Thomas Carlyle (1795 – 1881)
Scottish essayist, satirist, and historian, whose work was hugely influential during the Victorian era.
What is all Knowledge too but recorded Experience, and a product of History; of which, therefore, Reasoning and Belief, no less than Action and Passion, are essential materials?
Literature is the Thought of thinking Souls.
"Do the Duty which lies nearest thee," which thou knowest to be a Duty! Thy second Duty will already have become clearer.
In books lies the soul of the whole Past Time; the articulate audible voice of the Past, when the body and material substance of it has altogether vanished like a dream.
We are to remember what an umpire Nature is; what a greatness, composure of depth and tolerance there is in her. You take wheat to cast into the Earth's bosom; your wheat may be mixed with chaff, chopped straw, barn-sweepings, dust and all imaginable rubbish; no matter: you cast it into the kind just Earth; she grows the wheat, — the whole rubbish she silently absorbs, shrouds it in, says nothing of the rubbish. The yellow wheat is growing there; the good Earth is silent about all the rest, — has silently turned all the rest to some benefit too, and makes no complaint about it! So everywhere in Nature! She is true and not a lie; and yet so great, and just, and motherly in her truth. She requires of a thing only that it be genuine of heart; she will protect it if so; will not, if not so. There is a soul of truth in all the things she ever gave harbor to. Alas, is not this the history of all highest Truth that comes or ever came into the world?
Can the man say, Fiat lux, Let there be light; and out of chaos make a world? Precisely as there is light in himself, will he accomplish this.
No pressure, no diamonds.
I care little about the sword: I will allow a thing to struggle for itself in this world, with any sword or tongue or implement it has, or can lay hold of. We will let it preach, and pamphleteer, and fight, and to the uttermost bestir itself, and do, beak and claws, whatsoever is in it; very sure that it will, in the long-run, conquer nothing which does not deserve to be conquered. What is better than itself, it cannot put away, but only what is worse. In this great Duel, Nature herself is umpire, and can do no wrong: the thing which is deepest-rooted in Nature, what we call truest, that thing and not the other will be found growing at last.
The stupendous Fourth Estate, whose wide world-embracing influences what eye can take in?
Lord Bacon could as easily have created this planet as he could have written Hamlet.
The English are a dumb people. They can do great acts, but not describe them.
A loving heart is the beginning of all knowledge.
Love is ever the beginning of Knowledge as fire is of light.
With stupidity and sound digestion man may front much.
Blessed is he who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness.
The Book had in a high degree excited us to self-activity, which is the best effect of any book.
Wonder is the basis of worship.
Hadst thou not Greek enough to understand thus much: The end of man is an Action, and not a Thought, though it were the noblest.
So here hath been dawning
Another blue Day:
Think wilt thou let it
Slip useless away.
A person usually has two reasons for doing something: a good reason and the real reason.