"Not a hundredth part of the thoughts in my head have ever been or ever will be spoken or written — as long as I keep my senses, at least."

Jane Welsh Carlyle See all quotes by Jane Welsh Carlyle →

React to this quote

More by Jane Welsh Carlyle

“The triumphal-procession-air which, in our manners and customs, is given to marriage at the outset — that singing of Te Deum before the battle has begun.”

“Oh Lord! If you but knew what a brimstone of a creature I am behind all this beautiful amiability!”

“Letters and Memorials of Jane Welsh Carlyle”

“The surest way to get a thing in this life is to be prepared for doing without it, to the exclusion even of hope.”

“If they had said that the sun or the moon had gone out of the heavens, it could not have struck me with the idea of a more awful and dreary blank in creation than the words: "Byron is dead!”

“When one has been threatened with a great injustice, one accepts a smaller as a favour.”

Resonant Thoughts

"Political conflict rests to a very large extent on a universal ignorance of consequences, as the people who are benefited by any particular act or policy are rarely those who struggled for it, and the…"

— Kenneth Boulding

Economics1910–1993

#art

"If the world is to change for the better it must start with a change in human consciousness, in the very humanness of modern man."

— Václav Havel

Literature1920–1979

#art

"Geoffrey Chaucer articles at Harvard University"

— Geoffrey Chaucer

Literature1343–1400

#art

"The instinct which creates the arts is not the same as that which produces art. The creative instinct is, in its final analysis and in its simplest terms, an enormous extra vitality, a super-energy, b…"

— Pearl S. Buck

Literature1892–1973

#life