Quotes from Thomas Carlyle

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

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

When the oak is felled the whole forest echoes with its fall, but a hundred acorns are sown in silence by an unnoticed breeze.

History is the essence of innumerable biographies.

Every noble work is at first impossible.

In books lies the soul of the whole Past Time: the articulate audible voice of the Past, when the body and material substance of it has altogether vanished like a dream.

Adversity is the diamond dust Heaven polishes its jewels with

In books lies the soul fo the whole past time.

Wonder is the basis of worship.

The history of the world is but a biography of great men.

If you look deep enough you will see music; the heart of nature being everywhere music.

May blessings be upon the head of Cadmus, the Phoenicians, or whoever it was that invented books.

There needs not a great soul to make a hero; there needs a god-created soul which will be true to its origin; that will be a great soul!

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.

Love is ever the beginning of knowledge as fire is of light.

Fame is no sure test of merit.

If time is precious, no book that will not improve by repeated readings deserves to be read at all.

For a hundred that can bear adversity, there is hardly one that can bear prosperity.

No pressure, no diamonds.

Of our thinking it is but the upper surface that we shape into articulate thought; underneath the region of argument and conscious discourse lies the region of meditation.

Literature is the thought of thinking souls.

Under all speech that is good for anything there lies a silence that is better.

Let me have my own way in exactly everything and a sunnier and pleasanter creature does not exist.

No man lives without jostling and being jostled; in all ways he has to elbow himself through the world, giving and receiving offense.