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There are good and bad times, but our mood changes more often than our fortune.

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
Good
Mood
Fortune
Changes
Times
Often

More quotes by Thomas Carlyle

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Force, force, everywhere force we ourselves a mysterious force in the centre of that. There is not a leaf rotting on the highway but has Force in it: how else could it rot? [As used in his time, by the word force, Carlyle means energy.]
Thomas Carlyle
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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
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The situation that has not its duty, its ideal, was never yet occupied by man. Yes, here, in this poor, miserable, hampered, despicable actual, wherein thou even now standest, here or nowhere is thy ideal work it out therefrom, and, working, believe, live, be free. Fool! the ideal is in thyself.
Thomas Carlyle
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Government is emphatically a machine: to the discontented a taxing machine, to the contented a machine for securing property.
Thomas Carlyle
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Universal history, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here.
Thomas Carlyle
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Endurance is patience concentrated.
Thomas Carlyle
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When the oak is felled the whole forest echoes with it fall, but a hundred acorns are sown in silence by an unnoticed breeze.
Thomas Carlyle
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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
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The end of Man is an Action, and not a Thought, though it were the noblest?
Thomas Carlyle
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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
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Evil and good are everywhere, like shadow and substance inseparable (for men) yet not hostile, only opposed.
Thomas Carlyle
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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?
Thomas Carlyle
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In idleness there is a perpetual despair.
Thomas Carlyle
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Variety is the condition of harmony.
Thomas Carlyle
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The great soul of this world is just.
Thomas Carlyle
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A man--be the heavens ever praised!--is sufficient for himself.
Thomas Carlyle
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Happy season of virtuous youth, when shame is still an impassable barrier, and the sacred air-cities of hope have not shrunk into the mean clay hamlets of reality and man, by his nature, is yet infinite and free.
Thomas Carlyle
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Man is, properly speaking, based upon hope, he has no other possession but hope this world of his is emphatically the place of hope.
Thomas Carlyle
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Oblivion is the dark page, whereon Memory writes her light-beam characters, and makes them legible were it all light, nothing could be read there, any more than if it were all darkness.
Thomas Carlyle
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Superstition! that horrid incubus which dwelt in darkness, shunning the light, with all its racks, and poison chalices, and foul sleeping draughts, is passing away without return. Religion cannot pass away. The burning of a little straw may hide the stars of the sky but the stars are there and will reappear.
Thomas Carlyle