Quotes By Thomas Carlyle

No ghost was every seen by two pair of eyes.

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.

All that mankind has done, thought or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books.

Work alone is noble.

Do the duty which lies nearest to you, the second duty will then become clearer.

Conviction never so excellent, is worthless until it coverts itself into conduct.

No pressure, no diamonds.

The real use of gunpowder is to make all men tall.

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

Necessity dispenseth with decorum.

Imagination is a poor matter when it has to part company with understanding.

Teach a parrot the terms 'supply and demand' and you've got an economist.

The only happiness a brave person ever troubles themselves in asking about, is happiness enough to get their work done.

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.

Silence is as deep as eternity, speech a shallow as time.

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.

Nothing is more terrible than activity without insight.

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.

The fearful unbelief is unbelief in yourself.

Show me the man you honor, and I will know what kind of man you are.

Isolation is the sum total of wretchedness to a man.

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.

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

For, if a good speaker, never so eloquent, does not see into the fact, and is not speaking the truth of that - is there a more horrid kind of object in creation?

No man lives without jostling and being jostled; in all ways he has to elbow himself through the world, giving and receiving offence.

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

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

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

A man willing to work, and unable to find work, is perhaps the saddest sight that fortune's inequality exhibits under this sun.

A well-written life is almost as rare as a well-spent one.