Famous Quotes

Quotes by Thomas Carlyle

• No great man lives in vain. The history of the world is but the biography of great men.
• No sadder proof can be given by a man of his own littleness than disbelief in great men.
• None of us will ever accomplish anything excellent or commanding except when he listens to this whisper which is heard by him alone.
• Not brute force but only persuasion and faith are the kings of this world.
• Nothing that was worthy in the past departs no truth or goodness realized by man ever dies, or can die.
• Oh, give us the man who sings at his work.
• Old age is not a matter for sorrow. It is matter for thanks if we have left our work done behind us.
• Our main business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand.
• Reform is not pleasant, but grievous no person can reform themselves without suffering and hard work, how much less a nation.
• 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.
• Science must have originated in the feeling that something was wrong.
• Secrecy is the element of all goodness even virtue, even beauty is mysterious.
• Silence is as deep as eternity, speech a shallow as time.
• Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together.
• The courage we desire and prize is not the courage to die decently, but to live manfully.
• The difference between Socrates and Jesus? The great conscious and the immeasurably great unconscious.
• The eye sees what it brings the power to see.
• The first duty of man is to conquer fear he must get rid of it, he cannot act till then.
• The old cathedrals are good, but the great blue dome that hangs over everything is better.
• The only happiness a brave person ever troubles themselves in asking about, is happiness enough to get their work done.
• The real use of gunpowder is to make all men tall.
• The three great elements of modern civilization, Gun powder, Printing, and the Protestant religion.
• The work an unknown good man has done is like a vein of water flowing hidden underground, secretly making the ground green.
• There are good and bad times, but our mood changes more often than our fortune.
• There is a great discovery still to be made in literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write.
• This world, after all our science and sciences, is still a miracle wonderful, inscrutable, magical and more, to whosoever will think of it.
• To reform a world, to reform a nation, no wise man will undertake and all but foolish men know, that the only solid, though a far slower reformation, is what each begins and perfects on himself.
• To us also, through every star, through every blade of grass, is not God made visible if we will open our minds and our eyes.
• 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.
• 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.
• War is a quarrel between two thieves too cowardly to fight their own battle.
• 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.
• What you see, but can't see over is as good as infinite.
• Wonder is the basis of worship.
• 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.