Thomas Carlyle Quotes

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

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

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

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

Endurance is patience concentrated.

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

Nature alone is antique, and the oldest art a mushroom.

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

A loving heart is the beginning of all knowledge.

Of all acts of man repentance is the most divine. The greatest of all faults is to be conscious of none.

These Arabs, the man Mahomet, and that one century, - is it not as if a spark had fallen, one spark, on a world of what proves explosive powder, blazes heaven-high from Delhi to Granada! I said, the Great man was always as lightning out of Heaven; the rest of men waited for him like fuel, and then they too would flame.

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.

War is a quarrel between two thieves too cowardly to fight their own battle.

When we can drain the Ocean into mill-ponds, and bottle up the Force of Gravity, to be sold by retail, in gas jars; then may we hope to comprehend the infinitudes of man's soul under formulas of Profit and Loss; and rule over this too, as over a patent engine, by checks, and valves, and balances.

No pressure, no diamonds.

Superstition! that horrid incubus which dwelt in darkness, shunning the light, with all its racks, and poison chalices, and foul sleeping draughts, is passing away without return. Religion cannot pass away. The burning of a little straw may hide the stars of the sky; but the stars are there and will reappear.

Egotism is the source and summary of all faults and miseries.

We have our little theory on all human and divine things. Poetry, the workings of genius itself, which, in all times, with one or another meaning, has been called Inspiration, and held to be mysterious and inscrutable, is no longer without its scientific exposition. The building of the lofty rhyme is like any other masonry or bricklaying: we have theories of its rise, height, decline and fall -- which latter, it would seem, is now near, among all people.

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

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

Quackery gives birth to nothing; gives death to all things.

Do not be embarrassed by your mistakes. Nothing can teach us better than our understanding of them. This is one of the best ways of self-education.

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

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

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

Everywhere in life, the true question is not what we gain, but what we do.

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

Experience is the best of school masters, only the school fees are heavy.

Necessity dispenseth with decorum.

Speech is silver, silence is golden.

Isolation is the sum total of wretchedness to a man.

The eye sees what it brings the power to see.

Every noble work is at first impossible.

He who has no vision of eternity has no hold on time.

The mystical bond of brotherhood makes all men brothers.

Weak eyes are fondest of glittering objects.

Permanence, perseverance and persistence in spite of all obstacle s, discouragement s, and impossibilities: It is this, that in all things distinguishes the strong soul from the weak.

Laughter is the cipher key wherewith we decipher the whole man

Who is it that loves me and will love me forever with an affection which no chance, no misery, no crime of mine can do away? It is you, my mother.

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.

Music is well said to be the speech of angels.

A vein of poetry exists in the hearts of all men.

If Jesus Christ were to come today, people would not even crucify him. They would ask him to dinner, and hear what he had to say, and make fun of it.

The block of granite which was an obstacle in the pathway of the weak, became a stepping-stone in the pathway of the strong.

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

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

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

Silence, the great Empire of Silence: higher than all stars; deeper than the Kingdom of Death! It alone is great; all else is small.

True friends, like ivy and the wall Both stand together, and together fall.

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.