Thomas Carlyle Quotes | GloryQuotes

Thomas Carlyle Quotes About Work

Old age is not a matter for sorrow. It is matter for thanks if we have left our work done behind us.

The only happiness a brave person ever troubles themselves in asking about, is happiness enough to get their work done.

The work an unknown good man has done is like a vein of water flowing hidden underground, secretly making the ground green.

Reform is not pleasant, but grievous; no person can reform themselves without suffering and hard work, how much less a nation.

A man willing to work, and unable to find work, is perhaps the saddest sight that fortune's inequality exhibits under this sun.

Blessed is he who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness.

Writing is a dreadful labor, yet not so dreadful as Idleness.

Oh, give us the man who sings at his work.

More Quotes by Thomas Carlyle

Make yourself an honest man, and then you may be sure there is one less rascal in the world.

A laugh, to be joyous, must flow from a joyous heart, for without kindness, there can be no true joy.

Nothing that was worthy in the past departs; no truth or goodness realized by man ever dies, or can die.

If you look deep enough you will see music; the heart of nature being everywhere music.

No iron chain, or outward force of any kind, can ever compel the soul of a person to believe or to disbelieve.

Culture is the process by which a person becomes all that they were created capable of being.

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

The first duty of man is to conquer fear; he must get rid of it, he cannot act till then.

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

No great man lives in vain. The history of the world is but the biography of great men.

Laughter is one of the very privileges of reason, being confined to the human species.

If an eloquent speaker speak not the truth, is there a more horrid kind of object in creation?

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

There is a great discovery still to be made in literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write.

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

The three great elements of modern civilization, Gun powder, Printing, and the Protestant religion.

If there be no enemy there's no fight. If no fight, no victory and if no victory there is no crown.

Sarcasm I now see to be, in general, the language of the devil; for which reason I have long since as good as renounced it.

The difference between Socrates and Jesus? The great conscious and the immeasurably great unconscious.

To us also, through every star, through every blade of grass, is not God made visible if we will open our minds and our eyes.

If you do not wish a man to do a thing, you had better get him to talk about it; for the more men talk, the more likely they are to do nothing else.

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

All that mankind has done, thought or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books.

Of all acts of man repentance is the most divine. The greatest of all faults is to be conscious of none.

War is a quarrel between two thieves too cowardly to fight their own battle.

Imagination is a poor matter when it has to part company with understanding.

He who could foresee affairs three days in advance would be rich for thousands of years.

Men seldom, or rather never for a length of time and deliberately, rebel against anything that does not deserve rebelling against.

Not brute force but only persuasion and faith are the kings of this world.

History shows that the majority of people that have done anything great have passed their youth in seclusion.

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

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

Narrative is linear, but action has breadth and depth as well as height and is solid.

When new turns of behavior cease to appear in the life of the individual, its behavior ceases to be intelligent.

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

A strong mind always hopes, and has always cause to hope.

No man who has once heartily and wholly laughed can be altogether irreclaimably bad.

Science must have originated in the feeling that something was wrong.

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

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

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.

A man's felicity consists not in the outward and visible blessing of fortune, but in the inward and unseen perfections and riches of the mind.

Nothing builds self-esteem and self-confidence like accomplishment.

Speech is human, silence is divine, yet also brutish and dead: therefore we must learn both arts.

In the long-run every Government is the exact symbol of its People, with their wisdom and unwisdom; we have to say, Like People like Government.

Secrecy is the element of all goodness; even virtue, even beauty is mysterious.

He who has health, has hope; and he who has hope, has everything.

It is a vain hope to make people happy by politics.

Browse 153 quotes attributed to Thomas Carlyle, listed in the source data as a Scottish Philosopher, organized around themes such as Work, Career, Life. Use the topic links to explore similar quotes, or browse the full author collection in one place.