Thomas Carlyle

Men, I say, never did believe idle songs, never risked their soul's life on allegories: men in all times, especially in early earnest times, have had an instinct for detecting quacks, for detesting quacks.

It is a most earnest thing to be alive in this world; to die is not sport for a man. Man's life never was a sport to him; it was a stern reality, altogether a serious matter to be alive!

We cannot look, however imperfectly, upon a great man, without gaining something by him

Cash Payment the sole nexus; and there are so many things which cash will not pay!

O reader, to what shifts is poor Society reduced, struggling to give still some account of herself, in epochs when Cash Payment has become the sole nexus of man to men!

Democracy is, by the nature of it, a self-canceling business; and it gives in the long run a net result of zero.

A witty statesman said, you might prove anything by figures.

a matter in regard to which if something be not done, something will do itself one day, and in a fashion that will please nobody

Everywhere in life, the true question is not what we gain, but what we do.

Blessed is the healthy nature; it is the coherent, sweetly co-operative, not incoherent, self-distracting, self-destructive one!

To the very last, he had a kind of idea; that, namely, of la carrière ouverte aux talents,—the tools to him that can handle them.

Nothing that was worthy in the past departs; no truth or goodness realized by man ever dies, or can die.

It can be said of him [Scott], when he departed he took a man's life along with him. No sounder piece of British manhood was put together in that eighteenth century of time.

The uttered part of a man's life, let us always repeat, bears to the unuttered, unconscious part a small unknown proportion. He himself never knows it, much less do others.

All greatness is unconscious, or it is little and naught.

Literature is the Thought of thinking Souls.

No man lives without jostling and being jostled; in all ways he has to elbow himself through the world, giving and receiving offense.

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.

There is no heroic poem in the world but is at bottom a biography, the life of a man; also, it may be said, there is no life of a man, faithfully recorded, but is a heroic poem of its sort, rhymed or unrhymed.

There are depths in man which go down the length of the lowest Hell, as there are heights which reach the highest Heaven; — for are not both Heaven and Hell made out of him, everlasting Miracle and Mystery that he is?

The difference between Orthodoxy or Mydoxy and Heterodoxy or Thy-doxy.

The All of Things is an infinite conjugation of the verb To do.

He that has a secret should not only hide it, but hide that he has it to hide.

Misery which, through long ages, had no spokesman, no helper, will now be its own helper and speak for itself.