Thomas Carlyle Quotes

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.

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

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

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

Fame is no sure test of merit.

No pressure, no diamonds.

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!

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.

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

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

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

Of all the paths a man could strike into, there is, at any given moment, a best path .. A thing which, here and now, it were of all things wisest for him to do .. To find this path, and walk in it, is the one thing needful for him.

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

Literature is the thought of thinking souls.

The merit of originality is not novelty, it is sincerity. The believing man is the original man.