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

Thomas Carlyle

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Thomas Carlyle
Age: 85 †
Born: 1795
Born: December 4
Died: 1881
Died: February 5
Essayist
Historian
Linguist
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Mathematician
Novelist
Philosopher
Teacher
Translator
Writer
Philosopher of Chelsea
Person
Reformation
Without
Pleasant
Reform
Hard
Nation
Work
Nations
Much
Suffering
Less
Persons
Grievous

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Considering the multitude of mortals that handle the pen in these days, and can mostly spell, and write without glaring violations of grammar, the question naturally arises: How is it, then, that no work proceeds from them, bearing any stamp of authenticity and permanence of worth for more than one day?
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The vulgarity of inanimate things requires time to get accustomed to but living, breathing, bustling, plotting, planning, human vulgarity is a species of moral ipecacuanha, enough to destroy any comfort.
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If a book comes from the heart, it will contrive to reach other hearts all art and author-craft are of small amount to that.
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In books lies the soul of the whole Past Time the articulate audible voice of the Past, when the body and material substance of it has altogether vanished like a dream.
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The true epic of our times is not Arm's and the Man, but Tools and the Man--an infinitely wider kind of epic.
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The highest ensign that men ever met and embraced under, the Cross itself, had no meaning save an accidental extrinsic one.
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What is nature? Art thou not the living government of God? O Heaven, is it in very deed He then that ever speaks through thee, that lives and loves in thee, that lives and loves in me?
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Nine-tenths of the miseries and vices of mankind proceed from idleness.
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Show me the man you honor I know by that symptom, better than by any other, what kind of man you yourself are. For you show me there what your ideal of manhood is what kind of man you long inexpressibly to be.
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He that can work is born to be king of something.
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If those gentlemen would let me alone I should be much obliged to them. I would say, as Shakespeare would say... Sweet Friend, for Jesus sake forbear.
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History is the distillation of rumour.
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We call that fire of the black thunder-cloud electricity, and lecture learnedly about it, and grind the like of it out of glass and silk: but what is it? What made it? Whence comes it? Whither goes it?
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Lord Bacon could as easily have created the planets as he could have written Hamlet.
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There is but one temple in this Universe: The Body. We speak to God whenever we lay our hands upon it.
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A force as of madness in the hands of reason has done all that was ever done in the world.
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The greatest event for the world is the arrival of a new and wise person.
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A man cannot make a pair of shoes rightly unless he do it in a devout manner.
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He who talks much about virtue in the abstract, begins to be suspected it is shrewdly guessed that where there is great preaching there will be little almsgiving.
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Books are a triviality. Life alone is great.
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