Thomas Carlyle World Quotations

Make yourself an honest man, and then you may be sure there is one less rascal in the world.

Not brute force but only persuasion and faith are the kings of this world.

The world is a republic of mediocrities, and always was.

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.

Man is, properly speaking, based upon hope, he has no other possession but hope; this world of his is emphatically the place of hope.

In our wide world there is but one altogether fatal personage, the dunce,--he that speaks irrationally, that sees not, and yet thinks he sees.

The true Sovereign of the world, who moulds the world like soft wax, according to his pleasure, is he who lovingly sees into the world.

The great silent man! Looking round on the noisy inanity of the world,--words with little meaning, actions with little worth,--one loves to reflect on the great Empire of Silence.

Obedience is our universal duty and destiny; wherein whoso will not bend must break; too early and too thoroughly we cannot be trained to know that "would," in this world of ours, is a mere zero to "should," and for most part as the smallest of fractions even to "shall.

Such is the world. Understand it, despise it, love it; cheerfully hold on thy way through it, with thy eye on highest loadstars!

Genuine Work alone, what thou workest faithfully, that is eternal, as the Almighty Founder and World-Builder himself.

Nay, in every epoch of the world, the great event, parent of all others, is it not the arrival of a Thinker in the world?

The world is an old woman, and mistakes any gilt farthing for a gold coin; whereby being often cheated, she will thenceforth trust nothing but the common copper.

At worst, is not this an unjust world, full of nothing but beasts of prey, four-footed or two-footed?

Nothing ever happens but once in all this world. What I do now I do once for all. It is over and gone, with all its eternity of solemn meaning.

Habit and imitation--there is nothing more perennial in us than these two. They are the source of all working, and all apprenticeship, of all practice, and all learning, in this world.

The great soul of this world is just.

The world is a thing that a man must learn to despise, and even to neglect, before he can learn to reverence it, and work in it and for it.

One monster there is in the world, the idle man.

It is meritorious to insist on forms; religion and all else naturally clothes itself in forms. Everywhere the formed world is the only habitable one.

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

There is no heroic poem in the world but is at bottom a biography, the life of a man.

Every poet, be his outward lot what it may, finds himself born in the midst of prose; h e has to struggle from the littleness and obstruction of an actual world into the freedom and infinitude of an ideal.

Woe to him, . . . who has no court of appeal against the world's judgment.

The latest gospel in this world is, know thy work and do it.

There must be a new world if there is to be any world at all!... These days of universal death must be days of universal new birth, if the ruin is not to be total and final! It is Time to make the dullest man consider; and ask himself, Whence he came? Whither he is bound?

If I had my way, the world would hear a pretty stern command - Exit Christ.

A force as of madness in the hands of reason has done all that was ever done in the world.

Great is journalism. Is not every able editor a ruler of the world, being the persuader of it?

Popular opinion is the greatest lie in the world.

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.