Thomas Carlyle

A fair day's wages for a fair day's work.

— Thomas Carlyle

Great men are the commissioned guides of mankind, who rule their fellows because they are wiser.

— Thomas Carlyle

The greatest event for the world is the arrival of a new and wise person.

— Thomas Carlyle

Wonder is the basis of worship.

— Thomas Carlyle

A man perfects himself by working. Foul jungles are cleared away, fair seed-fields rise instead, and stately cities; and with the man himself first ceases to be a jungle, and foul unwholesome desert thereby. The man is now a man.

— Thomas Carlyle

Every noble work is at first impossible.

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle

Work alone is noble.

— Thomas Carlyle

Worship is transcendent wonder.

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle

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.

— Thomas Carlyle

Parliament will train you to talk; and above all things to hear, with patience, unlimited quantities of foolish talk.

— Thomas Carlyle

That a Parliament, especially a Parliament with Newspaper Reporters firmly established in it, is an entity which by its very nature cannot do work, but can do talk only.

— Thomas Carlyle

Manhood begins when we have in any way made truce with Necessity; begins even when we have surrendered to Necessity, as the most part only do; but begins joyfully and hopefully only when we have reconciled ourselves to Necessity; and thus, in reality, triumphed over it, and felt that in Necessity we are free.

— Thomas Carlyle

The most unhappy of all men is the man who cannot tell what he is going to do, who has got no work cut-out for him in the world, and does not go into it. For work is the grand cure of all the maladies and miseries that ever beset mankind,honest work, which you intend getting done.

— Thomas Carlyle

Democracy will prevail when men believe the vote of Judas as good as that of Jesus Christ.

— Thomas Carlyle

Of America it would ill beseem any Englishman, and me perhaps as little as another, to speak unkindly, to speak unpatriotically, if any of us even felt so. Sure enough, America is a great, and in many respects a blessed and hopeful phenomenon. Sure enough, these hardy millions of Anglosaxon men prove themselves worthy of their genealogy. But as to a Model Republic, or a model anything, the wise among themselves know too well that there is nothing to be said. Their Constitution, such as it may be, was made here, not there. Cease to brag to me of America, and its model institutions and constitutions.

— Thomas Carlyle

Twenty-seven millions, mostly fools.

— Thomas Carlyle

Only perhaps in the United States, which alone of countries can do without governing,every man being at least able to live, and move off into the wilderness, let Congress jargon as it will,can such a form of so-called Government continue for any length of time to torment men with the semblance, when the indispensable substance is not there.

— Thomas Carlyle

The Mystic Bond of Brotherhood makes all men one.

— Thomas Carlyle