Thomas Carlyle: Trending quotes (page 10)

“His religion at best is an anxious wish, — like that of Rabelais, a great Perhaps.”

Thomas Carlyle

Burns; compare: "The grand perhaps", Browning, Bishop Bloughram's Apology.
1820s, Critical and Miscellaneous Essays (1827–1855)

Religion

“A word spoken in season, at the right moment, is the mother of ages.”

Thomas Carlyle

Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 561.
1890s and attributed from posthumous publications

Age , Season

“An intellectual dapperling of these times boasts chiefly of his irresistible perspicacity, his “dwelling in the daylight of truth,” and so forth; which, on examination, turns out to be a dwelling in the rush-light of “closet logic,” and a deep unconsciousness that there is any other light to dwell in or any other objects to survey with it.”

Thomas Carlyle

1820s, Signs of the Times (1829)

Truth , Light , Time

“Sarcasm I now see to be, in general, the language of the Devil; for which reason I have, long since, as good as renounced it.”

Thomas Carlyle

Bk. II, ch. 4.
1830s, Sartor Resartus (1833–1834)

“Human virtue, if we went down to the roots of it, is not so rare. The materials of human virtue are everywhere abundant as the light of the sun: raw materials,—O woe, and loss, and scandal thrice and threefold, that they so seldom are elaborated, and built into a result! that they lie yet unelaborated, and stagnant in the souls of wide-spread dreary millions, fermenting, festering; and issue at last as energetic vice instead of strong practical virtue!”

Thomas Carlyle

1850s, Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850), Model Prisons (March 1, 1850)

Lie , Soul , Light , Strong

“Get, by six hundred and fifty-eight votes, or by no vote at all, by the silent intimation of your own eyesight and understanding given you direct out of Heaven, and more sacred to you than anything earthly, and than all things earthly,—a correct image of the fact in question, as God and Nature have made it: that is the one thing needful; with that it shall be well with you in whatsoever you have to do with said fact. Get, by the sublimest constitutional methods, belauded by all the world, an incorrect image of the fact: so shall it be other than well with you; so shall you have laud from able editors and vociferous masses of mistaken human creatures; and from the Nature's Fact, continuing quite silently the same as it was, contradiction, and that only. What else?”

Thomas Carlyle

1850s, Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850), Stump Orator (May 1, 1850)

God , World , Understanding , Question

“Democracy is, by the nature of it, a self-canceling business; and it gives in the long run a net result of zero.”

Thomas Carlyle

Source: 1840s, Chartism (1840), Ch. 6, Laissez-Faire.

Democracy , Business , Nature

“Alas, our noble men of genius, Heaven's real messengers to us, they also rendered nearly futile by the wasteful time;—preappointed they everywhere, and assiduously trained by all their pedagogues and monitors, to "rise in Parliament," to compose orations, write books, or in short speak words, for the approval of reviewers; instead of doing real kingly work to be approved of by the gods!”

Thomas Carlyle

1850s, Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850), The Present Time (February 1, 1850)

Men , God , Books , Time

“But oppression by your Mock-Superiors well shaken off, the grand problem yet remains to solve: That of finding government by your Real-Superiors! Alas, how shall we ever learn the solution of that, benighted, bewildered, sniffing, sneering, godforgetting unfortunates as we are? It is a work for centuries; to be taught us by tribulations, confusions, insurrections, obstructions; who knows if not by conflagration and despair! It is a lesson inclusive of all other lessons; the hardest of all lessons to learn.”

Thomas Carlyle

1840s, Past and Present (1843)

Problem , Learning , Despair

“In the meanest mortal there lies something nobler. The poor swearing soldier, hired to be shot, has his "honor of a soldier," different from drill-regulations and the shilling a day. It is not to taste sweet things, but to do noble and true things, and vindicate himself under God's Heaven as a god-made Man, that the poorest son of Adam dimly longs. Show him the way of doing that, the dullest day-drudge kindles into a hero. They wrong man greatly who say he is to be seduced by ease.”

