Quotes By Thomas Carlyle

Talk that does not end in any kind of action is better suppressed altogether.

No violent extreme endures.

Be not a slave of words.

Not what I have, but what I do is my kingdom.

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.

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

Not brute force but only persuasion and faith are the kings of this world.

Work alone is noble.

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

If what you have done is unjust, you have not succeeded.

The only happiness a brave person ever troubles themselves in asking about, is happiness enough to get their work done.

The greatest of faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none.

The eye sees what it brings the power to see.

The difference between Socrates and Jesus? The great conscious and the immeasurably great unconscious.

I don't like to talk much with people who always agree with me. It is amusing to coquette with an echo for a little while, but one soon tires of it.

Speech is human, silence is divine, yet also brutish and dead: therefore we must learn both arts.

There are good and bad times, but our mood changes more often than our fortune.

Nothing that was worthy in the past departs; no truth or goodness realized by man ever dies, or can die.

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

In every phenomenon the beginning remains always the most notable moment.

Clever men are good, but they are not the best.

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

I grow daily to honour facts more and more, and theory less and less. A fact, it seems to me, is a great thing; a sentence printed, if not by God, then at least by the Devil.

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.

The man of life upright has a guiltless heart, free from all dishonest deeds or thought of vanity.

A man without a goal is like a ship without a rudder.

Let each become all that he was created capable of being.

Thought once awakened does not again slumber; unfolds itself into a System of Thought; grows, in man after man, generation after generation, - till its full stature is reached, and such System of Thought can grow no farther, but must give place to another.

No man who has once heartily and wholly laughed can be altogether irreclaimably bad.

Youth is to all the glad season of life; but often only by what it hopes, not by what it attains, or what it escapes.