Carlyle, Thomas
"If you are ever in doubt as to whether to kiss a pretty girl, always give her the benefit of the doubt."
"Man is, properly speaking, based upon hope, he has no other possession but hope; this world of his is emphatically the place of hope."
"Humour has justly been regarded as the finest perfection of poetic genius."
"That there should one man die ignorant who had capacity for knowledge, this I call a tragedy."
"Laughter is one of the very privileges of reason, being confined to the human species."
"Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood."
"The greatest of all faults is to be conscious of none."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"The eye sees what it brings the power to see."
"The work an unknown good man has done is like a vein of water flowing hidden underground, secretly making the ground green."
"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 three great elements of modern civilisation, gunpowder, printing, and the Protestant religion." - Critical and Miscellaneous Essays
"The great law of culture is: Let each become all that he was created capable of being." - Critical and Miscellaneous Essays
"History is the essence of innumerable biographies." - Critical and Miscellaneous Essays
"Happy the people whose annals are blank in history books!" - Life of Frederick the Great
"The greatest of faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none." - On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History
"No sadder proof can be given by a man of his own littleness than disbelief in great men." - On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History
"This world, after all our science and sciences, is still a miracle; wonderful, inscrutable, magical and more, to whosoever will think of it." - On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History
"Every new opinion, at its starting, is precisely in a minority of one." - On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History
"The merit of originality is not novelty; it is sincerity. The believing man is the original man; whatsoever he believes, he believes it for himself, not for another." - On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History
"Laissez-faire, Supply-and-demand, - one begins to be weary of all that. Leave all to egoism, to ravenous greed of money, of pleasure, of applause: it is the Gospel of Despair!" - Past and Present
"In the long-run every Government is the exact symbol of its People, with their wisdom and unwisdom." - Past and Present
"Democracy means despair of finding any heroes to govern you, and contented putting up with the want of them." - Past and Present
"If Jesus Christ were to come today, people would not even crucify him. They would ask him to dinner, and hear what he had to say, and make fun of it." - quoted in D.A. Wilson's Carlyle at his Zenith
"The Ideal is in thyself, the impediment too is in thyself." - Sartor Resartus
"Speech is of Time, Silence is of Eternity." - Sartor Resartus
"Speech is too often not . . . the art of concealing Thought; but of quite stifling and suspending Thought." - Sartor Resartus
"Work is the grand cure for all the maladies and miseries that ever beset mankind, - honest work, which you intend getting done." - speech (1866)
"In every object there is inexhaustible meaning; the eye sees in it what the eye brings means of seeing." - The French Revolution
"France was long a despotism tempered by epigrams." - The French Revolution