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If time is precious, no book that will not improve by repeated readings deserves to be read at all.Thomas Carlyle
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He who has health, has hope; and he who has hope, has everythingThomas Carlyle
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Every poet... finds himself born in the midst of prose. He has to struggle from the littleness and obstruction of an actual world into the freedom and infinitude of an ideal.Thomas Carlyle
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If Jesus Christ were to come today, people would not even crucify him. They would ask him to dinner, and hear what he had to say, and make fun of it.Thomas Carlyle
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The lies (Western slander) which well-meaning zeal has heaped round this man (Muhammad) are disgraceful to ourselves only.Thomas Carlyle
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A loving heart is the beginning of all knowledge.Thomas Carlyle
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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.Thomas Carlyle
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(Quoted by Thomas Carlyle) The rude man requires only to see something going on. The man of more refinement must be made to feel. The man of complete refinement must be made to reflect.Thomas Carlyle
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Fool! The Ideal is in thyself, the impediment too is in thyself: thy Condition is but the stuff thou art to shape that same Ideal out of: what matters whether such stuff be of this sort or that, so the Form thou give it be heroic, be poetic? O thou that pinest in the imprisonment of the Actual, and criest bitterly to the gods for a kingdom wherein to rule and create, know this of a truth: the thing thou seekest is already with thee, ‘here or nowhere, ’ couldst thou only see! .Thomas Carlyle
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Ye are most strong, ye Sons of the icy North, of the far East, far marching from your rugged Eastern Wildernesses, hither-ward from the gray Dawn of Time! Ye are Sons of the Jotun-land; the land of Difficulties Conquered. Difficult? You must try this thing. Once try it with the understanding that it will and shall have to be done. Try it as ye try the paltrier thing, making of money! I will bet on you once more, against all Jo'tuns, Tailor-gods, Double-barrelled Law-wards, and Denizens of Chaos whatsoever!.Thomas Carlyle
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Look around you. Your world-hosts are all in mutiny, in confusion, destitution; on the eve of fiery wreck and madness! They will not march farther for you, on the sixpence a day and supply-demand principle; they will not; nor ought they, nor can they. Ye shall reduce them to order, begin reducing them. to order, to just subordination; noble loyalty in return for noble guidance. Their souls are driven nigh mad; let yours be sane and ever saner.Thomas Carlyle
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Let each become all that he was created capable of being.Thomas Carlyle
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Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together; that at length they may emerge, full-formed and majestic, into the daylight of Life, which they are thenceforth to rule. Not William the Silent only, but all the considerable men I have known, and the most undiplomatic and unstrategic of these, forbore to babble of what they were creating and projecting. Nay, in thy own mean perplexities, do thou thyself but hold thy tongue for one day: on the morrow, how much clearer are thy purposes and duties; what wreck and rubbish have those mute workmen within thee swept away, when intrusive noises were shut out! Speech is too often not, as the Frenchman defined it, the art of concealing Thought; but of quite stifling and suspending Thought, so that there is none to conceal. Speech too is great, but not the greatest. As the Swiss Inscription says: Sprecfien ist silbern, Schweigen ist golden (Speech is silvern, Silence is golden); or as I might rather express it: Speech is of Time, Silence is of Eternity.Thomas Carlyle
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All that mankind has done, thought, gained, or been; it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books.Thomas Carlyle
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My books are friends that never faiThomas Carlyle
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No magic Rune is stranger than a Book. All that Mankind has done, thought, gained or been: it is lyingas in magic preservation in the pages of Books. They are the chosen possession of men.Thomas Carlyle
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Of all the things which man can do or make here below, by far the most momentous, wonderful, and worthy are the things we call books.Thomas Carlyle
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History is the essence of innumerable biographies.Thomas Carlyle
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War is a quarrel between two thieves too cowardly to fight their own battle; therefore they take boys from one village and another village, stick them into uniforms, equip them with guns, and let them loose like wild beasts against one other.Thomas Carlyle
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A Dandy is a clothes-wearing Man, a Man whose trade, office and existence consists in the wearing of clothes.Thomas Carlyle
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Music is well said to be the speech of angels; in fact, nothing among the utterances allowed to man is felt to be so divine. It brings us near to the infinite.Thomas Carlyle
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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.Thomas Carlyle
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I do not believe in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.Thomas Carlyle
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The word of Mohammad is a voice direct from nature's own heart - all else is wind in comparison.Thomas Carlyle
