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 a book comes from the heart, it will contrive to reach other hearts; all art and author-craft are of small amount to that.

They wrong man greatly who say he is to be seduced by ease. Difficulty, abnegation, martyrdom, death are the allurements that act on the heart of man.

The graceful minuet-dance of fancy must give place to the toilsome, thorny pilgrimage of understanding. On the transition from the age of romance to that of science.

No person was every rightly understood until they had been first regarded with a certain feeling, not of tolerance, but of sympathy.

Force, force, everywhere force; we ourselves a mysterious force in the centre of that. "There is not a leaf rotting on the highway but has Force in it: how else could it rot?" [As used in his time, by the word force, Carlyle means energy.]

Neither let mistakes and wrong directions - of which every man, in his studies and elsewhere, falls into many - discourage you. There is precious instruction to be got by finding that we are wrong. Let a man try faithfully, manfully to be right, he will grow daily more and more right. It is, at bottom, the condition which all men have to cultivate themselves. Our very walking is an incessant falling - a falling and a catching of ourselves before we come actually to the pavement! - it is emblematic of all things a man does.