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Our achievements speak for themselves. What we have to keep track of are our failures, discouragements and doubts. We tend to forget the past difficulties, the many false starts, and the painful groping. We see our past achievements as the end results of a clean forward thrust, and our present difficulties as signs of decline and decay.

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Dec 28, 2025

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He who would write heroic poems should make his whole life a heroic poem.
Thomas Carlyle

Quote Author: Thomas Carlyle

Thomas Carlyle

Thomas Carlyle

Thomas Carlyle (December 4, 1795 - February 5, 1881) was a Scottish essayist, satirist, and historian, whose work was hugely influential during the Victorian era. Coming from a strict Calvinist family, Carlyle was expected by his parents to become a preacher. However, while at the University of Edinburgh, he lost his Christian faith; nevertheless, Calvinist values remained with him throughout his life. This combination of a religious temperament with loss of faith in traditional Christianity made Carlyle's work appealing to many Victorians who were grappling with scientific and political changes that threatened the traditional social order.

Other 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.

Nature is the time-vesture of God that reveals him to the wise, and hides him from the foolish.

Adversity is sometimes hard upon a man; But for one man who can stand prosperity, there are a hundred that will stand adversity.

Our grand business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand.

One life - a little gleam of time between two eternities.

No good book, or good thing of any sort, shows its best face at first.

Metaphysics is the attempt of the mind to rise above the mind.

Music is well said to be the speech of angels.

Labor is life.

Love is not altogether a delirium, yet it has many points in common therewith. I call it rather a discerning of the infinite in the finite.

Man is, properly speaking, based upon hope, he has no other possession but hope; this world of his is emphatically the place of hope.

No iron chain, or outward force of any kind, could ever compel the soul of man to believe or disbelieve

Doubt, of whatever kind, can be ended by Action alone.

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

Genius (which means transcendent capacity of taking trouble, first of all).

Worship is transcendent wonder.

A whiff of grapeshot.

Aristocracy of the Money bag.

France was long a despotism tempered by epigrams.

Cash payment is not the sole nexus of man with man.

Man is a tool-using animal.

The everlasting No.

A fair day's wage for a fair day's work: it is as just a demand as governed men ever made of governing. It is the everlasting right of man.

A well-written life is almost as rare as a well-spent one.

All that Mankind has done, thought, gained or been is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of Books. They are the chosen possession of men.

All poetry is but a giving of names.

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

Endurance is patience concentrated.

Every man has a coward and hero in his soul.

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 two everlasting hostile empires, Necessity and Freewill.

Fame, we may understand is no sure test of merit, but only a probability of such: it is an accident, not a property of a man.

For love is ever the beginning of Knowledge, As fire is of light.

Heroism - the divine relation which, in all times, unites a great man to other men.

How much lies in laughter: the cipher key, wherewith we decipher the whole man!

Humor - Its essence is love; it issues not in laughter, but in still smiles, which lie far deeper.

Humor has justly been regarded as the finest perfection of poetic genius.

Ill-health, of body or of mind, is defeat...Health alone is victory. Let all men, if they can manage it, contrive to be healthy!

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.

Action hangs, as it were, dissolved in speech, in thoughts whereof speech is the shadow; and precipitates itself there from. The kind of speech in a man betokens the kind of action you will get from him.

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 block of granite which was an obstacle in the path of the weak, becomes a steppingstone in the path of the strong.

The courage we desire and prize is not the courage to die decently, but to live manfully.

The deepest depth of vulgarism is that of setting up money as the ark of the covenant.

The end of man is action, and not thought, though it be of the noblest.

There is no act more moral between men than that of rule And obedience.

The eye sees what it brings the power to see.

This world, after all our science and sciences, is still A miracle; wonderful, inscrutable, magical and more, to whosoever will think of it.

Thought once awakened does not again slumber.

Time has only a relative existence.

So here hath been dawning another blue day: Think, wilt thou let it slip useless away? Out of eternity this new day is born; Into eternity at night 'twill return.

