Thomas Carlyle

“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 t...”

“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-d...”

“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 r...”

“The illimitable, silent, never-resting thing called Time, rolling, rushing on, swift, silent, like an all-embracing ocean-tide, on which we and all the Universe swim like exhalations, like a...”

“A loving heart is the beginning of all knowledge.”

“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.”

“All that mankind has done, thought, gained, or been; it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books.”

“No magic Rune is stranger than a Book. All that Mankind has done, thought, gained or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of Books. They are the chosen possession of men.”

“(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.”

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

“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.”

“When the oak is felled the whole forest echoes with it fall, but a hundred acorns are sown in silence by an unnoticed breeze.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“Talk that does not end in any kind of action is better suppressed altogether.”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”