Quotes by Thomas Carlyle (Page 3 of 3)

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.

Speech is great, but silence is greater.

The tragedy of life is not so much what men suffer, but rather what they miss.

Ill-health, of body or of mind, is defeat. Health alone is victory. Let all men, if they can manage it, contrive to be healthy!

Faith is loyalty to some inspired teacher, some spiritual hero.

History of the world is the biography of the great man. And I said: The great man always act like a thunder. He storms the skies, while others are waiting to be stormed.

Silence is the eternal duty of man.

Speech is of time, silence is of eternity.

Speech is silver, silence is golden.

The mystical bond of brotherhood makes all men brothers.

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

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.

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

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

A man cannot make a pair of shoes rightly unless he do it in a devout manner.

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.

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

Writing is a dreadful labor, yet not so dreadful as Idleness.

Worship is transcendent wonder.

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

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

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

All great peoples are conservative.

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.

Conviction is worthless unless it is converted into conduct.

The cut of a garment speaks of intellect and talent and the color of temperament and heart.

If what you have done is unjust, you have not succeeded.

The spiritual is the parent of the practical.

No ghost was every seen by two pair of eyes.

Science must have originated in the feeling that something was wrong.

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.

It is a vain hope to make people happy by politics.

Every new opinion, at its starting, is precisely in a minority of one.

There is a great discovery still to be made in literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write.

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.

Genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains.

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

Weak eyes are fondest of glittering objects.

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

Oh, give us the man who sings at his work.

The outer passes away; the innermost is the same yesterday, today, and forever.

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

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

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.

The eye sees what it brings the power to see.

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.

Necessity dispenseth with decorum.

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

Man is, properly speaking, based upon hope, he has no other possession but hope; this world of his is emphatically the place of hope.

A man's felicity consists not in the outward and visible blessing of fortune, but in the inward and unseen perfections and riches of the mind.

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.

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.

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

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

A loving heart is the beginning of all knowledge.

A laugh, to be joyous, must flow from a joyous heart, for without kindness, there can be no true joy.

No amount of ability is of the slightest avail without honor.

None of us will ever accomplish anything excellent or commanding except when he listens to this whisper which is heard by him alone.

Endurance is patience concentrated.

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

Make yourself an honest man, and then you may be sure there is one less rascal in the world.

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

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

Men seldom, or rather never for a length of time and deliberately, rebel against anything that does not deserve rebelling against.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Men do less than they ought, unless they do all that they can.

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

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.

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.

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

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

Not what I have, but what I do is my kingdom.

Isolation is the sum total of wretchedness to a man.

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

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

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.