No violent extreme endures.
Thomas Carlyle
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Thomas Carlyle quotes
Blessed is he who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness.
The work an unknown good man has done is like a vein of water flowing hidden underground, secretly making the ground green.
A loving heart is the beginning of all knowledge.
Music is well said to be the speech of angels.
A man lives by believing something: not by debating and arguing about many things.
A man without a goal is like a ship without a rudder.
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.
A person who is gifted sees the essential point and leaves the rest as surplus.
A sad spectacle. If they be inhabited, what a scope for misery and folly. If they be not inhabited, what a waste of space.
A strong mind always hopes, and has always cause to hope.
A well-written life is almost as rare as a well-spent one.
Action hangs, as it were, "dissolved" in speech, in thoughts whereof speech is the shadow; and precipitates itself therefrom. The kind of speech in a man betokens the kind of action you will get from him.
Adversity is the diamond dust Heaven polishes its jewels with.
All great peoples are conservative.
All men, if they work not as in the great taskmaster's eye, will work wrong, and work unhappily for themselves and for you.
All that mankind has done, thought or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books.
As a first approximation, I define "belief" not as the object of believing (a dogma, a program, etc.) but as the subject's investment in a proposition, the act of saying it and considering it as true.
Be not a slave of words.
Cash-payment never was, or could except for a few years be, the union-bond of man to man. Cash never yet paid one man fully his deserts to another; nor could it, nor can it, now or henceforth to the end of the world.
Clever men are good, but they are not the best.
Conviction is worthless unless it is converted into conduct.
Conviction never so excellent, is worthless until it coverts itself into conduct.
Culture is the process by which a person becomes all that they were created capable of being.
Do the duty which lies nearest to you, the second duty will then become clearer.
Doubt, of whatever kind, can be ended by action alone.
Egotism is the source and summary of all faults and miseries.
Every new opinion, at its starting, is precisely in a minority of one.
Every noble work is at first impossible.
Everywhere in life, the true question is not what we gain, but what we do.
Everywhere the human soul stands between a hemisphere of light and another of darkness; on the confines of the two everlasting empires, necessity and free will.
Foolish men imagine that because judgment for an evil thing is delayed, there is no justice; but only accident here below. Judgment for an evil thing is many times delayed some day or two, some century or two, but it is sure as life, it is sure as death.
For all right judgment of any man or things it is useful, nay, essential, to see his good qualities before pronouncing on his bad.
For man is not the creature and product of Mechanism; but, in a far truer sense, its creator and producer.
Fun I love, but too much fun is of all things the most loathsome. Mirth is better than fun, and happiness is better than mirth.
Genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains.
He who could foresee affairs three days in advance would be rich for thousands of years.
He who has health, has hope; and he who has hope, has everything.
Humor has justly been regarded as the finest perfection of poetic genius.
I do not believe in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.
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.
I don't pretend to understand the Universe - it's a great deal bigger than I am.
I've got a great ambition to die of exhaustion rather than boredom.
If an eloquent speaker speak not the truth, is there a more horrid kind of object in creation?
If there be no enemy there's no fight. If no fight, no victory and if no victory there is no crown.
If what you have done is unjust, you have not succeeded.
If you do not wish a man to do a thing, you had better get him to talk about it; for the more men talk, the more likely they are to do nothing else.
If you look deep enough you will see music; the heart of nature being everywhere music.
Imagination is a poor matter when it has to part company with understanding.
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.
In books lies the soul of the whole past time.
In every phenomenon the beginning remains always the most notable moment.
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.
Isolation is the sum total of wretchedness to a man.
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.
It is a vain hope to make people happy by politics.
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 studies and callings, till they emerged, sadder and wiser, at the age of twenty-five.
Laughter is one of the very privileges of reason, being confined to the human species.
Let each become all that he was created capable of being.
Let one who wants to move and convince others, first be convinced and moved themselves. If a person speaks with genuine earnestness the thoughts, the emotion and the actual condition of their own heart, others will listen because we all are knit together by the tie of sympathy.
Little other than a red tape Talking-machine, and unhappy Bag of Parliamentary Eloquence.
Love is not altogether a delirium, yet it has many points in common therewith.
Make yourself an honest man, and then you may be sure there is one less rascal in the world.
Man is a tool-using Animal. Nowhere do you find him without tools; without tools he is nothing, with tools he is all.
Man is, properly speaking, based upon hope, he has no other possession but hope; this world of his is emphatically the place of hope.
Men do less than they ought, unless they do all that they can.
Men seldom, or rather never for a length of time and deliberately, rebel against anything that does not deserve rebelling against.
Music is well said to be the speech of angels; in fact, nothing among the utterances allowed to man is felt to be so divine. It brings us near to the Infinite.
Narrative is linear, but action has breadth and depth as well as height and is solid.
Necessity dispenseth with decorum.
No age seemed the age of romance to itself.
No amount of ability is of the slightest avail without honor.
No ghost was every seen by two pair of eyes.
No great man lives in vain. The history of the world is but the biography of great men.
No iron chain, or outward force of any kind, can ever compel the soul of a person to believe or to disbelieve.
No man lives without jostling and being jostled; in all ways he has to elbow himself through the world, giving and receiving offence.
