Quotes from Thomas Carlyle

Do not be embarrassed by your mistakes. Nothing can teach us better than our understanding of them. This is one of the best ways of self-education.

Habit and imitation--there is nothing more perennial in us than these two. They are the source of all working, and all apprenticeship, of all practice, and all learning, in this world.

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

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

Insurrection, never so necessary, is a most sad necessity; and governors who wait for that to instruct them are surely getting into the fatalest course.

It is a mathematical fact that the casting of this pebble from my hand alters the centre of gravity of the universe.

The word of Mohammad is a voice direct from nature's own heart - all else is wind in comparison.

This world, after all our science and sciences, is still a miracle; wonderful, inscrutable, magical and more, to whosoever will think of it.

Laws, written, if not on stone tables, yet on the azure of infinitude, in the inner heart of God's creation, certain as life, certain as death, are there, and thou shalt not disobey them.

persons, with big wigs many of them and austere aspect, whom I take to be Professors of the Dismal Science… Coining "Dismal Science" as a nickname for Political Economy

There is something in man which your science cannot satisfy.

Professors of the Dismal Science, I perceive the length of your tether is now pretty well run; and I must request you to talk a little lower in the future.

No pressure, no diamonds.

A man lives by believing something: not by debating and arguing about many things.

Everywhere in life, the true question is not what we gain, but what we do.

Doubt, of whatever kind, can be ended by action alone.

If you are ever in doubt as to whether to kiss a pretty girl, always give her the benefit of the doubt.

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

Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together; that at length they may emerge, full-formed and majestic, into the delight of life, which they are thenceforth to rule.

I don't like to talk much with people who always agree with me. It is amusing to coquette with an echo for a little while, but one soon tires of it.

The cut of a garment speaks of intellect and talent and the color of temperament and heart.

There is often more spiritual force in a proverb than in whole philosophical systems.

History, as it lies at the root of all science, is also the first distinct product of man's spiritual nature, his earliest expression of what may be called thought.

Let each become all that he was created capable of being.