Thomas Carlyle Biography | Inspiration Quotations | Motivation Quotes

Thomas Carlyle Motivational Quotations:

• “Permanence, perseverance and persistence in spite of all obstacles, discouragements, and impossibilities: It is this, that in all things distinguishes the strong soul from the weak.”

•  “Necessity dispenseth with decorum.”

•  “Silence is as deep as eternity, speech a shallow as time.”

•  “Nothing builds self-esteem and self-confidence like accomplishment.”

•  “No pressure, no diamonds.”

•  “There are good and bad times, but our mood changes more often than our fortune.”

•  “Nothing stops the man who desires to achieve. Every obstacle is simply a course to develop his achievement muscle. It's a strengthening of his powers of accomplishment.”

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

•  “Every noble work is at first impossible.”

•  “Silence is more eloquent than words.”

•  “A man without a goal is like a ship without a rudder.”

•  “Teach a parrot the terms 'supply and demand' and you've got an economist.”

•  “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.”

•  “A well-written life is almost as rare as a well-spent one”

•  “He who has  health, has hope; and he who has hope, has everything.”

•  “If there be no enemy there's no fight. If no fight, no victory and if no victory there is no crown.”

•  “Man is a tool-using animal. Without tools he is nothing, with tools he is all.”

•  “Endurance is patience concentrated.”

•  “If you do not wish a man to do a thing, you had better get him to talk about it; for the more men talk, the more likely they are to do nothing else.”

•  “The block of granite which was an obstacle in the pathway of the weak, became a stepping-stone in the pathway of the strong.”

•  “A laugh, to be joyous, must flow from a joyous heart, for without kindness, there can be no true joy.”

•  “No ghost was every seen by two pair of eyes.”

•  “Go as far as you can see; when you get there you'll be able to see farther.”

•  “Secrecy is the element of all goodness; even virtue, even beauty is mysterious.”

•  “I do not believe in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.”

•  “Adversity is the diamond dust Heaven polishes its jewels with.”

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

•  “If what you have done is unjust, you have not succeeded.”

•  “The real use of gunpowder is to make all men tall.”

•  “No great man lives in vain. The history of the world is but the biography of great men.”

•  “Genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains.”

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

•  “The merit of originality is not novelty; it is sincerity.”

•  “Not brute force but only persuasion and faith are the kings of this world.”

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

•  “None of us will ever accomplish anything excellent or commanding except when he listens to this whisper which is heard by him alone.”

•  “Love is not altogether a delirium, yet it has many points in common therewith.”

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

•  “Old age is not a matter for sorrow. It is matter for thanks if we have left our work done behind us.”

•  “Every day that is born into the world comes like a burst of music and rings the whole day through, and you make of it a dance, a dirge, or a life march, as you will.”

•  “Imperfection clings to a person, and if they wait till they are brushed off entirely, they would spin for ever on their axis, advancing nowhere.”

•  “Nothing is more terrible than activity without insight.”

•  “What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books.”

•  “Wonder is the basis of worship.”

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

•  “To reform a world, to reform a nation, no wise man will undertake; and all but foolish men know, that the only solid, though a far slower reformation, is what each begins and perfects on himself.”

•  “No person is important enough to make me angry.”

•  “Reform is not pleasant, but grievous; no person can reform themselves without suffering and hard work, how much less a nation.”

•  “The man of life upright has a guiltless heart, free from all dishonest deeds or thought of vanity.”

•  “The greatest of faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none.”

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

•  “A man's felicity consists not in the outward and visible blessing of fortune, but in the inward and unseen perfections and riches of the mind.”

•  “The old cathedrals are good, but the great blue dome that hangs over everything is better.”

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

•  “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.”

•  “War is a quarrel between two thieves too cowardly to fight their own battle.”

•  “Conviction never so excellent, is worthless until it coverts itself into conduct.”

•  “The difference between Socrates and Jesus? The great conscious and the immeasurably great unconscious.”

•  “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.”

•  “One must verify or expel his doubts, and convert them into the certainty of Yes or NO.”

•  “Show me the man you honor, and I will know what kind of man you are.”

•  “No amount of ability is of the slightest avail without honor.”

•  “The difference between Socrates and Jesus? The great conscious and the immeasurably great unconscious.”

•  “The first duty of man is to conquer fear; he must get rid of it, he cannot act till then.”

•  “Do the duty which lies nearest to you, the second duty will then become clearer.”

•  “A person who is gifted sees the essential point and leaves the rest as surplus.”

•  “Laughter is one of the very privileges of reason, being confined to the human species.”

•  “No sadder proof can be given by a man of his own littleness than disbelief in great men.”

•  “To us also, through every star, through every blade of grass, is not God made visible if we will open our minds and our eyes.”

•  “I grow daily to honour facts more and more, and theory less and less. A fact, it seems to me, is a great thing; a sentence printed, if not by God, then at least by the Devil.”

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

•  “Show me the person you honor, for I know better by that the kind of person you are. For you show me what your idea of humanity is.”

•  “Egotism is the source and summary of all faults and miseries.”

•  “It is a strange trade that of advocacy. Your intellect, your highest heavenly gift is hung up in the shop window like a loaded pistol for sale.”

•  “Of all acts of man repentance is the most divine. The greatest of all faults is to be conscious of none.”

•  “All great peoples are conservative.”

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

•  “No man who has once heartily and wholly laughed can be altogether irreclaimably bad.”

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

•  “Youth is to all the glad season of life; but often only by what it hopes, not by what it attains, or what it escapes.”

  

   

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

•  “Humor has justly been regarded as the finest perfection of poetic genius.”

•  “Man is, properly speaking, based upon hope, he has no other possession but hope; this world of his is emphatically the place of hope.”

•  “He who could foresee affairs three days in advance would be rich for thousands of years.”

•  “The eye sees what it brings the power to see.”

•  “What you see, but can't see over is as good as infinite.”

•  “Men seldom, or rather never for a length of time and deliberately, rebel against anything that does not deserve rebelling against.”

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

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

•  “Narrative is linear, but action has breadth and depth as well as height and is solid.”

•  “I don't pretend to understand the Universe - it's a great deal bigger than I am. Thomas Carlyle”

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

•  “The courage we desire and prize is not the courage to die decently, but to live manfully.”

•  “The outer passes away; the innermost is the same yesterday, today, and forever.”

•  “No iron chain, or outward force of any kind, can ever compel the soul of a person to believe or to disbelieve.”

•  “No violent extreme endures.”

•  “In every phenomenon the beginning remains always the most notable moment.”

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

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

•  “In the long-run every Government is the exact symbol of its People, with their wisdom and unwisdom; we have to say, Like People like Government.”

•  “Clever men are good, but they are not the best.”

•  “Imagination is a poor matter when it has to part  company with understanding.”

•  “For all right judgment of any man or things it is useful, nay, essential, to see his good qualities before pronouncing on his bad.”

•  “If an eloquent  speaker speak not the truth, is there a more horrid kind of object in creation?”

•  “It is a vain hope to make people happy by politics.”

•  “Conviction is worthless unless it is converted into conduct.”

• “Thought is the parent of the deed.”

• “Woe to him that claims obedience when it is not due; woe to him that refuses it when it is.”

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

•  “Worship is transcendent wonder.”

•  “History shows that the majority of people that have done anything great have passed their youth in seclusion.”

•  “Good breeding differs, if at all, from high breeding only as it gracefully remembers the rights of others, rather than gracefully insists on its own rights.”

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