Quotes from Thomas Carlyle

Great men are the commissioned guides of mankind, who rule their fellows because they are wiser.

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.

A stammering man is never a worthless one. Physiology can tell you why. It is an excess of sensibility to the presence of his fellow creature, that makes him stammer.

The man of life upright has a guiltless heart, free from all dishonest deeds or thought of vanity.

Silence is the eternal duty of man.

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

Universal history, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here.

Every man has a coward and hero in his soul.

Man, it is not thy works, which are mortal, infinitely little, and the greatest no greater than the least, but only the spirit thou workest in, that can have worth or continuance.

There is in man a higher than love of happiness; he can do without happiness, and instead thereof find blessedness.

The great silent man! Looking round on the noisy inanity of the world,--words with little meaning, actions with little worth,--one loves to reflect on the great Empire of Silence.

The first duty of man is that of subduing fear.

No man sees far, most see no farther than their noses.

All men, if they work not as in the great taskmaster's eye, will work wrong, and work unhappily for themselves and for you.

A man's felicity consists not in the outward and visible blessing of fortune, but in the inward and unseen perfections and riches of the mind.

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.

A man protesting against error is on the way towards uniting himself with all men that believe in truth.

A man's religion consists, not of the many things he is in doubt of and tries to believe, but of the few he is assured of and has no need of effort for believing.

Ill-health, of body or of mind, is defeat. Health alone is victory. Let all men, if they can manage it, contrive to be healthy!

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

Courtesy is the due of man to man; not of suit-of-clothes to suit-of-clothes.

That there should one man die ignorant who had capacity for knowledge, this I call a tragedy.

Man always worships something; always he sees the Infinite shadowed forth in something finite; and indeed can and must so see it in any finite thing, once tempt him well to fix his eyes thereon.

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.