Thomas Carlyle

A greater number of God's creatures believe in Mahomet's word at this hour than in any other word whatever. Are we to suppose that it was a miserable piece of spiritual legerdemain, this which so many creatures of the almighty have lived by and died by?

It is the first of all problems for a man to find out what kind of work he is to do in this universe.

The depth of our despair measures what capability and height of claim we have to hope.

I do not believe in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.

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.

No person was every rightly understood until they had been first regarded with a certain feeling, not of tolerance, but of sympathy.

Government is emphatically a machine: to the discontented a taxing machine, to the contented a machine for securing property.

In this world there is one godlike thing, the essence of all that was or ever will be of godlike in this world: the veneration done to Human Worth by the hearts of men.

It is not a lucky word, this name impossible; no good comes of those who have it so often in their mouths.

There can be no acting or doing of any kind till it be recognized that there is a thing to be done; the thing once recognized, doing in a thousand shapes becomes possible.

It is a mathematical fact that the casting of this pebble from my hand alters the centre of gravity of the universe.

Great souls are always loyally submissive, reverent to what is over them: only small mean souls are otherwise.

There is no life of a man, faithfully recorded, but is a heroic poem of its sort, rhymed or unrhymed.

In every object there is inexhaustible meaning; the eye sees in it what the eye brings means of seeing.

In a certain sense all men are historians.

History is the distillation of rumour.

For, strictly considered, what is all Knowledge too but recorded Experience, and a product of History; of which, therefore, Reasoning and Belief, no less than Action and Passion, are essential materials?

Tell a person they are brave and you help them become so.

The past is all holy to us; the dead are all holy; even they that were wicked when alive.

In books lies the soul of the whole Past Time; the articulate audible voice of the Past, when the body and material substance of it has altogether vanished like a dream.

The word of Mohammad is a voice direct from nature's own heart - all else is wind in comparison.