Thomas Carlyle

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

Even in the meanest sorts of Labor, the whole soul of a man is composed into a kind of real harmony the instant he sets himself to work.

Properly speaking, all true work is religion.

All true work is sacred. In all true work, were it but true hand work, there is something of divineness. Labor, wide as the earth, has its summit in Heaven.

All work is as seed sown; it grows and spreads, and sows itself anew.

All life is figured by them as a Tree. Igdrasil, the Ash-tree of existence, has its roots deep-down in the kingdoms of Death: its trunk reaches up heaven-high, spreads its boughs over the whole Universe: it is the Tree of Existence. At the foot of it, in the Death-Kingdom, sit the three Fates - the Past, Present and Future; watering its roots from the Sacred Well. It's "bough," with their buddings and disleafings, - events, things suffered, things done, catastrophes, - stretch through all lands and times. Is not every leaf of it a biography, every fiber there an act or word? Its boughs are the Histories of Nations. The rustle of it is the noise of Human Existence, onwards from of old. . . . I find no similitude so true as this of a Tree. Beautiful; altogether beautiful and great.

Let him who wants to move and convince others be first moved and convinced himself.

The history of the world is but the biography of great men.

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

Teaching school is but another word for sure and not very slow destruction.