Thomas Carlyle Quotes

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

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

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

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

Endurance is patience concentrated.

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

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

A strong mind always hopes, and has always cause to hope.

A loving heart is the beginning of all knowledge.

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

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

No pressure, no diamonds.

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

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

Man is a tool-using animal. Without tools he is nothing, with tools he is all.

Quackery gives birth to nothing; gives death to all things.

Do not be embarrassed by your mistakes. Nothing can teach us better than our understanding of them. This is one of the best ways of self-education.

Silence is as deep as eternity, speech a shallow as time.

Show me the man you honor, and I will know what kind of man you are.

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

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

Experience is the best of school masters, only the school fees are heavy.

The real use of gunpowder is to make all men tall.

Necessity dispenseth with decorum.

Speech is silver, silence is golden.

Isolation is the sum total of wretchedness to a man.

The eye sees what it brings the power to see.

Every noble work is at first impossible.

He who has no vision of eternity has no hold on time.

Weak eyes are fondest of glittering objects.

The mystical bond of brotherhood makes all men brothers.

Laughter is the cipher key wherewith we decipher the whole man

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.

If Jesus Christ were to come today, people would not even crucify him. They would ask him to dinner, and hear what he had to say, and make fun of it.

Music is well said to be the speech of angels.

Who is it that loves me and will love me forever with an affection which no chance, no misery, no crime of mine can do away? It is you, my mother.

A vein of poetry exists in the hearts of all men.

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.

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

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

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

Silence, the great Empire of Silence: higher than all stars; deeper than the Kingdom of Death! It alone is great; all else is small.

Laughter is one of the very privileges of reason, being confined to the human species.

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.

True friends, like ivy and the wall Both stand together, and together fall.

The three great elements of modern civilization, Gun powder, Printing, and the Protestant religion.

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.

Nothing is more terrible than activity without insight.

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

Popular opinion is the greatest lie in the world.