Thomas Carlyle: Trending quotes (page 8)

“For, in fact, I say the degree of vision that dwells in a man is a correct measure of the man. If called to define Shakspeare's faculty, I should say superiority of Intellect, and think I had included all under that. What indeed are faculties? We talk of faculties as if they were distinct, things separable; as if a man had intellect, imagination, fancy, &c., as he has hands, feet and arms. That is a capital error. Then again, we hear of a man's "intellectual nature," and of his "moral nature," as if these again were divisible, and existed apart. Necessities of language do perhaps prescribe such forms of utterance; we must speak, I am aware, in that way, if we are to speak at all. But words ought not to harden into things for us. It seems to me, our apprehension of this matter is, for most part, radically falsified thereby. We ought to know withal, and to keep forever in mind, that these divisions are at bottom but names; that man's spiritual nature, the vital Force which dwells in him, is essentially one and indivisible; that what we call imagination, fancy, understanding, and so forth, are but different figures of the same Power of Insight, all indissolubly connected with each other, physiognomically related; that if we knew one of them, we might know all of them. Morality itself, what we call the moral quality of a man, what is this but another side of the one vital Force whereby he is and works? All that a man does is physiognomical of him. You may see how a man would fight, by the way in which he sings; his courage, or want of courage, is visible in the word he utters, in the opinion he has formed, no less than in the stroke he strikes. He is one; and preaches the same Self abroad in all these ways.”

Thomas Carlyle

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

Way , Error , Imagination , Courage

“Speech is human, silence is divine, yet also brutish and dead: therefore we must learn both arts.”

Thomas Carlyle

Notebooks (1830).
1830s

Art , Silence , Learning , Dead

“Find in any country the Ablest Man that exists there; raise him to the supreme place, and loyally reverence him: you have a perfect government for that country; no ballot-box, parliamentary eloquence, voting, constitution-building, or other machinery whatsoever can improve it a whit.”

Thomas Carlyle

1840s, Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840), The Hero As King

Perfection , Country , Box

“Yes, truly, it is a great thing for a Nation that it get an articulate voice; that it produce a man who will speak forth melodiously what the heart of it means!”

Thomas Carlyle

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

Heart

“The seeing eye! It is this that discloses the inner harmony of things; what Nature meant, what musical idea Nature has wrapped up in these often rough embodiments. Something she did mean. To the seeing eye that something were discernible. Are they base, miserable things? You can laugh over them, you can weep over them; you can in some way or other genially relate yourself to them; — you can, at lowest, hold your peace about them, turn away your own and others' face from them, till the hour come for practically exterminating and extinguishing them!”

Thomas Carlyle

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

Peace , Music , Way , Idea

“Certainly the Art of Writing is the most miraculous of all things man has devised.”

Thomas Carlyle

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

Art

“No man lives without jostling and being jostled; in all ways he has to elbow himself through the world, giving and receiving offense.”

Thomas Carlyle

1830s, Sir Walter Scott (1838)

World , Way

“Blessed is the healthy nature; it is the coherent, sweetly co-operative, not incoherent, self-distracting, self-destructive one!”

Thomas Carlyle

1830s, Sir Walter Scott (1838)

Nature

“Burke said there were Three Estates in Parliament; but, in the Reporter's Gallery yonder, there sat a Fourth Estate more important far than they all.”

Thomas Carlyle

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

“He has now a second far greater success to gain: to seek out his real superiors, whom not the Tailor but the Almighty God has made superior to him, and see a little what he will do with these! Rebel against these also? Pass by with minatory eagle-glance, with calm-sniffing mockery, or even without any mockery or sniff, when these present themselves? The lion-hearted will never dream of such a thing. Forever far be it from him! His minatory eagle-glance will veil itself in softness of the dove: his lion- heart will become a lamb's; all is just indignation changed into just reverence, dissolved in blessed floods of noble humble love, how much heavenlier than any pride, nay, if you will, how much prouder!”

Thomas Carlyle

1840s, Past and Present (1843)

Love , God , Dreams , Change

“At bottom, as was said above, we are to consider Luther as a Prophet Idol-breaker; a bringer-back of men to reality. It is the function of great men and teachers.”

Thomas Carlyle

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

Men , Reality , Teachers

“There is clear truth in the idea that a struggle from the lower classes of society, towards the upper regions and rewards of society, must ever continue. Strong men are born there, who ought to stand elsewhere than there.”

Thomas Carlyle

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

Men , Truth , Idea , Strong

“A man perfects himself by work much more than by reading.”

Thomas Carlyle

1860s, On The Choice Of Books (1866)

Reading , Perfection

“That there should one Man die ignorant who had capacity for Knowledge, this I call a tragedy.”

Thomas Carlyle

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

Knowledge

“Innumerable are the illusions and legerdemain-tricks of Custom: but of all these, perhaps the cleverest is her knack of persuading us that the Miraculous, by simple repetition, ceases to be Miraculous.”

Thomas Carlyle

Bk. III, ch. 8.
1830s, Sartor Resartus (1833–1834)

“Or indeed we may say again, it is in what I called Portrait-painting, delineating of men and things, especially of men, that Shakspeare is great. All the greatness of the man comes out decisively here. It is unexampled, I think, that calm creative perspicacity of Shakspeare. The thing he looks at reveals not this or that face of it, but its inmost heart and generic secret: it dissolves itself as in light before him, so that he discerns the perfect structure of it. Creative, we said: poetic creation, what is this too but seeing the thing sufficiently? The word that will describe the thing, follows of itself from such clear intense sight of the thing. And is not Shakspeare's morality, his valour, candour, tolerance, truthfulness; his whole victorious strength and greatness, which can triumph over such obstructions, visible there too? Great as the world!”

Thomas Carlyle

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

Men , Truth , Secret , World

“Literary men are…a perpetual priesthood.”

Thomas Carlyle

The State of German Literature.
1820s, Critical and Miscellaneous Essays (1827–1855)

Men

“Who is there that can recognize real intellect, and do reverence to it; and discriminate it well from sham intellect, which is so much more abundant, and deserves the reverse of reverence? He that himself has it!—One really human Intellect, invested with command, and charged to reform Downing Street for us, would continually attract real intellect to those regions, and with a divine magnetism search it out from the modest corners where it lies hid. And every new accession of intellect to Downing Street would bring to it benefit only, and would increase such divine attraction in it, the parent of all benefit there and elsewhere!”

Thomas Carlyle

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

Search , Parent

“A spontaneous, passionate, yet just, true-meaning man! Full of wild faculty, fire and light; of wild worth, all uncultured; working out his life-task in the depths of the Desert there.”

Thomas Carlyle

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

Life , Light , Passion

“The stupendous Fourth Estate, whose wide world-embracing influences what eye can take in?”

Thomas Carlyle

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

World