Work is the grand cure for all maladies and miseries that ever beset mankind - honest work, which you intend getting done.

The fearful Unbelief is unbelief in yourself.

Poetry we will call Musical Thought.

The man who cannot laugh is not only fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils, but his whole life is already a treason and a stratagem.

The greatest of faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none.

The true past departs not, no truth or goodness realized By man ever dies, or can die; but all is still here, and, recognized or not, lives and works through endless change.

The great law of culture: Let each become all that he was created capable of being.

Skepticism means not intellectual doubt alone, But moral doubt.

The fraction of life can be increased in value not so much By increasing your numerator as by lessening your denominator. Nay, unless my Algebra deceives me, unity itself divided by zero will give infinity.

Virtue, like health, is the harmony of the whole man.

What we become depends on what we read after all the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is the collection of books.

Out of the lowest depths there is a path to the loftiest heights.

As I grow older, I pay less attention to what men say. I just watch what they do.

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.

In a controversy the instant we feel anger we have already ceased striving for the truth, and have begun striving for ourselves.

The great law of culture is: let each become all that he was created capable of being.

A man lives by believing something; not by debating and arguing about many things.

The block of granite, which is an obstacle in the pathway of the weak, becomes a stepping-stone in the pathway of the strong.

Of all the things which man can do or make here below, by far the most momentous, wonderful, and worthy are the things we call books.

Tell a man he is brave, and you help him to become so.

The man who cannot wonder, who does not habitually wonder and worship, ... is but a pair of spectacles behind which there is no eye.

That there should one man die ignorant who had capacity for knowledge, this I call a tragedy.

Today is not yesterday: we ourselves change; how can our works and thoughts, if they are always to be the fittest, continue always the same? Change, indeed is painful; yet ever needful; and if memory have its force and worth, so also has hope.

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, and will preserve it longer.

Man makes circumstances, and spiritually as well as economically, is the artificer of his own fortune.

From the lowliest depth there is a path to the loftiest height.

Our main business is not to see what lies dimly in the distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand.

What we might call, by way of eminence, the Dismal Science.

Freedom is the one purport, wisely aimed at, or unwisely, of all man's struggles, toilings and sufferings, in this earth.

It is great, and there is no other greatness—to make one nook of God’s Creation more fruitful, better, more worthy of God; to make some human heart a little wiser, manlier, happier—more blessed.

Great men are the commissioned guides of mankind, who rule their fellows because they are wiser.

Let each man become all that he was created capable of being.

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

Happy the people whose annals are blank in the history books!

Show me the man you honor, and I will show you the kind of a man you are, for it shows me what your ideal of manhood is, and what kind of a man you long to be.

Every noble work is at first impossible. quoted by Og Mandino.

Except by name, Jean Paul Friedrich Richter is little known out of Germany. The only thing connected with him, we think, that has reached this country is his saying,—imported by Madame de Staël, and thankfully pocketed by most newspaper critics,—'Providence has given to the French the empire of the land; to the English that of the sea; to the Germans that of—the air!' Richter: German humorist & prose writer.

He who would write heroic poems should make his whole life a heroic poem.

Give me a man who sings at his work.

The glory of a workman, still more of a master workman, that he does his work well, ought to be his most precious possession; like the honor of a soldier, dearer to him than life.

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

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

The meaning of song goes deep. Who in logical words can explain the effect music has on us? A kind of inarticulate, unfathomable speech, which leads us to the edge of the infinite, and lets us for a moment gaze into that!

There is a perennial nobleness, and even sacredness, in work. Were he never so benighted, forgetful of his high calling, there is always hope in a man that actually and earnestly works: in idleness alone there is perpetual despair.

Nothing that was worthy in the past departs; no truth or goodness realized by man ever dies, or can die; but is all still here, and, recognized or not, lives and works through endless changes.

Of all paths a man could strike into, there is, at any given moment, a best path for every man; to find this path, and to walk in it, is the one thing needful for him.

Every new opinion at its starting is precisely a minority of one.

Originality is a thing we constantly clamour for, and constantly quarrel with.

