Thomas Carlyle Quotes - Page 2

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

Silence is more eloquent than words.

My books are friends that never fai

War is a quarrel between two thieves too cowardly to fight their own battle; therefore they take boys from one village and another village, stick them into uniforms, equip them with guns, and let them loose like wild beasts against one other.

Who is there that in logical words can express the effect music has on us? A kind of inarticulate unfathomable speech which leads us to the edge of the Infinite and lets us for moments gaze into that!

Here hath been dawning another blue day: think wilt thou let it slip useless away?

Burke said there were three Estates in Parliament but in the reporters' gallery yonder there sat a fourth Estate more important than them all.

Speech is silvern silence is golden.

Blessed is he who has found his work let him ask no other blessedness. He has a work a life-purpose. ... Get your happiness out of your work or you will never know what real happiness is. ... Even in the meanest sorts of labor the whole soul of a man is composed into a kind of real harmony the instant he sets himself to work.

Hero-worship exists has existed and will forever exist universally among mankind.

A fair day's wages for a fair day's work: it is as just a demand as governed men ever made of government.

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.

One life - a little gleam of Time between two Eternities.

Experience is the best of schoolmasters only the school-fees are heavy.

A Dandy is a clothes-wearing Man, a Man whose trade, office and existence consists in the wearing of clothes.

Of all the paths a man could strike into, there is, at any given moment, a best path .. A thing which, here and now, it were of all things wisest for him to do .. To find this path, and walk in it, is the one thing needful for him.

Acorns are planted silently by some unnoticed breeze.

It is the heart always that sees before the head can see.

It is a great shame for anyone to listen to the accusation that Islam is a lie and that Muhammad was a fabricator and a deceiver. We saw that he remained steadfast upon his principles, with firm determination; kind and generous, compassionate, pious, virtuous, with real manhood, hardworking and sincere. Besides all these qualities, he was lenient with others, tolerant, kind, cheerful and praiseworthy and perhaps he would joke and tease his companions. He was just, truthful, smart, pure, magnanimous and present-minded; his face was radiant as if he had lights within him to illuminate the darkest of nights; he was a great man by nature who was not educated in a school nor nurtured by a teacher as he was not in need of any of this.

Adversity is sometimes hard upon a man but for one man who can stand prosperity there are a hundred that will stand adversity.

The lies (Western slander) which well-meaning zeal has heaped round this man (Muhammad) are disgraceful to ourselves only.

We arc the miracle of miracles the great inscrutable mystery of God.

Make yourself an honest man, and then you may be sure that there is one less scoundrel in the world.

The tragedy of life is not so much what men suffer but rather what they miss.

He that can work is a born king of something.

Time is the silent never-resting thing ... rolling rushing on swift silent like an all-embracing oceantide on which we and all the universe swim.

No sadder proof can be given by a man of his own littleness than disbelief in great men.

(Quoted by Thomas Carlyle) The rude man requires only to see something going on. The man of more refinement must be made to feel. The man of complete refinement must be made to reflect.

Love is ever the beginning of Knowledge as fire is of light.

Fool! The Ideal is in thyself, the impediment too is in thyself: thy Condition is but the stuff thou art to shape that same Ideal out of: what matters whether such stuff be of this sort or that, so the Form thou give it be heroic, be poetic? O thou that pinest in the imprisonment of the Actual, and criest bitterly to the gods for a kingdom wherein to rule and create, know this of a truth: the thing thou seekest is already with thee, ‘here or nowhere,’ couldst thou only see!

Wonder is the basis of worship.

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

Under all speech that is good for anything there lies a silence that is better.

Go as far as you can see; when you get there, you'll be able to see further.

The true university of these days is a collection of books.

All work of man is as the swimmer's: a vast ocean threatens to devour him if he front it not bravely it will keep its word.

There is endless merit in a man's knowing when to have done.

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

Debt is a bottomless sea.

The block of granite which was an obstacle in the path of the weak becomes a stepping stone in the path of the strong.

All that Mankind has done, thought, gained or been is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of Books. They are the chosen possession of men.

If time is precious, no book that will not improve by repeated readings deserves to be read at all.

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 him.

Nine-tenths of the miseries and vices of mankind proceed from idleness.

All reform except a moral one will prove unavailing.

A loving heart is the beginning of all knowledge.

Every noble crown is and on Earth will forever be a crown of thorns.

History is the essence of innumerable biographies.

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.