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To reform a world, to reform a nation, no wise man will undertake; and all but foolish men know, that the only solid, though a far slower reformation, is what each begins and perfects on himself.

Thomas Carlyle
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Genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains.
Thomas Carlyle
A strong mind always hopes, and has always cause to hope.
Thomas Carlyle
The greatest of faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none.
Thomas Carlyle
Weak eyes are fondest of glittering objects.
Thomas Carlyle
Happy the people whose annals are vacant.
Thomas Carlyle
Every noble work is at first impossible.
Thomas Carlyle
The outer passes away; the innermost is the same yesterday, today, and forever.
Thomas Carlyle
Show me the man you honor, and I will know what kind of man you are.
Thomas Carlyle
There are good and bad times, but our mood changes more often than our fortune.
Thomas Carlyle
Work alone is noble.
Thomas Carlyle
No great man lives in vain. The history of the world is but the biography of great men.
Thomas Carlyle
Be not a slave of words.
Thomas Carlyle
No man lives without jostling and being jostled; in all ways he has to elbow himself through the world, giving and receiving offence.
Thomas Carlyle
Nothing builds self-esteem and self-confidence like accomplishment.
Thomas Carlyle
None of us will ever accomplish anything excellent or commanding except when he listens to this whisper which is heard by him alone.
Thomas Carlyle
One must verify or expel his doubts, and convert them into the certainty of Yes or NO.
Thomas Carlyle
Woe to him that claims obedience when it is not due; woe to him that refuses it when it is.
Thomas Carlyle
No person is important enough to make me angry.
Thomas Carlyle
Long stormy spring-time, wet contentious April, winter chilling the lap of very May; but at length the season of summer does come.
Thomas Carlyle
Do the duty which lies nearest to you, the second duty will then become clearer.
Thomas Carlyle
The three great elements of modern civilization, Gun powder, Printing, and the Protestant religion.
Thomas Carlyle
The end of man is action, and not thought, though it be of the noblest.
Thomas Carlyle
A man lives by believing something: not by debating and arguing about many things.
Thomas Carlyle
Love is not altogether a delirium, yet it has many points in common therewith.
Thomas Carlyle
The only happiness a brave person ever troubles themselves in asking about, is happiness enough to get their work done.
Thomas Carlyle
It is a vain hope to make people happy by politics.
Thomas Carlyle
All great peoples are conservative.
Thomas Carlyle
Everywhere the human soul stands between a hemisphere of light and another of darkness; on the confines of the two everlasting empires, necessity and free will.
Thomas Carlyle
Every day that is born into the world comes like a burst of music and rings the whole day through, and you make of it a dance, a dirge, or a life march, as you will.
Thomas Carlyle
No amount of ability is of the slightest avail without honor.
Thomas Carlyle
No iron chain, or outward force of any kind, can ever compel the soul of a person to believe or to disbelieve.
Thomas Carlyle
Speech is human, silence is divine, yet also brutish and dead: therefore we must learn both arts.
Thomas Carlyle
Imperfection clings to a person, and if they wait till they are brushed off entirely, they would spin for ever on their axis, advancing nowhere.
Thomas Carlyle
A man willing to work, and unable to find work, is perhaps the saddest sight that fortune's inequality exhibits under this sun.
Thomas Carlyle
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, will preserve it longer, than the sad or sullen.
Thomas Carlyle
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.
Thomas Carlyle
No violent extreme endures.
Thomas Carlyle
If you are ever in doubt as to whether to kiss a pretty girl, always give her the benefit of the doubt.
Thomas Carlyle
Show me the person you honor, for I know better by that the kind of person you are. For you show me what your idea of humanity is.
Thomas Carlyle
No pressure, no diamonds.
Thomas Carlyle
If you look deep enough you will see music; the heart of nature being everywhere music.
Thomas Carlyle
I grow daily to honour facts more and more, and theory less and less. A fact, it seems to me, is a great thing; a sentence printed, if not by God, then at least by the Devil.
Thomas Carlyle
Secrecy is the element of all goodness; even virtue, even beauty is mysterious.
Thomas Carlyle
All that mankind has done, thought or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books.
Thomas Carlyle
If an eloquent speaker speak not the truth, is there a more horrid kind of object in creation?
Thomas Carlyle
The man of life upright has a guiltless heart, free from all dishonest deeds or thought of vanity.
Thomas Carlyle
Make yourself an honest man, and then you may be sure there is one less rascal in the world.
Thomas Carlyle
Science must have originated in the feeling that something was wrong.
Thomas Carlyle