Thomas Carlyle

“Reform is not pleasant, but grievous; no person can reform themselves without suffering and hard work, how much less a nation.”

“The real use of gunpowder is to make all men tall.”

“Make yourself an honest man, and then you may be sure there is one less rascal in the world.”

“A man willing to work, and unable to find work, is perhaps the saddest sight that fortune's inequality exhibits under this sun.”

“The outer passes away; the innermost is the same yesterday, today, and forever.”

“This world, after all our science and sciences, is still a miracle wonderful, inscrutable, magical and more, to whosoever will think of it.”

“Isolation is the sum total of wretchedness to a man.”

“A laugh, to be joyous, must flow from a joyous heart, for without kindness, there can be no true joy.”

“Humor has justly been regarded as the finest perfection of poetic genius.”

“If you are ever in doubt as to whether to kiss a pretty girl, always give her the benefit of the doubt.”

“There is a great discovery still to be made in literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write.”

“Every new opinion, at its starting, is precisely in a minority of one.”

“The three great elements of modern civilization, Gun powder, Printing, and the Protestant religion.”

“The end of man is action, and not thought, though it be of the noblest.”

“In every phenomenon the beginning remains always the most notable moment.”

“The merit of originality is not novelty; it is sincerity.”

“Originality is a thing we constantly clamour for, and constantly quarrel with.”

“Science must have originated in the feeling that something was wrong.”

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

“Genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains.”