Quotes By Thomas Carlyle

History, a distillation of rumour.

Genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains.

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.

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

Woe to him that claims obedience when it is not due; woe to him that refuses it when it is.

Adversity is the diamond dust Heaven polishes its jewels with.

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.

In books lies the soul of the whole past time.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Wonder is the basis of worship.

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