for him like fuel, and then they too would flame...

  • Love is not altogether a delirium, yet it has many points in common therewith.

  • No pressure, no diamonds.

  • No sadder proof can be given by a man of his own littleness than disbelief in great men.

  • Superstition! that horrid incubus which dwelt in darkness, shunning the light, with all its racks, and poison chalices, and foul sleeping draughts, is passing away without return. Religion cannot pass away. The burning of a little straw may hide the stars of the sky; but the stars are there and will reappear.

  • The English are a dumb people. They can do great acts, but not describe them.

  • In our wide world there is but one altogether fatal personage, the dunce,--he that speaks irrationally, that sees not, and yet thinks he sees.

  • Earnestness alone makes life eternity.

  • Egotism is the source and summary of all faults and miseries.

  • Silence is more eloquent than words.

  • Endurance is patience concentrated.

  • How indestructibly the good grows, and propagates itself, even among the weedy entanglements of evil.

  • 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.

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