Quotes from Thomas Carlyle

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

There is endless merit in a man's knowing when to have done.

The eternal stars shine out as soon as it is dark enough.

If you can walk, you can dance. Zimbabwe saying Music is well said to be the speech of angels.

Biography is the only true history.

Acorns are planted silently by some unnoticed breeze.

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

Debt is a bottomless sea.

Of all paths a man could strike into, there is, at any given moment, a best path 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.

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

The end of man is action.

Nothing is more terrible than activity without insight.

In the long run every government is the exact symbol of its people, with their wisdom and unwisdom.

Innumerable are the illusions and legerdemain tricks of custom: but of all these, perhaps the cleverest is her knack of persuading us that the miraculous by simple repetition ceases to be miraculous.

Blessed is he who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness. He has a work, a life-purpose. ... Get your happiness out of your work or you will never know what real happiness is. ... Even in the meanest sorts of labor, the whole soul of a man is composed into a kind of real harmony the instant he sets himself to work.

Without kindness, there can be no true joy.

Hero-worship exists, has existed, and will forever exist, universally among mankind.

Nine-tenths of the miseries and vices of mankind proceed from idleness.

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

It is the heart always that sees, before the head can see.

Macaulay is well for awhile, but one wouldn't live under Niagara.

Burke said there were Three Estates in Parliament; but, in the Reporters' gallery yonder, there sat a Fourth Estate more important far than they all.

The man who cannot laugh is not only fit for treasons, strategems, and spoils, but his whole life is already a treason and a stratagem.

One life - a little gleam of Time between two Eternities.