Best Quotes by Thomas Carlyle (Top 10)
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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.
Thomas Carlyle
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I've got a great ambition to die of exhaustion rather than boredom.
Thomas Carlyle
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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 it.
Thomas Carlyle
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All that mankind has done, thought or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books.
Thomas Carlyle
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Go as far as you can see; when you get there you'll be able to see farther.
Thomas Carlyle
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A loving heart is the beginning of all knowledge.
Thomas Carlyle
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Conviction is worthless unless it is converted into conduct.
Thomas Carlyle
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Silence is as deep as eternity, speech a shallow as time.
Thomas Carlyle
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Endurance is patience concentrated.
Thomas Carlyle
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Foolish men imagine that because judgment for an evil thing is delayed, there is no justice; but only accident here below. Judgment for an evil thing is many times delayed some day or two, some century or two, but it is sure as life, it is sure as death.
Thomas Carlyle
More Thomas Carlyle Quotes
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Make yourself an honest man, and then you may be sure there is one less rascal in the world.
Thomas Carlyle
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Tell a person they are brave and you help them become so.
Thomas Carlyle
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The tragedy of life is not so much what men suffer, but rather what they miss.
Thomas Carlyle
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Show me the man you honor, and I will know what kind of man you are.
Thomas Carlyle
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He who has health, has hope; and he who has hope, has everything.
Thomas Carlyle
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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
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The true university of these days is a collection of books.
Thomas Carlyle
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Our main business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand.
Thomas Carlyle
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No pressure, no diamonds.
Thomas Carlyle
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If you look deep enough you will see music; the heart of nature being everywhere music.
Thomas Carlyle
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Every noble work is at first impossible.
Thomas Carlyle
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A man lives by believing something: not by debating and arguing about many things.
Thomas Carlyle
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Every man is my superior in that I may learn from him.
Thomas Carlyle
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Popular opinion is the greatest lie in the world.
Thomas Carlyle
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The block of granite which was an obstacle in the pathway of the weak, became a stepping-stone in the pathway of the strong.
Thomas Carlyle
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The best effect of any book is that it excites the reader to self activity.
Thomas Carlyle
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Adversity is the diamond dust Heaven polishes its jewels with.
Thomas Carlyle
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Everywhere in life, the true question is not what we gain, but what we do.
Thomas Carlyle
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Permanence, perseverance and persistence in spite of all obstacles, discouragements, and impossibilities: It is this, that in all things distinguishes the strong soul from the weak.
Thomas Carlyle
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Experience is the best of school masters, only the school fees are heavy.
Thomas Carlyle
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The merit of originality is not novelty; it is sincerity.
Thomas Carlyle
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A great man shows his greatness by the way he treats little men.
Thomas Carlyle
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Silence is more eloquent than words.
Thomas Carlyle
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One life - a little gleam of Time between two Eternities.
Thomas Carlyle
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It is the heart always that sees, before the head can see.
Thomas Carlyle
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Music is well said to be the speech of angels.
Thomas Carlyle
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Love is ever the beginning of knowledge as fire is of light.
Thomas Carlyle
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A person usually has two reasons for doing something: a good reason and the real reason.
Thomas Carlyle
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Wonder is the basis of worship.
Thomas Carlyle
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The work an unknown good man has done is like a vein of water flowing hidden underground, secretly making the ground green.
Thomas Carlyle
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If you are ever in doubt as to whether to kiss a pretty girl, always give her the benefit of the doubt.
Thomas Carlyle
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When the oak is felled the whole forest echoes with it fall, but a hundred acorns are sown in silence by an unnoticed breeze.
Thomas Carlyle
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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.
Thomas Carlyle
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I do not believe in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.
Thomas Carlyle
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History is the distillation of rumour.
Thomas Carlyle
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Do the duty which lieth nearest to thee! Thy second duty will already have become clearer
Thomas Carlyle
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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.
Thomas Carlyle
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If time is precious, no book that will not improve by repeated readings deserves to be read at all.
