Top 835 Quotes & Sayings by Thomas Carlyle
Explore popular quotes and sayings by a Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle.
Last updated on September 16, 2024.
Do the duty which lies nearest to you, the second duty will then become clearer.
Every noble work is at first impossible.
If there be no enemy there's no fight. If no fight, no victory and if no victory there is no crown.
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 merit of originality is not novelty; it is sincerity.
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.
Teach a parrot the terms 'supply and demand' and you've got an economist.
I do not believe in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.
Not what I have, but what I do is my kingdom.
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.
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.
Man is a tool-using animal. Without tools he is nothing, with tools he is all.
The work an unknown good man has done is like a vein of water flowing hidden underground, secretly making the ground green.
Conviction is worthless unless it is converted into conduct.
If you look deep enough you will see music; the heart of nature being everywhere music.
A loving heart is the beginning of all knowledge.
Speech is human, silence is divine, yet also brutish and dead: therefore we must learn both arts.
A person who is gifted sees the essential point and leaves the rest as surplus.
All that mankind has done, thought or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books.
No pressure, no diamonds.
There are good and bad times, but our mood changes more often than our fortune.
In every phenomenon the beginning remains always the most notable moment.
Our main business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand.
The real use of gunpowder is to make all men tall.
Music is well said to be the speech of angels.
He who has health, has hope; and he who has hope, has everything.
In books lies the soul of the whole past time.
When the oak is felled the whole forest echoes with it fall, but a hundred acorns are sown in silence by an unnoticed breeze.
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.
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.
Blessed is he who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness.
Adversity is the diamond dust Heaven polishes its jewels with.
The three great elements of modern civilization, Gun powder, Printing, and the Protestant religion.
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.
Show me the man you honor, and I will know what kind of man you are.
The only happiness a brave person ever troubles themselves in asking about, is happiness enough to get their work done.
Nothing builds self-esteem and self-confidence like accomplishment.
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.
A man willing to work, and unable to find work, is perhaps the saddest sight that fortune's inequality exhibits under this sun.
Make yourself an honest man, and then you may be sure there is one less rascal in the world.
Thought is the parent of the deed.
The courage we desire and prize is not the courage to die decently, but to live manfully.
Wonder is the basis of worship.
A man without a goal is like a ship without a rudder.
I've got a great ambition to die of exhaustion rather than boredom.
Go as far as you can see; when you get there you'll be able to see farther.
Silence is as deep as eternity, speech a shallow as time.
Isolation is the sum total of wretchedness to a man.
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.
No great man lives in vain. The history of the world is but the biography of great men.
A well-written life is almost as rare as a well-spent one.
Of all acts of man repentance is the most divine. The greatest of all faults is to be conscious of none.
The greatest of faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none.
Work alone is noble.
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.
Culture is the process by which a person becomes all that they were created capable of being.
Endurance is patience concentrated.
War is a quarrel between two thieves too cowardly to fight their own battle.
Silence is more eloquent than words.
The first duty of man is to conquer fear; he must get rid of it, he cannot act till then.
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