Guess quote

Thomas Carlyle [1795-1881] Scottish

Thomas Carlyle was a Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher. Considered one of the most important social commentators of his time, he presented many lectures during his lifetime with certain acclaim in the Victorian era.

Work, Business, Fear, Great, Humor, Music, Power, Religion, Strength, Time, Wisdom, Age, Alone, Beauty, Best, Change, Communication, Courage, Death, Faith, Good, Happiness, Health, History, Hope, Imagination, Knowledge, Love, Men, Nature, Patience, Positive, Sad, Science, Teacher, Thankful

Quote	Tags	Rank
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.	Strength	78
Nothing builds self-esteem and self-confidence like accomplishment.		102
Our main business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand.	Business	103
When the oak is felled the whole forest echoes with it fall, but a hundred acorns are sown in silence by an unnoticed breeze.		104
Isolation is the sum total of wretchedness to a man.		105
If you are ever in doubt as to whether to kiss a pretty girl, always give her the benefit of the doubt.		106
Make yourself an honest man, and then you may be sure there is one less rascal in the world.		107
Everywhere the human soul stands between a hemisphere of light and another of darkness; on the confines of the two everlasting empires, necessity and free will.		108
There are good and bad times, but our mood changes more often than our fortune.	Change, Good	109
The block of granite which was an obstacle in the pathway of the weak, became a stepping-stone in the pathway of the strong.		110
He who has health, has hope; and he who has hope, has everything.	Health, Hope	111
Necessity dispenseth with decorum.		112
I've got a great ambition to die of exhaustion rather than boredom.	Great	113
Adversity is the diamond dust Heaven polishes its jewels with.		114
None of us will ever accomplish anything excellent or commanding except when he listens to this whisper which is heard by him alone.	Alone	115
Every noble work is at first impossible.	Work	116
Music is well said to be the speech of angels.	Music	117
A loving heart is the beginning of all knowledge.	Knowledge, Love	118
No great man lives in vain. The history of the world is but the biography of great men.	Great, History, Men	119
Talk that does not end in any kind of action is better suppressed altogether.		120
A man lives by believing something: not by debating and arguing about many things.		121
In every phenomenon the beginning remains always the most notable moment.		122
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.	Positive, Power, Sad, Strength, Time	123
Egotism is the source and summary of all faults and miseries.		124
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.		125
Love is not altogether a delirium, yet it has many points in common therewith.		126
Not what I have, but what I do is my kingdom.		201
Silence is as deep as eternity, speech a shallow as time.	Time	202
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.		203
If there be no enemy there's no fight. If no fight, no victory and if no victory there is no crown.		204
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.		205
The work an unknown good man has done is like a vein of water flowing hidden underground, secretly making the ground green.	Business	206
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.		207
Be not a slave of words.	Communication	208
The merit of originality is not novelty; it is sincerity.		209
Teach a parrot the terms 'supply and demand' and you've got an economist.		210
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.	Teacher	211
The old cathedrals are good, but the great blue dome that hangs over everything is better.	Nature	212
A man without a goal is like a ship without a rudder.		213
No ghost was every seen by two pair of eyes.		214
It were a real increase of human happiness, could all young men from the age of nineteen be covered under barrels, or rendered otherwise invisible; and there left to follow their lawful studies and callings, till they emerged, sadder and wiser, at the age of twenty-five.	Age, Happiness	215
Conviction is worthless unless it is converted into conduct.		216
Speech is human, silence is divine, yet also brutish and dead: therefore we must learn both arts.		217
Endurance is patience concentrated.	Patience	218
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.		219
Long stormy spring-time, wet contentious April, winter chilling the lap of very May; but at length the season of summer does come.		220
A man willing to work, and unable to find work, is perhaps the saddest sight that fortune's inequality exhibits under this sun.		221
Under all speech that is good for anything there lies a silence that is better, Silence is deep as Eternity; speech is shallow as Time.		222
No pressure, no diamonds.		223
Clever men are good, but they are not the best.	Best	224
If you look deep enough you will see music; the heart of nature being everywhere music.	Music	225
A well-written life is almost as rare as a well-spent one.		226
Nothing that was worthy in the past departs; no truth or goodness realized by man ever dies, or can die.		301
Woe to him that claims obedience when it is not due; woe to him that refuses it when it is.		302
The true university of these days is a collection of books.		303
No person is important enough to make me angry.		304
Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together.		305
The three great elements of modern civilization, Gun powder, Printing, and the Protestant religion.	Religion	306
The first duty of man is to conquer fear; he must get rid of it, he cannot act till then.	Fear	307
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.		308
Not brute force but only persuasion and faith are the kings of this world.	Faith	309
If what you have done is unjust, you have not succeeded.		310
The cut of a garment speaks of intellect and talent and the color of temperament and heart.		311
This world, after all our science and sciences, is still a miracle wonderful, inscrutable, magical and more, to whosoever will think of it.	Science	312
All great peoples are conservative.		313
Foolish men imagine that because judgment for an evil thing is delayed, there is no justice; but only accident here below. Judgment for an evil thing is many times delayed some day or two, some century or two, but it is sure as life, it is sure as death.	Death	314
It is the heart always that sees, before the head can see.		315
Love is the only game that is not called on account of darkness.		316
A laugh, to be joyous, must flow from a joyous heart, for without kindness, there can be no true joy.		317
History shows that the majority of people that have done anything great have passed their youth in seclusion.		318
No sadder proof can be given by a man of his own littleness than disbelief in great men.		319
