Quotes By Thomas Carlyle

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.

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

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

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

Reform is not pleasant, but grievous; no person can reform themselves without suffering and hard work, how much less a nation.

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

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

Endurance is patience concentrated.

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

Be not a slave of words.

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

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.

Talk that does not end in any kind of action is better suppressed altogether.

I do not believe in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.

No violent extreme endures.

A strong mind always hopes, and has always cause to hope.

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

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

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

Not brute force but only persuasion and faith are the kings of this world.

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.

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

The greatest of faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none.

The eye sees what it brings the power to see.

The difference between Socrates and Jesus? The great conscious and the immeasurably great unconscious.

Nothing that was worthy in the past departs; no truth or goodness realized by man ever dies, or can die.

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

Clever men are good, but they are not the best.