Time is the silent never-resting thing ... rolling rushing on swift silent like an all-embracing Oceanside on which we and all the universe swim.

— Thomas Carlyle

Today is not yesterday how can our works and thoughts if they are always to be the fittest always continue the same? Change indeed is painful yet ever needful.

— Thomas Carlyle

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.

— 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.

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle

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 loose like wild beasts against one other.

— Thomas Carlyle

We arc the miracle of miracles the great inscrutable mystery of God.

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— Thomas Carlyle

When the oak is felled the whole forest echoes with its fall but a hundred acorns are sown in silence by an unnoticed breeze.

— Thomas Carlyle