Thomas Carlyle

“True humor springs not more from the head than from the heart. It is not contempt its essence is love. It issues not in laughter, but in still smiles, which lie far deeper.”

“Imagination is a poor matter when it has to part company with understanding.”

“A loving heart is the beginning of all knowledge.”

“Men seldom, or rather never for a length of time and deliberately, rebel against anything that does not deserve rebelling against.”

“If you do not wish a man to do a thing, you had better get him to talk about it; for the more men talk, the more likely they are to do nothing else.”

“The real use of gunpowder is to make all men tall.”

“Men do less than they ought, unless they do all that they can.”

“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.”

“If you look deep enough you will see music the heart of nature being everywhere music.”

“Music is well said to be the speech of angels.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Wonder is the basis of worship.”

“What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books.”

“If an eloquent speaker speak not the truth, is there a more horrid kind of object in creation?”

“War is a quarrel between two thieves too cowardly to fight their own battle.”

“I do not believe in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.”

“Every noble work is at first impossible.”

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

“Good breeding differs, if at all, from high breeding only as it gracefully remembers the rights of others, rather than gracefully insists on its own rights.”

“Silence is as deep as eternity, speech a shallow as time.”

“A man willing to work, and unable to find work, is perhaps the saddest sight that fortune's inequality exhibits under this sun.”