Quotes By Thomas Carlyle

The three great elements of modern civilization, Gun powder, Printing, and the Protestant religion.

Nothing stops the man who desires to achieve. Every obstacle is simply a course to develop his achievement muscle. It's a strengthening of his powers of accomplishment.

The fearful unbelief is unbelief in yourself.

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

Isolation is the sum total of wretchedness to a man.

Good breeding differs, if at all, from high breeding only as it gracefully remembers the rights of others, rather than gracefully insists on its own rights.

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

For, if a good speaker, never so eloquent, does not see into the fact, and is not speaking the truth of that - is there a more horrid kind of object in creation?

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

The old cathedrals are good, but the great blue dome that hangs over everything is better.

There is a great discovery still to be made in literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write.

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

Blessed is he who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness.

A well-written life is almost as rare as a well-spent one.

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.

History, a distillation of rumour.

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.

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

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.

Writing is a dreadful labor, yet not so dreadful as Idleness.