Quotes from Thomas Carlyle

A well written life is almost as rare as a well spent one.

Culture is the process by which a person becomes all that they were created capable of being.

Do the duty which lieth nearest to thee! Thy second duty will already have become clearer.

Enjoy things which are pleasant; that is not the evil: it is the reducing of our moral self to slavery by them that is.

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.

Happy are the people whose annals are blank in history books

Happy the people whose annals are blank in the history books

Long stormy spring-time, wet contentious April, winter chilling the lap of very May but at length the season of summer does come.

Make yourself an honest man, and then you may be sure that there is one rascal less in the world.

Man is a tool-using Animal. Nowhere do you find him without tools; without tools he is nothing, with tools he is all.

Nothing is more terrible than activity without insight.

Originality is a thing we constantly clamour for, and constantly quarrel with.

Speech is human, silence is divine, yet also brutish and dead therefore we must learn both arts.

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

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

The man without a purpose is like a ship without a rudder - 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.

The past is all holy to us; the dead are all holy; even they that were wicked when alive.

The world is a republic of mediocrities, and always was.

True humor springs not more from the head than from the heart. It is not contempt; its essence is love. It issues not in laugther, but in still smiles, which lie far deeper.

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.

You don't want to be great to start anything like business or any other but you will become great once you started

The block of granite which was an obstacle in the pathway of the weak becomes a stepping-stone in the pathway of the strong.

Have a purpose in life, and having it, throw into your work such strength of mind and muscle as God has given you.

In a controversy, the instant we feel anger we have already ceased striving for the truth, and have begun striving for ourselves.