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.		320
Humor has justly been regarded as the finest perfection of poetic genius.	Humor	321
Laughter is one of the very privileges of reason, being confined to the human species.		322
Show me the man you honor, and I will know what kind of man you are.		323
Of all acts of man repentance is the most divine. The greatest of all faults is to be conscious of none.		324
Doubt, of whatever kind, can be ended by action alone.		325
Old age is not a matter for sorrow. It is matter for thanks if we have left our work done behind us.	Thankful	326
The fearful unbelief is unbelief in yourself.	Fear	401
Secrecy is the element of all goodness; even virtue, even beauty is mysterious.	Beauty	402
The world is a republic of mediocrities, and always was.		403
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.		404
Silence is more eloquent than words.		405
Thought once awakened does not again slumber; unfolds itself into a System of Thought; grows, in man after man, generation after generation, - till its full stature is reached, and such System of Thought can grow no farther, but must give place to another.		406
One must verify or expel his doubts, and convert them into the certainty of Yes or NO.		407
Reform is not pleasant, but grievous; no person can reform themselves without suffering and hard work, how much less a nation.		408
War is a quarrel between two thieves too cowardly to fight their own battle.		409
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.		410
A man cannot make a pair of shoes rightly unless he do it in a devout manner.		411
Man is a tool-using animal. Without tools he is nothing, with tools he is all.		412
The real use of gunpowder is to make all men tall.		413
No iron chain, or outward force of any kind, can ever compel the soul of a person to believe or to disbelieve.		414
Blessed is he who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness.	Work	415
No man who has once heartily and wholly laughed can be altogether irreclaimably bad.		416
Men do less than they ought, unless they do all that they can.		417
The eye sees what it brings the power to see.	Power	418
No amount of ability is of the slightest avail without honor.		419
Originality is a thing we constantly clamour for, and constantly quarrel with.		420
Men seldom, or rather never for a length of time and deliberately, rebel against anything that does not deserve rebelling against.		421
All that mankind has done, thought or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books.		422
Nothing is more terrible than activity without insight.		423
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.		424
I don't pretend to understand the Universe - it's a great deal bigger than I am.		425
The courage we desire and prize is not the courage to die decently, but to live manfully.	Courage	426
Everywhere in life, the true question is not what we gain, but what we do.		501
Narrative is linear, but action has breadth and depth as well as height and is solid.		502
The outer passes away; the innermost is the same yesterday, today, and forever.		503
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.		504
Conviction never so excellent, is worthless until it coverts itself into conduct.		505
Oh, give us the man who sings at his work.		506
Let each become all that he was created capable of being.		507
Weak eyes are fondest of glittering objects.		508
Genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains.		509
The difference between Socrates and Jesus? The great conscious and the immeasurably great unconscious.		510
True humor springs not more from the head than from the heart. It is not contempt; its essence is love. It issues not in laughter, but in still smiles, which lie far deeper.	Humor	511
For all right judgment of any man or things it is useful, nay, essential, to see his good qualities before pronouncing on his bad.		512
There is a great discovery still to be made in literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write.		513
It is a vain hope to make people happy by politics.		514
Culture is the process by which a person becomes all that they were created capable of being.		515
Sarcasm I now see to be, in general, the language of the devil; for which reason I have long since as good as renounced it.		516
Science must have originated in the feeling that something was wrong.		517
The spiritual is the parent of the practical.		518
Thought is the parent of the deed.		519
When new turns of behavior cease to appear in the life of the individual, its behavior ceases to be intelligent.		520
Wonder is the basis of worship.	Religion	521
Go as far as you can see; when you get there you'll be able to see farther.		522
The man of life upright has a guiltless heart, free from all dishonest deeds or thought of vanity.		523
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.		524
Worship is transcendent wonder.		525
History, a distillation of rumour.		526
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.		601
For, if a good speaker, never so eloquent, does not see into the fact, and is not speaking the truth of that - is there a more horrid kind of object in creation?		602
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.		603
The greatest of faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none.		604
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.		605
Man is, properly speaking, based upon hope, he has no other possession but hope; this world of his is emphatically the place of hope.		606
He who could foresee affairs three days in advance would be rich for thousands of years.		607
What you see, but can't see over is as good as infinite.		608
I do not believe in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.	Wisdom	609
In books lies the soul of the whole past time.		610
No man lives without jostling and being jostled; in all ways he has to elbow himself through the world, giving and receiving offence.		611
The end of man is action, and not thought, though it be of the noblest.		612
Do the duty which lies nearest to you, the second duty will then become clearer.		613
The only happiness a brave person ever troubles themselves in asking about, is happiness enough to get their work done.		614
No violent extreme endures.		615
A person who is gifted sees the essential point and leaves the rest as surplus.		616
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.	Wisdom	617
Imagination is a poor matter when it has to part company with understanding.	Imagination	618
Every new opinion, at its starting, is precisely in a minority of one.		619
If an eloquent speaker speak not the truth, is there a more horrid kind of object in creation?		620
Work alone is noble.	Work	621
Writing is a dreadful labor, yet not so dreadful as Idleness.		622
Happy the people whose annals are vacant.		623

The script ran 0.019 seconds.