No man who has once heartily and wholly laughed can be altogether irreclaimably bad.
No person is important enough to make me angry.
No pressure, no diamonds.
No violent extreme endures.
None of us will ever accomplish anything excellent or commanding except when he listens to this whisper which is heard by him alone.
Not brute force but only persuasion and faith are the kings of this world.
Not on morality, but on cookery, let us build our stronghold: there brandishing our frying-pan, as censer, let us offer sweet incense to the Devil, and live at ease on the fat things he has provided for his elect!
Not our logical faculty, but our imaginative one is king over us. I might say, priest and prophet to lead us to heaven-ward, or magician and wizard to lead us hellward.
Not what I have, but what I do is my kingdom.
Nothing builds self-esteem and self-confidence like accomplishment.
Nothing is more terrible than activity without insight.
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.
Nothing that was worthy in the past departs; no truth or goodness realized by man ever dies, or can die.
Of all acts of man repentance is the most divine. The greatest of all faults is to be conscious of none.
Oh, give us the man who sings at his work.
Old age is not a matter for sorrow. It is matter for thanks if we have left our work done behind us.
One must verify or expel his doubts, and convert them into the certainty of Yes or NO.
Originality is a thing we constantly clamour for, and constantly quarrel with.
Our main business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance,but to do what lies clearly at hand.
Permanence, perseverance and persistence in spite of all obstacle s, discouragement s, and impossibilities: It is this, that in all things distinguishes the strong soul from the weak.
Reform is not pleasant, but grievous; no person can reform themselves without suffering and hard work, how much less a nation.
Sarcasm I now see to be, in general, the language of the devil; for which reason I have long since as good as renounced it.
Science must have originated in the feeling that something was wrong.
Secrecy is the element of all goodness; even virtue, even beauty is mysterious.
Show me the man you honor, and I will know what kind of man you are.
Show me the person you honor, for I know better by that the kind of person you are. For you show me what your idea of humanity is.
Silence is as deep as eternity, speech a shallow as time.
Silence is more eloquent than words.
Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together.
Speech is human, silence is divine, yet also brutish and dead: therefore we must learn both arts.
Surely of all the 'rights of man', this right of the ignorant man to be guided by the wiser, to be, gently or forcibly, held in the true course by him, is the indisputablest.
Talk that does not end in any kind of action is better suppressed altogether.
Teach a parrot the terms "supply and demand" and you've got an economist.
That monstrous tuberosity of civilized life, the capital of England.
The actual well seen is ideal.
The barrenest of all mortals is the sentimentalist.
The block of granite which was an obstacle in the pathway of the weak, became a stepping-stone in the pathway of the strong.
The courage we desire and prize is not the courage to die decently, but to live manfully.
The cut of a garment speaks of intellect and talent and the color of temperament and heart.
The depth of our despair measures what capability and height of claim we have to hope.
The difference between Socrates and Jesus? The great conscious and the immeasurably great unconscious.
The end of man is action, and not thought, though it be of the noblest.
The eye sees what it brings the power to see.
The fearful unbelief is unbelief in yourself.
The first duty of man is to conquer fear; he must get rid of it, he cannot act till then.
The foul sluggard's comfort: 'It will last my time.'
The greatest of all faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none.
The greatest of faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none.
The mathematics of high achievement
The merit of originality is not novelty; it is sincerity.
The novel can't compete with cars, the movies, television, and liquor. A guy who's had a good feed and tanked up on good wine gives his old lady a kiss after supper and his day is over. Finished.
The old cathedrals are good, but the great blue dome that hangs over everything is better.
The only happiness a brave person ever troubles themselves in asking about, is happiness enough to get their work done.
The outer passes away; the innermost is the same yesterday, today, and forever.
The past is all holy to us; the dead are all holy; even they that were wicked when alive.
The real use of gunpowder is to make all men tall.
The spiritual is the parent of the practical.
The three great elements of modern civilization, Gun powder, Printing, and the Protestant religion.
The world is a republic of mediocrities, and always was.
There are good and bad times, but our mood changes more often than our fortune.
There is a great discovery still to be made in literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write.
This world, after all our science and sciences, is still a miracle wonderful, inscrutable, magical and more, to whosoever will think of it.
Thought is the parent of the deed.
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 System of Thought can grow no farther, but must give place to another.
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.
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.
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.
We have profoundly forgotten everywhere that cash-payment is not the sole relation of human beings.
Weak eyes are fondest of glittering objects.
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.
What you see, but can't see over is as good as infinite.
When new turns of behavior cease to appear in the life of the individual, its behavior ceases to be intelligent.
When the oak is felled the whole forest echoes with it fall, but a hundred acorns are sown in silence by an unnoticed breeze.
When we can drain the Ocean into mill-ponds, and bottle up the Force of Gravity, to be sold by retail, in gas jars; then may we hope to comprehend the infinitudes of man's soul under formulas of Profit and Loss; and rule over this too, as over a patent engine, by checks, and valves, and balances.
Woe to him that claims obedience when it is not due; woe to him that refuses it when it is.
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.
Work alone is noble.
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.
The mathematics of high achievement.
War is a quarrel between two thieves too cowardly to fight their own battle.
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