Thomas Carlyle

Biography is the most universally pleasant and profitable of all reading.

The barrenest of all mortals is the sentimentalist.

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!

There is but one thing without honor, smitten with eternal barrenness, inability to do or to be,-insincerity, unbelief.

True friends, like ivy and the wall Both stand together, and together fall.

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

Instead of saying that man is the creature of circumstance, it would be nearer the mark to say that man is the architect of circumstance.

Happy the People whose Annals are blank in History Books!

What is nature? Art thou not the living government of God? O Heaven, is it in very deed He then that ever speaks through thee, that lives and loves in thee, that lives and loves in me?

Intellect is the soul of man, the only immortal part of him.

Men's hearts ought not to be set against one another, but set with one another and all against evil only.

In idleness there is a perpetual despair.

The eternal stars shine out again, so soon as it is dark enough.

We have not read an author till we have seen his object, whatever it may be, as he saw it.

Pain was not given thee merely to be miserable under; learn from it, turn it to account.

Men are to be guided only by their self-interests. Good government is a good balancing of these; and, except a keen eye and appetite for self-interest, requires no virtue in any quarter. To both parties it is emphatically a machine: to the discontented, a taxing-machine; to the contented, a machine for securing property. Its duties and its faults are not those of a father, but of an active parish-constable.

Not our Logical, Mensurative faculty, but our Imaginative one is King over us; I might say, Priest and Prophet to lead us heavenward; or Magician and Wizard to lead us hellward.

A fair day's wages for a fair day's work.

That a Parliament, especially a Parliament with Newspaper Reporters firmly established in it, is an entity which by its very nature cannot do work, but can do talk only.

Man's Unhappiness, as I construe, comes of his Greatness; it is because there is an Infinite in him, with which all his cunning he cannot quite bury under the Finite... Try him with half of a Universe, of an Omnipotence, he sets to quarreling with the proprietor of the other half, and declares himself the most maltreated of men. Always there is a black spot in our sunshine: It is even, as I said, the Shadow of Ourselves.

A man's perfection is his work.