Thomas Carlyle quotes

“Love is not altogether a delirium, yet it has many points in common therewith.”

— Thomas Carlyle

“Man is, properly speaking, based upon hope, he has no other possession but hope; this world of his is emphatically the place of hope.”

— Thomas Carlyle

“Men do less than they ought, unless they do all that they can.”

— Thomas Carlyle

“Narrative is linear, but action has breadth and depth as well as height and is solid.”

— Thomas Carlyle

“Necessity dispenseth with decorum.”

— Thomas Carlyle

“No iron chain, or outward force of any kind, can ever compel the soul of a person to believe or to disbelieve.”

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle

“No violent extreme endures.”

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle

“Science must have originated in the feeling that something was wrong.”

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle

“The end of man is action, and not thought, though it be of the noblest.”

— Thomas Carlyle

“The eye sees what it brings the power to see.”

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle

“The outer passes away; the innermost is the same yesterday, today, and forever.”

— 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.”

— Thomas Carlyle

“What you see, but can't see over is as good as infinite.”

— Thomas Carlyle

“When new turns of behavior cease to appear in the life of the individual, its behavior ceases to be intelligent.”

— Thomas Carlyle

“Work alone is noble.”

— Thomas Carlyle

“Worship is transcendent wonder.”

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle

“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.”

— Thomas Carlyle

“Every day that is born into the world comes like a burst of music and rings the whole day through, and you make of it a dance, a dirge, or a life march, as you will.”

— Thomas Carlyle

“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.”

— Thomas Carlyle

“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.”

— Thomas Carlyle

“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.”

— Thomas Carlyle

“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.”

— Thomas Carlyle

“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.”

— Thomas Carlyle

“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.”

— Thomas Carlyle

“It were a real increase of human happiness, could all young men from the age of nineteen be covered under barrels, or rendered otherwise invisible; and there left to follow their lawful studies and callings, till they emerged, sadder and wiser, at the age of twenty-five.”

— Thomas Carlyle