Quotes from Thomas Carlyle

The merit of originality is not novelty; it is sincerity.

The best effect of any book is that it excites the reader to self activity.

Wondrous is the strength of cheerfulness, and its power of endurance - the cheerful man will do more in the same time, will do it better, will preserve it longer, than the sad or sullen.

The true University of these days is a Collection of Books.

A person usually has two reasons for doing something, a good reason and the real reason.

Silence is more eloquent than words.

I don't pretend to understand the Universe - it's a great deal bigger than I am.

If what you have done is unjust, you have not succeeded.

Men do less than they ought, unless they do all that they can.

Every new opinion, at its starting, is precisely in a minority of one.

A man willing to work, and unable to find work, is perhaps the saddest sight that fortune's inequality exhibits under this sun.

He that can work is born to be king of something.

It is the first of all problems for a man to find out what kind of work he is to do in this universe.

Blessed is he who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness.

Work is the grand cure of all the maladies and miseries that ever beset mankind.

Tell a person they are brave and you help them become so.

Stop a moment, cease your work, and look around you.

A man cannot make a pair of shoes rightly unless he do it in a devout manner.

Oh, give us the man who sings at his work.

The work an unknown good man has done is like a vein of water flowing hidden underground, secretly making the ground green.

All work, even cotton-spinning, is noble; work is alone noble.

The world is a thing that a man must learn to despise, and even to neglect, before he can learn to reverence it, and work in it and for it.

The only happiness a brave person ever troubles themselves in asking about, is happiness enough to get their work done.

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.