Words matter. These are the best Thomas Carlyle Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
I’ve got a great ambition to die of exhaustion rather than boredom.
The only happiness a brave person ever troubles themselves in asking about, is happiness enough to get their work done.
No man who has once heartily and wholly laughed can be altogether irreclaimably bad.
A man cannot make a pair of shoes rightly unless he do it in a devout manner.
Adversity is the diamond dust Heaven polishes its jewels with.
History, a distillation of rumour.
Reform is not pleasant, but grievous; no person can reform themselves without suffering and hard work, how much less a nation.
Nothing builds self-esteem and self-confidence like accomplishment.
The eye sees what it brings the power to see.
Conviction is worthless unless it is converted into conduct.
A loving heart is the beginning of all knowledge.
It is a vain hope to make people happy by politics.
The world is a republic of mediocrities, and always was.
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.
There are good and bad times, but our mood changes more often than our fortune.
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.
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.
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.
A well-written life is almost as rare as a well-spent one.
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.
Laughter is one of the very privileges of reason, being confined to the human species.
Do the duty which lies nearest to you, the second duty will then become clearer.
The difference between Socrates and Jesus? The great conscious and the immeasurably great unconscious.
If you look deep enough you will see music; the heart of nature being everywhere music.
What you see, but can’t see over is as good as infinite.
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.
Science must have originated in the feeling that something was wrong.
Doubt, of whatever kind, can be ended by action alone.
Endurance is patience concentrated.
Not what I have, but what I do is my kingdom.
Necessity dispenseth with decorum.
Weak eyes are fondest of glittering objects.
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.
Talk that does not end in any kind of action is better suppressed altogether.
No ghost was every seen by two pair of eyes.
No great man lives in vain. The history of the world is but the biography of great men.
Work alone is noble.
If what you have done is unjust, you have not succeeded.
Imagination is a poor matter when it has to part company with understanding.
Narrative is linear, but action has breadth and depth as well as height and is solid.
When new turns of behavior cease to appear in the life of the individual, its behavior ceases to be intelligent.
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.
Oh, give us the man who sings at his work.
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.
Everywhere in life, the true question is not what we gain, but what we do.
Every new opinion, at its starting, is precisely in a minority of one.
Woe to him that claims obedience when it is not due; woe to him that refuses it when it is.
Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together.
Secrecy is the element of all goodness; even virtue, even beauty is mysterious.
None of us will ever accomplish anything excellent or commanding except when he listens to this whisper which is heard by him alone.
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.
Man’s unhappiness, as I construe, comes of his greatness; it is because there is an Infinite in him, which with all his cunning he cannot quite bury under the Finite.
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.
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.
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.
All that mankind has done, thought or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books.
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.
Nothing that was worthy in the past departs; no truth or goodness realized by man ever dies, or can die.
Humor has justly been regarded as the finest perfection of poetic genius.
Go as far as you can see; when you get there you’ll be able to see farther.
I don’t pretend to understand the Universe – it’s a great deal bigger than I am.
All great peoples are conservative.
Every noble work is at first impossible.
He who could foresee affairs three days in advance would be rich for thousands of years.
No person is important enough to make me angry.
Genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains.
Silence is more eloquent than words.
If there be no enemy there’s no fight. If no fight, no victory and if no victory there is no crown.
Nothing stops the man who desires to achieve. Every obstacle is simply a course to develop his achievement muscle. It’s a strengthening of his powers of accomplishment.
Egotism is the source and summary of all faults and miseries.
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.
There is a great discovery still to be made in literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write.
The end of man is action, and not thought, though it be of the noblest.
The real use of gunpowder is to make all men tall.
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.
