All that mankind has done, thought, gained, or been; it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books.

One life; a little gleam of Time between two Eternities; no second chance to us for evermore!

This green flowery rock-built earth, the trees, the mountains, rivers, many-sounding seas;—that great deep sea of azure that swims overhead; the winds sweeping through it; the black cloud fashioning itself together, now pouring out fire,...

The whole universe is but a huge Symbol of god”.

Ye are most strong, ye Sons of the icy North, of the far East, far marching from your rugged Eastern Wildernesses, hither-ward from the gray Dawn of Time! Ye are Sons of the Jotun-land; the...

Intellect is not speaking and logicising; it is seeing and ascertaining.

Happy the people whose annals are blank in history books.

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

Fool! The Ideal is in thyself, the impediment too is in thyself: thy Condition is but the stuff thou art to shape that same Ideal out of: what matters whether such stuff be of this...

I’ve got a great ambition to die of exhaustion rather than boredom.

There needs not a great soul to make a hero; there needs a god-created soul which will be true to its origin; that will be a great soul!

If time is precious, no book that will not improve by repeated readings deserves to be read at all.

Of our thinking it is but the upper surface that we shape into articulate thought; underneath the region of argument and conscious discourse lies the region of meditation.

Look around you. Your world-hosts are all in mutiny, in confusion, destitution; on the eve of fiery wreck and madness! They will not march farther for you, on the sixpence a day and supply-demand principle;...

Adversity is sometimes hard upon a man, but for one man who can stand prosperity, there are a hundred that will stand adversity.

No magic Rune is stranger than a Book. All that Mankind has done, thought, gained or been: it is lyingas in magic preservation in the pages of Books. They are the chosen possession of men.

A loving heart is the beginning of all knowledge.

Surely of all ‘rights of man’, this right of the ignorant man to be guided by the wiser, to be, gently or forcibly, held in the true course by him, is the indisputablest.

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.

Of all your troubles, great and small, the greatest are the ones that don’t happen at all.

Some comfort it would have been, could I, like a Faust, have fancied myself tempted and tormented of the Devil; for a Hell, as I imagine, without Life, though only Diabolic Life, were more frightful:...

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.

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...

Venerable to me is the hard hand; crooked & coarse; wherein notwithstanding lies a cunning virtue indefeasibly royal as the Scepter of this Planet. Hardly entreated Brother! For us was thy way so bent, for...

There are impertinent inquiries made; your rule is, to leave the inquirer uninformed on the matter; not, if you can help it, misinformed, but precisely as dark as he was!

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

(Quoted by Thomas Carlyle) The rude man requires only to see something going on. The man of more refinement must be made to feel. The man of complete refinement must be made to reflect.

Go as far as you can see; when you get there, you’ll be able to see further.

You may take my purse; but I cannot have my moral Self annihilated. The purse is any Highwayman’s who might meet me with a loaded pistol: but the Self is mine and God my Maker’s;...

But figure his thought, when Death is now clutching at his own heart-strings, unlooked for, inexorable! Yes, poor Louis, Death has found thee. No palace walls or life-guards, gorgeous tapestries or gilt buckram of stiffest...

A man lives by believing something; not by debating and arguing about many things.

If Jesus Christ were to come today, people would not even crucify him. They would ask him to dinner, and hear what he had to say, and make fun of it.

It is a great shame for anyone to listen to the accusation that Islam is a lie and that Muhammad was a fabricator and a deceiver. We saw that he remained steadfast upon his principles,...

History is the essence of innumerable biographies.

Well at ease are the Sleepers for whom Existence is a shallow Dream.

The lies (Western slander) which well-meaning zeal has heaped round this man (Muhammad) are disgraceful to ourselves only.

Of all the paths a man could strike into, there is, at any given moment, a best path .. A thing which, here and now, it were of all things wisest for him to do...

A Dandy is a clothes-wearing Man, a Man whose trade, office and existence consists in the wearing of clothes.

The suffering man ought really to consume his own smoke; there is no good in emitting smoke till you have made it into fire.

My books are friends that never fail me.”(Letter to his mother, Margaret A. Carlyle; 17 March 1817)

Such I hold to be the genuine use of Gunpowder: that it makes all men tall.

Music is well said to be the speech of angels; in fact, nothing among the utterances allowed to man is felt to be so divine. It brings us near to the infinite.

Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together; that at length they may emerge, full-formed and majestic, into the daylight of Life, which they are thenceforth to rule. Not William the Silent...

War is a quarrel between two thieves too cowardly to fight their own battle; therefore they take boys from one village and another village, stick them into uniforms, equip them with guns, and let them...

Everywhere the human soul stands between a hemisphere of light and another of darkness; on the confines of two everlasting empires, necessity and free will.

The word of Mohammad is a voice direct from nature’s own heart – all else is wind in comparison.

Under all speech that is good for anything there lies a silence that is better.