Thomas Carlyle Life Quotations

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?

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

Our works are the mirror wherein the spirit first sees its natural lineaments. Hence, too, the folly of that impossible precept, Know theyself; till it be translated into this partially possible one, know what thou canst work at.

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.

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

Let Time and Chance combine, combine! Let Time and Chance combine! The fairest love from heaven above, That love of yours was mine, My Dear! That love of yours was mine.

Books are a triviality. Life alone is great.

Love is ever the beginning of knowledge as fire is of light.

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

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

It is now almost my sole rule of life to clear myself of cants and formulas, as of poisonous Nessus shirts.

Poverty, we may say, surrounds a man with ready-made barriers, which if they do mournfully gall and hamper, do at least prescribe for him, and force on him, a sort of course and goal; a safe and beaten, though a circuitous, course. A great part of his guidance is secure against fatal error, is withdrawn from his control. The rich, again, has his whole life to guide, without goal or barrier, save of his own choosing, and, tempted, is too likely to guide it ill.

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.

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?

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

In private life I never knew anyone interfere with other people's disputes but he heartily repented of it.

Our life is not really a mutual helpfulness; but rather, it's fair competition cloaked under due laws of war; it's a mutual hostility.

Life is a little gleam of time between two eternity s.

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

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.

Genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains.

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

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

Success in life, in anything, depends upon the number of persons that one can make himself agreeable to.

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

Every noble work is at first impossible.

No pressure, no diamonds.

Show me the man you honor, and I will know what kind of man you are.