“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
“The only happiness a brave person ever troubles themselves in asking about, is happiness enough to get their work done.”
– Thomas Carlyle
“All great peoples are conservative.”
– 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
“History shows that the majority of people that have done anything great have passed their youth in seclusion.”
– Thomas Carlyle
“No sadder proof can be given by a man of his own littleness than disbelief in great men.”
– Thomas Carlyle
“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.”
– Thomas Carlyle
“The difference between Socrates and Jesus? The great conscious and the immeasurably great unconscious.”
– Thomas Carlyle
“Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together.”
– Thomas Carlyle
“I don’t pretend to understand the Universe – it’s a great deal bigger than I am.”
– Thomas Carlyle
“No great man lives in vain. The history of the world is but the biography of great men.”
– Thomas Carlyle
“The old cathedrals are good, but the great blue dome that hangs over everything is better.”
– Thomas Carlyle
“The three great elements of modern civilization, Gun powder, Printing, and the Protestant religion.”
– Thomas Carlyle
“I’ve got a great ambition to die of exhaustion rather than boredom.”
– Thomas Carlyle
“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.”
– Thomas Carlyle
“What you see, but can’t see over is as good as infinite.”
– Thomas Carlyle
“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?”
– Thomas Carlyle
“Sarcasm I now see to be, in general, the language of the devil for which reason I have long since as good as renounced it.”
– 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
“Clever men are good, but they are not the best.”
– Thomas Carlyle
“For all right judgment of any man or things it is useful, nay, essential, to see his good qualities before pronouncing on his bad.”
– Thomas Carlyle
“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
“The work an unknown good man has done is like a vein of water flowing hidden underground, secretly making the ground green.”
– Thomas Carlyle
“The old cathedrals are good, but the great blue dome that hangs over everything is better.”
– Thomas Carlyle
“There are good and bad times, but our mood changes more often than our fortune.”
– Thomas Carlyle
“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.”
– Thomas Carlyle
“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
“He who has health, has hope and he who has hope, has everything.”
– Thomas Carlyle
“The first duty of man is to conquer fear he must get rid of it, he cannot act till then.”
– Thomas Carlyle
“Not brute force but only persuasion and faith are the kings of this world.”
– Thomas Carlyle