Quotes By Thomas Carlyle

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

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.

Genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains.

War is a quarrel between two thieves too cowardly to fight their own battle.

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.

This world, after all our science and sciences, is still a miracle wonderful, inscrutable, magical and more, to whosoever will think of it.

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

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.

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.

Nothing builds self-esteem and self-confidence like accomplishment.

It is a vain hope to make people happy by politics.

Conviction is worthless unless it is converted into conduct.

The courage we desire and prize is not the courage to die decently, but to live manfully.

If you do not wish a man to do a thing, you had better get him to talk about it; for the more men talk, the more likely they are to do nothing else.

The first duty of man is to conquer fear; he must get rid of it, he cannot act till then.

Every noble work is at first impossible.

Culture is the process by which a person becomes all that they were created capable of being.

A loving heart is the beginning of all knowledge.

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

Oh, give us the man who sings at his work.

Weak eyes are fondest of glittering objects.

Men seldom, or rather never for a length of time and deliberately, rebel against anything that does not deserve rebelling against.

For all right judgment of any man or things it is useful, nay, essential, to see his good qualities before pronouncing on his bad.

Man is a tool-using animal. Without tools he is nothing, with tools he is all.