Thomas Carlyle
Imagination is a poor matter when it has to part company with understanding.Collection: Imagination
The courage we desire and prize is not the courage to die decently, but to live manfully.Collection: Courage
There are good and bad times, but our mood changes more often than our fortune.Collection: Good
Humor has justly been regarded as the finest perfection of poetic genius.Collection: Humor
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.Collection: Time
The work an unknown good man has done is like a vein of water flowing hidden underground, secretly making the ground green.Collection: Business
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.Collection: Humor
Blessed is he who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness.Collection: Work
Work alone is noble.Collection: Work
Every noble work is at first impossible.Collection: Work
A loving heart is the beginning of all knowledge.Collection: Love
Endurance is patience concentrated.Collection: Patience
He who has health, has hope; and he who has hope, has everything.Collection: Hope
The real use of gunpowder is to make all men tall.Collection: Men
No great man lives in vain. The history of the world is but the biography of great men.Collection: History
I do not believe in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.Collection: Wisdom
The eye sees what it brings the power to see.Collection: Power
Old age is not a matter for sorrow. It is matter for thanks if we have left our work done behind us.Collection: Thankful
The old cathedrals are good, but the great blue dome that hangs over everything is better.Collection: Nature
Wonder is the basis of worship.Collection: Religion
Secrecy is the element of all goodness; even virtue, even beauty is mysterious.Collection: Beauty
Our main business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand.Collection: Business
If you look deep enough you will see music; the heart of nature being everywhere music.Collection: Nature
No sadder proof can be given by a man of his own littleness than disbelief in great men.Collection: Men
The three great elements of modern civilization, Gun powder, Printing, and the Protestant religion.Collection: Religion
Silence is as deep as eternity, speech a shallow as time.Collection: Time
I've got a great ambition to die of exhaustion rather than boredom.Collection: Great
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.Collection: Men
The only happiness a brave person ever troubles themselves in asking about, is happiness enough to get their work done.Collection: Happiness
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.Collection: Wisdom
Music is well said to be the speech of angels.Collection: Music
The first duty of man is to conquer fear; he must get rid of it, he cannot act till then.Collection: Fear
The fearful unbelief is unbelief in yourself.Collection: Fear
Be not a slave of words.Collection: Communication
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.Collection: Teacher
Clever men are good, but they are not the best.Collection: Best
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.Collection: Strength
Doubt, of whatever kind, can be ended by action alone.Collection: Alone
This world, after all our science and sciences, is still a miracle wonderful, inscrutable, magical and more, to whosoever will think of it.Collection: Science
A man without a goal is like a ship without a rudder.
Go as far as you can see; when you get there you'll be able to see farther.
A man willing to work, and unable to find work, is perhaps the saddest sight that fortune's inequality exhibits under this sun.
No pressure, no diamonds.
The greatest of faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none.
If there be no enemy there's no fight. If no fight, no victory and if no victory there is no crown.
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.
Man is a tool-using animal. Without tools he is nothing, with tools he is all.
Teach a parrot the terms 'supply and demand' and you've got an economist.
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 block of granite which was an obstacle in the pathway of the weak, became a stepping-stone in the pathway of the strong.