Thomas Carlyle

1840s, Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840), The Hero as Prophet

God , Way

“There is a science of Dynamics in man's fortunes and nature, as well as of Mechanics. There is a science which treats of, and practically addresses, the primary, unmodified forces and energies of man, the mysterious springs of Love, and Fear, and Wonder, of Enthusiasm, Poetry, Religion, all which have a truly vital and infinite character; as well as a science which practically addresses the finite, modified developments of these, when they take the shape of immediate “motives,” as hope of reward, or as fear of punishment.
Now it is certain, that in former times the wise men, the enlightened lovers of their kind, who appeared generally as Moralists, Poets or Priests, did, without neglecting the Mechanical province, deal chiefly with the Dynamical; applying themselves chiefly to regulate, increase and purify the inward primary powers of man; and fancying that herein lay the main difficulty, and the best service they could undertake. But a wide difference is manifest in our age. For the wise men, who now appear as Political Philosophers, deal exclusively with the Mechanical province; and occupying themselves in counting-up and estimating men's motives, strive by curious checking and balancing, and other adjustments of Profit and Loss, to guide them to their true advantage”

Thomas Carlyle

1820s, Signs of the Times (1829)

Love , Men , Age , Fear

“I think he once told us his first short clothes were a hull made mostly or wholly of leather. We all only laughed, for it is now long ago. Thou dear father! Through what stern obstructions was thy way to manhood to be forced, and for us and for our travelling to be made smooth!”

Thomas Carlyle

1880s, Reminiscences (1881)

Way , Travel , Thinking , Clothes

“Whoso belongs only to his own age, and reverences only its gilt Popinjays or smoot-smeared Mumbojumbos, must needs die with it.”

Thomas Carlyle

1830s, Boswell's Life of Johnson (1832)

Age

“Alas! such is the miseducation of these days, it is only among those that are called the uneducated classes — those educated by experience — that you can look for a Man. Even among these, such a sight is growing daily rarer. My father, in several respects, has not, that I can think of, left his fellow. Perhaps among Scottish peasants what Samuel Johnson was among English authors. I have a sacred pride in my peasant father, and would not exchange him, even now, for any king known to me. Gold and the guinea stamp — the Man and the clothes of the man. Let me thank God for that greatest of blessings, and strive to live worthily of it.”

Thomas Carlyle

1880s, Reminiscences (1881)

God , Education , Thinking , Clothes

“Constitution,—the apex of all its intelligences and mighty instincts and dumb longings: it is I? William Conqueror's big gifts, and Edward's and Elizabeth's; Oliver's lightning soul, noble as Sinai and the thunders of the Lord: these are mine, I begin to perceive,—to a certain extent. These heroisms have I,—though rather shy of exhibiting them. These; and something withal of the huge beaver-faculty of our Arkwrights, Brindleys; touches too of the phoenix-melodies and sunny heroisms of our Shakspeares, of our Singers, Sages and inspired Thinkers all this is in me, I will hope,—though rather shy of exhibiting it on common occasions.”

Thomas Carlyle

1850s, Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850), Downing Street (April 1, 1850)

Hope , Soul , Intelligence

“Alas, the Hero from of old has had to cramp himself into strange shapes: the world knows not well at any time what to do with him, so foreign is his aspect in the world!”

Thomas Carlyle

1840s, Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840), The Hero as Man of Letters

World , Time

“It has ever been held the highest wisdom for a man not merely to submit to Necessity,—Necessity will make him submit,—but to know and believe well that the stern thing which Necessity had ordered was the wisest, the best, the thing wanted there. To cease his frantic pretension of scanning this great God's-World in his small fraction of a brain; to know that it had verily, though deep beyond his soundings, a Just Law, that the soul of it was Good;—that his part in it was to conform to the Law of the Whole, and in devout silence follow that; not questioning it, obeying it as unquestionable.”

Thomas Carlyle

1840s, Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840), The Hero as Prophet

Wisdom , God , World , Law

“The eye of the intellect "sees in all objects what it brought with it the means of seeing."”

Thomas Carlyle

Varnhagen von Ense's Memoirs.
1820s, Critical and Miscellaneous Essays (1827–1855)

“In brief, all this Mammon- Gospel, of Supply-and-demand, Competition, Laissez-faire, and Devil take the hindmost, begins to be one of the shabbiest Gospels ever preached on Earth; or altogether the shabbiest.”

Thomas Carlyle

1840s, Past and Present (1843)

“The All of Things is an infinite conjugation of the verb To do.”

Thomas Carlyle

Pt. II, Bk. III, ch. 1.
1830s, The French Revolution. A History (1837)