Quotes By Thomas Carlyle

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

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.

Our main business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand.

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

This world, after all our science and sciences, is still a miracle wonderful, inscrutable, magical and more, to whosoever will think of it.

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

Nothing builds self-esteem and self-confidence like accomplishment.

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

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.

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.

The first duty of man is to conquer fear; he must get rid of it, he cannot act till then.

Every noble work is at first impossible.

Culture is the process by which a person becomes all that they were created capable of being.

Conviction is worthless unless it is converted into conduct.

The courage we desire and prize is not the courage to die decently, but to live manfully.

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.

Weak eyes are fondest of glittering objects.

A loving heart is the beginning of all knowledge.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together.

He who could foresee affairs three days in advance would be rich for thousands of years.

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

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.