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Some comfort it would have been, could I, like a Faust, have fancied myself tempted and tormented of the Devil; for a Hell, as I imagine, without Life, though only Diabolic Life, were more frightful: but in our age of Downpulling and Disbelief, the very Devil has been pulled down, you cannot so much as believe in a Devil. To me the Universe was all void of Life, of Purpose, of Volition, even of Hostility: it was one huge, dead, immeasurable Steam-engine, rolling on, in its dead indifference, to grind me limb from limb.Thomas Carlyle
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Well at ease are the Sleepers for whom Existence is a shallow Dream.Thomas Carlyle
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All that Mankind has done, thought, gained or been is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of Books. They are the chosen possession of men.Thomas Carlyle
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Make yourself an honest man, and then you may be sure that there is one less scoundrel in the world.Thomas Carlyle
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Under all speech that is good for anything there lies a silence that is better.Thomas Carlyle
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The whole universe is but a huge Symbol of god".Thomas Carlyle
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Go as far as you can see; when you get there, you'll be able to see further.Thomas Carlyle
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Surely of all ‘rights of man’, this right of the ignorant man to be guided by the wiser, to be, gently or forcibly, held in the true course by him, is the indisputablest.Thomas Carlyle
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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.Thomas Carlyle
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It is a great shame for anyone to listen to the accusation that Islam is a lie and that Muhammad was a fabricator and a deceiver. We saw that he remained steadfast upon his principles, with firm determination; kind and generous, compassionate, pious, virtuous, with real manhood, hardworking and sincere. Besides all these qualities, he was lenient with others, tolerant, kind, cheerful and praiseworthy and perhaps he would joke and tease his companions. He was just, truthful, smart, pure, magnanimous and present-minded; his face was radiant as if he had lights within him to illuminate the darkest of nights; he was a great man by nature who was not educated in a school nor nurtured by a teacher as he was not in need of any of this. .Thomas Carlyle
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Such I hold to be the genuine use of Gunpowder: that it makes all men tall.Thomas Carlyle
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Adversity is sometimes hard upon a man, but for one man who can stand prosperity, there are a hundred that will stand adversity.Thomas Carlyle
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Thus must the bewildered Wanderer stand, as so many have done, shouting question after question into the Sibyl-cave of Destiny, and receive no Answer but an Echo. It is all a grim howling of wild beasts, or the shrieks of despairing, hate-filled men...( The Everlasting No)Thomas Carlyle
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I've got a great ambition to die of exhaustion rather than boredom.Thomas Carlyle
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Of all your troubles, great and small, the greatest are the ones that don't happen at all.Thomas Carlyle
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There are impertinent inquiries made; your rule is, to leave the inquirer uninformed on the matter; not, if you can help it, misinformed, but precisely as dark as he was!Thomas Carlyle
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Everywhere the human soul stands between a hemisphere of light and another of darkness; on the confines of two everlasting empires, necessity and free will.Thomas Carlyle
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There is endless merit in a man's knowing when to have done.Thomas Carlyle
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The block of granite which was an obstacle in the path of the weak becomes a steppingstone in the path of the strong.Thomas Carlyle
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Adversity is sometimes hard upon a man but for one man who can stand prosperity there are a hundred that will stand adversity.Thomas Carlyle
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The eternal stars shine out as soon as it is dark enough.Thomas Carlyle
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If you can walk you can dance. Zimbabwe saying Music is well said to be the speech of angels.Thomas Carlyle
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Biography is the only true history.Thomas Carlyle
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Acorns are planted silently by some unnoticed breeze.Thomas Carlyle
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The true university of these days is a collection of books.Thomas Carlyle
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Debt is a bottomless sea.Thomas Carlyle
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The three great elements of modern civilization Gunpowder Printing and the Protestant Religion.Thomas Carlyle
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The courage we desire and prize is not the courage to die decently but to live manfully.Thomas Carlyle
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Today is not yesterday how can our works and thoughts if they are always to be the fittest continue always the same? Change indeed is painful yet ever needful.Thomas Carlyle
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It is the heart always that sees before the head can see.Thomas Carlyle
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Of all paths a man could strike into there is at any given moment a best path 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.Thomas Carlyle
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Give me a man who sings at his work.Thomas Carlyle
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Experience is the best of schoolmasters only the school-fees are heavy.Thomas Carlyle
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I grow daily to honor facts more and more and theory less and less.Thomas Carlyle
