Thomas Carlyle

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

“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 Syst...”

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

“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 stud...”

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

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

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

“I've got a great ambition to die of exhaustion rather than boredom.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“When new turns of behavior cease to appear in the life of the individual, its behavior ceases to be intelligent.”

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

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

“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.”

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