Thomas Carlyle (1795 – 1881)
Scottish essayist, satirist, and historian, whose work was hugely influential during the Victorian era.
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 each other.
There are depths in man that go to the lowest hell, and heights that reach the highest heaven, for are not both heaven and hell made out of him, everlasting miracle and mystery that he is.
Ever, as before, does Madness remain a mysterious-terrific, altogether infernal boiling-up of the Nether Chaotic Deep, through this fair-painted Vision of Creation, which swims thereon, which we name the Real.
Alas! the fearful Unbelief is unbelief in yourself.
Everywhere in life, the true question is not what we gain, but what we do.
He who takes not counsel of the Unseen and Silent, from him will never come real visibility and speech.
Enjoying things which are pleasant; that is not the evil: it is the reducing of our moral self to slavery by them that is.
His religion at best is an anxious wish, — like that of Rabelais, a great Perhaps.
Literary men are...a perpetual priesthood.
For love is ever the beginning of Knowledge, as fire is of light.
With what scientific stoicism he walks through the land of wonders, unwondering …
The All of Things is an infinite conjugation of the verb To do.
It is really, as Coleridge I think said of something else, like reading a story by flashes of lightning!
Not only was Thebes built by the music of an Orpheus; but without the music of some inspired Orpheus was no city ever built, no work that man glories in ever done.
I have read -- nay, I have bought! -- Carlyle's Latter Day Pamphlets, and look on my eight shillings as very much thrown away. To me, it appears that the grain of sense is so smothered up in a sack of the sheerest trash, that the former is valueless. He does not himself know what he wants. He has one idea -- a hatred of spoken and acted falsehood; and on that he harps through the whole eight pamphlets. I look on him as a man who was always in danger of going mad in literature and who has now done so.
How does the poet speak to men with power, but by being still more a man than they?
We have chosen Mahomet not as the most eminent Prophet; but as the one we are freest to speak of. He is by no means the truest of Prophets; but I do esteem him a true one. Farther, as there is no danger of our becoming, any of us, Mahometans, I mean to say all the good of him I justly can. It is the way to get at his secret: let us try to understand what he meant with the world; what the world meant and means with him, will then be a more answerable question. Our current hypothesis about Mahomet, that he was a scheming Impostor, a Falsehood incarnate, that his religion is a mere mass of quackery and fatuity, begins really to be now untenable to any one. The lies, which well-meaning zeal has heaped round this man, are disgraceful to ourselves only.
The three great elements of modern civilization, gunpowder, printing, and the Protestant religion.
The suffering man ought really 'to consume his own smoke'; there is no good in emitting smoke till you have made it into fire, — which, in the metaphorical sense too, all smoke is capable of becoming!
He who first shortened the labor of copyists by device of movable types was disbanding hired armies, and cashiering most kings and senates, and creating a whole new democratic world: he had invented the art of printing.