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Faith is loyalty to some inspired teacher some spiritual hero.Thomas Carlyle
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The greatest of faults I should say is to be conscious of none.Thomas Carlyle
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The end of man is action.Thomas Carlyle
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Nothing is more terrible than activity without insight.Thomas Carlyle
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In the long run every government is the exact symbol of its people with their wisdom and unwisdom.Thomas Carlyle
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No sadder proof can be given by a man of his own littleness than disbelief in great men.Thomas Carlyle
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Innumerable are the illusions and legerdemain tricks of custom: but of all these perhaps the cleverest is her knack of persuading us that the miraculous by simple repetition ceases to be miraculous.Thomas Carlyle
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Blessed is he who has found his work let him ask no other blessedness. He has a work a life-purpose.... Get your happiness out of your work or you will never know what real happiness is.... 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.Thomas Carlyle
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Without kindness there can be no true joy.Thomas Carlyle
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Hero-worship exists has existed and will forever exist universally among mankind.Thomas Carlyle
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History a distillation of rumorThomas Carlyle
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Nine-tenths of the miseries and vices of mankind proceed from idleness.Thomas Carlyle
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It is the heart always that sees before the head can see.Thomas Carlyle
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Macaulay is well for awhile but one wouldn't live under Niagara.Thomas Carlyle
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Burke said there were Three Estates in Parliament but in the Reporters' gallery yonder there sat a Fourth Estate more important far than they all.Thomas Carlyle
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The man who cannot laugh is not only fit for treasons strategems and spoils but his whole life is already a treason and a stratagem.Thomas Carlyle
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The tragedy of life is not so much what men suffer but rather what they miss.Thomas Carlyle
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Love is ever the beginning of Knowledge as fire is of light.Thomas Carlyle
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One life - a little gleam of Time between two Eternities.Thomas Carlyle
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Man is a tool-using animal.Thomas Carlyle
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We arc the miracle of miracles the great inscrutable mystery of God.Thomas Carlyle
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Here hath been dawning another blue day: think wilt thou let it slip useless away?Thomas Carlyle
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Music is well said to be the speech of angels.Thomas Carlyle
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Who is there that in logical words can express the effect music has on us? A kind of inarticulate unfathomable speech which leads us to the edge of the Infinite and lets us for moments gaze into that!Thomas Carlyle
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When the oak is felled the whole forest echoes with its fall but a hundred acorns are sown in silence by an unnoticed breeze.Thomas Carlyle
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Burke said there were three Estates in Parliament but in the reporters' gallery yonder there sat a fourth Estate more important than them all.Thomas Carlyle
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Our grand business undoubtedly is not to see what lies dimly at a distance but to do what lies clearly at hand.Thomas Carlyle
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Time is the silent never-resting thing ... rolling rushing on swift silent like an all-embracing oceantide on which we and all the universe swim.Thomas Carlyle
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Love is not altogether a delirium yet it has many points in common therewith.Thomas Carlyle
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Poetry therefore we will call Musical Thought.Thomas Carlyle
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Every noble work is at first impossible.Thomas Carlyle
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The block of granite which was an obstacle in the path of the weak becomes a stepping stone in the path of the strong.Thomas Carlyle
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All work of man is as the swimmer's: a vast ocean threatens to devour him if he front it not bravely it will keep its word.Thomas Carlyle
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If Jesus Christ were to come today people would not even crucify him. They would ask him to dinner and hear what he had to say and make fun of him.Thomas Carlyle
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His religion at best is an anxious wish - like that of Rebelais a great Perhaps.Thomas Carlyle
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All reform except a moral one will prove unavailing.Thomas Carlyle
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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.Thomas Carlyle
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The great law of culture: Let each become all that he was created capable of being.Thomas Carlyle
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Every noble crown is and on Earth will forever be a crown of thorns.Thomas Carlyle
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Silence is deep as Eternity speech shallow as Time.Thomas Carlyle
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Silence is more eloquent than words.Thomas Carlyle
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Skepticism means not intellectual doubt alone but moral doubt.Thomas Carlyle