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Quotes by Thomas Carlyle

  • Music is well said to be the speech of angels.
  • 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.
  • Blessed is he who has found his work let him ask no other blessedness.
  • No great man lives in vain. The history of the world is but the biography of great men.
  • I do not believe in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.
  • It is the first of all problems for a man to find out what kind of work he is to do in this universe.
  • Long stormy spring-time, wet contentious April, winter chilling the lap of very May but at length the season of summer does come.
  • Originality is a thing we constantly clamour for, and constantly quarrel with.
  • A man with a half volition goes backwards and forwards, and makes no way on the smoothest road a man with a whole volition advances on the roughest, and will reach his purpose, if there be even a little worthiness in it. The man without a purpose is like a ship without a rudder - a waif, a nothing, a no man. Have a purpose in life and having it, throw such strength of mind and muscle into your work as God has given you.
  • 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.
  • A vein of poetry exists in the hearts of all men.
  • Silence is deep as Eternity speech is shallow as Time.
  • A well written life is almost as rare as a well spent one.
  • Happy the people whose annals are blank in the history books
  • The greatest of faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none.
  • Talk that does not end in any kind of action is better suppressed altogether.
  • Adversity is sometimes hard upon a man but for one man who can stand prosperity, there are a hundred that will stand adversity.
  • If you are ever in doubt as to whether to kiss a pretty girl, always give her the benefit of the doubt.
  • Men do less than they ought, unless they do all that they can.
  • Our main business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance but to do what lies clearly at hand.
  • Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood.
  • Nothing that was worthy in the past departs no truth or goodness realized by man ever dies, or can die.
  • One life - a little gleam of Time between two Eternities.
  • Skepticism means, not intellectual doubt alone, but moral doubt.
  • The best effect of any book is that it excites the reader to self-activity.
  • That there should one Man die ignorant who had capacity for Knowledge, this I call a tragedy.
  • Enjoy things which are pleasant that is not the evil it is the reducing of our moral self to slavery by them that is.
  • Under all speech that is good for anything there lies a silence that is better. Silence is deep as Eternity speech is shallow as Time.
  • Speech is human, silence is divine, yet also brutish and dead therefore we must learn both arts.