Quotes from Thomas Carlyle

"A fair day's wages for a fair day's work": it is as just a demand as governed men ever made of governing. It is the everlasting right of man.

With stupidity and sound digestion man may front much.

Histories are a kind of distilled newspapers.

History a distillation of rumor.

The first purpose of clothes... was not warmth or decency, but ornament.... Among wild people, we find tattooing and painting even prior to clothes. The first spiritual want of a barbarous man is decoration; as indeed we still see among the barbarous classes in civilized countries.

Were we to characterize this age of ours by any single epithet, we should be tempted to call it… above all others, the Mechanical Age…. The same habit regulates not our modes of action alone, but our modes of thought and feeling. Men are grown mechanical in head and in heart, as well as in hand.

Secrecy is the element of all goodness even virtue, even beauty is mysterious.

The stupendous Fourth Estate, whose wide world-embracing influences what eye can take in?

History is a great dust heap.

So here hath been dawningAnother blue Day:Think wilt thou let itSlip useless away.

Everywhere the human soul stands between a hemisphere of light and another of darkness on the confines of two everlasting hostile empires, — Necessity and Free Will.

O poor mortals, how ye make this earth bitter for each other.

The first duty of man is to conquer fear he must get rid of it, he cannot act till then.

The fine arts once divorcing themselves from truth are quite certain to fall mad, if they do not die.

I've got a great ambition to die of exhaustion rather than boredom.

A strong mind always hopes, and has always cause to hope.

Reform is not pleasant, but grievous no person can reform themselves without suffering and hard work, how much less a nation.

Fun I love, but too much fun is of all things the most loathsome. Mirth is better than fun, and happiness is better than mirth.

Democracy is, by the nature of it, a self-canceling business; and gives in the long run a net result of zero.

No great man lives in vain. The history of the world is but the biography of great men.

All work, even cotton spinning, is noble; work is alone noble…. A life of ease is not for any man, nor for any god.

Fire is the best of servants; but what a master!

Old age is not a matter for sorrow. It is matter for thanks if we have left our work done behind us.

The Age of Miracles is forever here!