It were a real increase of human happiness, could all young men from the age of nineteen be covered under barrels, or rendered otherwise invisible; and there left to follow their lawful studies and callings, till they emerged, sadder and wiser, at the age of twenty-five.
Thomas Carlyle

Laughter is one of the very privileges of reason, being confined to the human species.
Thomas Carlyle

Let each become all that he was created capable of being.
Thomas Carlyle

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

Love is not altogether a delirium, yet it has many points in common therewith.
Thomas Carlyle

Love is the only game that is not called on account of darkness.
Thomas Carlyle

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

Man is a tool-using animal. Without tools he is nothing, with tools he is all.
Thomas Carlyle

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

Man's unhappiness, as I construe, comes of his greatness; it is because there is an Infinite in him, which with all his cunning he cannot quite bury under the Finite.
Thomas Carlyle

Men do less than they ought, unless they do all that they can.
Thomas Carlyle

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

Music is well said to be the speech of angels.
Thomas Carlyle

Narrative is linear, but action has breadth and depth as well as height and is solid.
Thomas Carlyle

Necessity dispenseth with decorum.
Thomas Carlyle

No amount of ability is of the slightest avail without honor.
Thomas Carlyle

No ghost was every seen by two pair of eyes.
Thomas Carlyle

No great man lives in vain. The history of the world is but the biography of great men.
Thomas Carlyle

No iron chain, or outward force of any kind, can ever compel the soul of a person to believe or to disbelieve.
Thomas Carlyle

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