Thomas Carlyle Quotes

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.

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

It is a mathematical fact that the casting of this pebble from my hand alters the centre of gravity of the universe.

Let each become all that he was created capable of being.

In every phenomenon the beginning remains always the most notable moment.

The devil has his elect.

To believe practically that the poor and luckless are here only as a nusiance to be abraded and abated, and in some permissable manner made away with, and swept out of sight, is not an amiable faith.

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.

The end of man is action.

Work is the grand cure of all the maladies and miseries that ever beset mankind.

A stammering man is never a worthless one. Physiology can tell you why. It is an excess of sensibility to the presence of his fellow creature, that makes him stammer.

There can be no acting or doing of any kind till it be recognized that there is a thing to be done; the thing once recognized, doing in a thousand shapes becomes possible.

Secrecy is the element of all goodness; even virtue, even beauty is mysterious.

May blessings be upon the head of Cadmus, the Phoenicians, or whoever it was that invented books.

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.

Thirty millions, mostly fools.

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

History is the essence of innumerable biographies.

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

It is the heart always that sees, before the head can see.

A well-written life is almost as rare as a well-spent one.

Tell a person they are brave and you help them become so.

You can make even a parrot into a learned political economist - all he must learn are the two words "supply" and "demand."

See deep enough, and you see musically.

The merit of originality is not novelty; it is sincerity.

The coldest word was once a glowing new metaphor.

What you see, but can't see over is as good as infinite.

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.

Once the mind has been expanded by a big idea, it will never go back to its original state.

History shows that the majority of people that have done anything great have passed their youth in seclusion.

A lie should be trampled on and extinguished wherever found. I am for fumigating the atmosphere when I suspect that falsehood, like pestilence, breathes around me.

Heroism is the divine relation which, in all times, unites a great man to other men.

In books lies the soul fo the whole past time.

Providence has given to the French the empire of the land, to the English that of the sea, to the Germans that of--the air!

The depth of our despair measures what capability and height of claim we have to hope.

Why did not somebody teach me the constellations, and make me at home in the starry heavens, which are always overhead, and which I don't half know to this day?

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

Silence is the eternal duty of man.

What is all Knowledge too but recorded Experience, and a product of History; of which, therefore, Reasoning and Belief, no less than Action and Passion, are essential materials?

In idleness there is a perpetual despair.

A person with a clear purpose will make progress, even on the roughest road. A person with no purpose will make no progress, even on the smoothest road.

A great man shows his greatness by the way he treats little men.

Violence does even justice unjustly.

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

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

Thou fool! Nature alone is antique, and the oldest art a mushroom; that idle crag thou sittest on is six thousand years of age.

The great silent man! Looking round on the noisy inanity of the world,--words with little meaning, actions with little worth,--one loves to reflect on the great Empire of Silence.

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

Stop a moment, cease your work, and look around you.

Caution is the lower story of prudence.