No man sees far, the most see no farther than their noses.

A man’s perfection is his work.

A vein of poetry exists in the hearts of all men.

Of all God’s creatures, Man alone is poor.

The Ideal is in thyself, the impediments too is in thyself.

Having a purpose in life, throw into your work such strength of mind and muscle as God has given you.

Of all the acts of man, repentance is the most divine.

A great man shows his greatness by the way he treats little men.

Let a man try faithfully, manfully to be right, he will daily grow more and more right. It is at the bottom of the condition on which all men have to cultivate themselves.

Clean undeniable right, clear undeniable might: either of these once ascertained puts an end to battle. All battle is a confused experiment to ascertain one and both of these.

Over the times thou hast no power.... Solely over one man thou hast quite absolute power. Him redeem and make honest.

Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together.

Silence is deep as Eternity; speech is shallow as Time.

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.

Give us, O give us the man who sings at his work! Be his occupation what it may, he is equal to any of those who follow the same pursuit in silent sullenness. He will do more in the same time ... he will do it better ... he will persevere longer. One is scarcely sensible to fatigue while he marches to music. The very stars are said to make harmony as they revolve in their spheres.

Talk that does not end in any kind of action is better suppressed altogether.

Teaching school is but another word for sure and not very slow destruction.

The tragedy of life is not so much what men suffer, but rather what they miss.

The true university of these days is a collection of books.

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

Even in the meanest sorts of Labor, the whole soul of a man is composed into a kind of real harmony the instant he sets himself to work.

Properly speaking, all true work is religion.

All true work is sacred. In all true work, were it but true hand work, there is something of divineness. Labor, wide as the earth, has its summit in Heaven.

All work is as seed sown; it grows and spreads, and sows itself anew.

All life is figured by them as a Tree. Igdrasil, the Ash-tree of existence, has its roots deep-down in the kingdoms of Death: its trunk reaches up heaven-high, spreads its boughs over the whole Universe: it is the Tree of Existence. At the foot of it, in the Death-Kingdom, sit the three Fates - the Past, Present and Future; watering its roots from the Sacred Well. It's 'bough,' with their buddings and disleafings, - events, things suffered, things done, catastrophes, - stretch through all lands and times. Is not every leaf of it a biography, every fiber there an act or word? Its boughs are the Histories of Nations. The rustle of it is the noise of Human Existence, onwards from of old.... I find no similitude so true as this of a Tree. Beautiful; altogether beautiful and great.

Let him who wants to move and convince others be first moved and convinced himself.

The history of the world is but the biography of great men.

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.

The greatest of all faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none.

Conviction is worthless unless it is converted into conduct.

To me the Universe was all void of Life, of Purpose, of Volition, even of Hostility; it was one huge, dead, immeasurable Steam-engine, rolling on, in its dead indifference, to grind me limb from limb. Oh vast gloomy, solitary Golgotha, and Mill of Death! Why was the living banished thither companionless, conscious? Why, if there is no Devil; nay, unless the Devil is your God?

Do the duty which lieth nearest to thee! Thy second duty will already have become clearer.

It must have been a most blessed discovery, that of an old Latin Bible which he found in the Erfurt Library about this time. He had never seen the Book before. It taught him another lesson than that of fasts and vigils Luther learned now that a man was saved not by singing masses, but by the infinite grace of God: a more credible hypothesis. He gradually got himself founded, as on the rock. No wonder he should venerate the Bible, which had brought this blessed help to him. He prized it as the Word of the Highest must be prized by such a man. He determined to hold by that, as through life and to death he firmly did.

Let me have my own way in exactly everything, and a sunnier and pleasanter creature does not exist.

The merit of originality is not novelty; it is sincerity.

Go as far as you can see; when you get there you'll be able to see farther.

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

Under all speech that is good for anything there lies a silence that is better.

Virtue is like health: the harmony of the whole man.

Permanence, perseverance and persistence in spite of all obstacles, discouragements, and impossibilities: It is this, that in all things distinguishes the strong soul from the weak.

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