Thomas Carlyle
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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.
Thomas Carlyle
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Talk that does not end in any kind of action is better suppressed altogether.
Thomas Carlyle
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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
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Work is the grand cure of all the maladies and miseries that ever beset mankind.
Thomas Carlyle
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The spiritual is the parent of the practical.
Thomas Carlyle
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Happy the people whose annals are blank in history books.
Thomas Carlyle
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The barrenest of all mortals is the sentimentalist.
Thomas Carlyle
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It is a mathematical fact that the casting of this pebble from my hand alters the centre of gravity of the universe.
Thomas Carlyle
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Weak eyes are fondest of glittering objects.
Thomas Carlyle
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A man with a half volition goes backwards and forwards, and makes no way on the smoothest road; a man with a whole volition advances on the roughest, and will reach his purpose, if there be even a little worthiness in it. The man without a purpose is like a ship without a rudder - a waif, a nothing, a no man. Have a purpose in life and having it, throw such strength of mind and muscle into your work as God has given you.
Thomas Carlyle
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Nothing that was worthy in the past departs; no truth or goodness realized by man ever dies, or can die.
Thomas Carlyle
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Long stormy spring-time, wet contentious April, winter chilling the lap of very May; but at length the season of summer does come.
Thomas Carlyle
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One life; a little gleam of Time between two Eternities; no second chance to us for evermore!
Thomas Carlyle
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Every noble crown is, and on Earth will forever be, a crown of thorns.
Thomas Carlyle
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A man without a goal is like a ship without a rudder.
Thomas Carlyle
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The greatest of faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none.
Thomas Carlyle
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Speech is human, silence is divine, yet also brutish and dead: therefore we must learn both arts.
Thomas Carlyle
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Under all speech that is good for anything there lies a silence that is better, Silence is deep as Eternity; speech is shallow as Time.
Thomas Carlyle
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It is the first of all problems for a man to find out what kind of work he is to do in this universe.
Thomas Carlyle
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Adversity is sometimes hard upon a man; but for one man who can
stand prosperity, there are a hundred that will stand adversity.
Thomas Carlyle
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All work is as seed sown; it grows and spreads, and sows itself anew.
Thomas Carlyle
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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
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Love is not altogether a delirium, yet it has many points in common therewith.
Thomas Carlyle
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Literature is the thought of thinking souls.
Thomas Carlyle
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Speech is silver, silence is golden.
Thomas Carlyle
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Nine-tenths of the miseries and vices of mankind proceed from idleness.
Thomas Carlyle
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Of a truth, men are mystically united: a mystic bond of brotherhood makes all men one.
Thomas Carlyle
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Poetry, therefore, we will call Musical Thought.
Thomas Carlyle
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To us also, through every star, through every blade of grass, is not God made visible if we will open our minds and our eyes.
Thomas Carlyle
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Skepticism means, not intellectual doubt alone, but moral doubt.
Thomas Carlyle
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Biography is the only true history
Thomas Carlyle
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The three great elements of modern civilization, Gun powder, Printing, and the Protestant religion.
Thomas Carlyle
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The eternal stars shine out as soon as it is dark enough.
Thomas Carlyle
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The merit of originality is not novelty; it is sincerity. The believing man is the original man; whatsoever he believes, he believes it for himself, not for another.
Thomas Carlyle
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Blessed is he who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness.
Thomas Carlyle
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The courage we desire and prize is not the courage to die decently, but to live manfully.
Thomas Carlyle
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Nothing is more terrible than activity without insight.
Thomas Carlyle
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Hero-worship exists, has existed, and will forever exist, universally, among mankind.
Thomas Carlyle
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No sadder proof can be given by a man of his own littleness than disbelief in great men.
Thomas Carlyle
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France was long a despotism tempered by epigrams.
Thomas Carlyle
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I don't pretend to understand the Universe - it's a great deal bigger than I am.
Thomas Carlyle