thomas Carlyle

“A man lives by believing something, not by debating and arguing about many things.”

“A poet without love were a physical and metaphysical impossibility.”

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

“Every new opinion, at its starting, is precisely in a minority of one.”

“History is the biography of great men.”

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

“Literature is the Thought of thinking Souls.”

“Men do less than they ought, unless they do all that they can.”

“Music is well said to be the speech of angels; in fact, nothing among the utterances allowed to man is felt to be so divine.  It brings us near to the Infinite.”

“Nothing is more terrible than activity without insight.”

“Silence is deep as Eternity, speech is shallow as Time.”

“Stop a moment, cease your work, and look around you.”

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

“The best effect of any book is that it excites the reader to self-activity.”

“The great law of culture:  let each become all that he was created capable of doing.”

“The greatest of faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none.”  (Heroes and Hero-Worship, The Hero as a Profit)

“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.”

“The mystic bond of brotherhood makes all men one.”

“The universe is but one vast Symbol of God.”

“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.”