Thomas Carlyle

"A man with a half volition goes backwards and forwards, and makes no way on the smoothest road a man with a whole volition advances on the roughest, and will reach his purpose, if there be even a little worthiness in it. The man without a purpose is like a ship without a rudder - a waif, a nothing, a no man. Have a purpose in life and having it, throw such strength of mind and muscle into your work as God has given you. "

"A vein of poetry exists in the hearts of all men. "

"A well written life is almost as rare as a well spent one. "

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

"Blessed is he who has found his work let him ask no other blessedness. "

"Enjoy things which are pleasant that is not the evil it is the reducing of our moral self to slavery by them that is. "

"Happy the people whose annals are blank in the history books "

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

"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. "

"If you are ever in doubt as to whether to kiss a pretty girl, always give her the benefit of the doubt. "

"It is the first of all problems for a man to find out what kind of work he is to do in this universe. "

"Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood. "

"Long stormy spring-time, wet contentious April, winter chilling the lap of very May but at length the season of summer does come. "

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

"Music is well said to be the speech of angels. "

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

"Nothing that was worthy in the past departs no truth or goodness realized by man ever dies, or can die. "

"One life - a little gleam of Time between two Eternities. "

"Originality is a thing we constantly clamour for, and constantly quarrel with. "

"Our main business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance but to do what lies clearly at hand. "

"Silence is deep as Eternity speech is shallow as Time. "

"Skepticism means, not intellectual doubt alone, but moral doubt. "

"Speech is human, silence is divine, yet also brutish and dead therefore we must learn both arts. "

"Talk that does not end in any kind of action is better suppressed altogether. "

"That there should one Man die ignorant who had capacity for Knowledge, this I call a tragedy. "

"The best effect of any book is that it excites the reader to self-activity. "

"The greatest of faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none. "

"Under all speech that is good for anything there lies a silence that is better. Silence is deep as Eternity speech is shallow as Time. "

"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. "