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Life Quotes by Thomas Carlyle

57 Life quotes by Thomas Carlyle

All Life quotes Thomas Carlyle’s page

The glory of a workman, especially a master workman, is shown as his most precious possession. Earnestness alone makes life feel eternal, and true truth or goodness never truly dies. The real question is not what we gain, but what we do with our time.

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Books are a triviality. Life alone is great.

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Life is a series of lessons that have to be understood.

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“One life - a little gleam of Time between two Eternities.”

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All work, even cotton-spinning, is noble; work is alone noble.

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Earnestness alone makes life eternity.

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Whose school-hours are all the days and nights of our existence.

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

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The Present is the living sum-total of the whole Past.

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The man of life upright has a guiltless heart, free from all dishonest deeds or thought of vanity.

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The essence of humor is sensibility; warm, tender fellow-feeling with all forms of existence.

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O Time! Time! how it brings forth and devours! And the roaring flood of existence rushes on forever similar, forever changing!

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

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Poetry is the attempt which man makes to render his existence harmonious.

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Everywhere in life, the true question is not what we gain, but what we do.

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There is no heroic poem in the world but is at bottom a biography, the life of a man.

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

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Let Time and Chance combine, combine! Let Time and Chance combine! The fairest love from heaven above, That love of yours was…

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Have not I myself known five hundred living soldiers sabred into crows' meat for a piece of glazed cotton, which they call…

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No nobler feeling than this, of admiration for one higher than himself, dwells in the breast of man. It is to this…

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Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together; that at length they may emerge, full-formed and majestic, into the…

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Rich as we are in biography, a well-written life is almost as rare as a well-spent one; and there are certainly many…

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Our works are the mirror wherein the spirit first sees its natural lineaments. Hence, too, the folly of that impossible precept, Know…

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The glory of a workman, still more of a master workman, that he does his work well, ought to be his most…

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Labor is life: from the inmost heart of the worker rises his God-given force, the sacred celestial life-essence breathed into him by…

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Poverty, we may say, surrounds a man with ready-made barriers, which if they do mournfully gall and hamper, do at least prescribe…

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A dandy is a clothes-wearing man--a man whose trade, office, and existence consist in the wearing of clothes. Every faculty of his…

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If you will believe me, you who are young, yours is the golden season of life. As you have heard it called,…

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To me the Universe was all void of Life, of Purpose, of Volition, even of Hostility; it was one huge, dead, immeasurable…

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The weakest living creature, by concentrating his powers on a single object, can accomplish something. The strongest, by dispensing his over many,…

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Blessed is he who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness. He has a work, a life-purpose; he has…

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All sorts of Heroes are intrinsically of the same material; that given a great soul, open to the Divine Significance of Life,…

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“Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together; that at length they may emerge, full-formed and majestic, into the…

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But deepest of all illusory Appearances, for hiding Wonder, as for many other ends, are your two grand fundamental world-enveloping Appearances, SPACE…

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

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That monstrous tuberosity of civilised life, the capital of England.

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Time has only a relative existence.

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One life; a little gleam of Time between two Eternities; no second chance to us for evermore!

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He is wise who can instruct us and assist us in the business of virtuous living.

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Everywhere in life the true question is, not what we have gained, but what we do.

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

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More by Thomas Carlyle

O thou that pinest in the imprisonment of the Actual, and criest bitterly to the gods for a kingdom wherein to rule and create,…

Whose school-hours are all the days and nights of our existence.

No sadder proof can be given by a man of his own littleness than disbelief in great men.

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

The sincere alone can recognize sincerity.

Be a pattern to others, and then all will go well; for as a whole city is affected by the licentious passions and vices…

The glory of a workman, still more of a master workman, that he does his work well, ought to be his most precious possession;…

All human things do require to have an ideal in them; to have some soul in them.

Insurrection, never so necessary, is a most sad necessity; and governors who wait for that to instruct them are surely getting into the fatalest…

What is philosophy but a continual battle against custom?

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

Thought will not work except in silence.

The public is anold woman.Let her maunderand mumble.

Does not every true man feel that he is himself made higher by doing reverence to what is really above him?

The press is the fourth estate of the realm.