Thomas Carlyle citations (482 citations, Page 10)

Thomas Carlyle: 482 citations 1 J'aime

Thomas Carlyle Citations

“L'on a beaucoup écrit sur la façon dont Mahomet propagea sa religion par l'épée. Il y a, sans doute, beaucoup d'honnêteté de la part des chrétiens à se vanter d'avoir, eux, propagé leur religion pacifiquement.”

Thomas Carlyle livre Les héros, le culte des héros et l'héroique dans l'histoire

Much has been said of Mahomet's propagating his Religion by the sword. It is no doubt far nobler what we have to boast of the Christian Religion, that it propagated itself peaceably.
en
On Heroes, Hero-worship, and the Heroic in History, 1841

religion

Thomas Carlyle: Citations en anglais

“"By what method or methods can the able men from every rank of life be gathered, as diamond-grains from the general mass of sand: the able men, not the sham-able;—and set to do the work of governing, contriving, administering and guiding for us!" It is the question of questions. All that Democracy ever meant lies there: the attainment of a truer and truer Aristocracy, or Government again by the Best.”

Help us translate this quote

Thomas Carlyle

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

“The Philosopher of this age is not a Socrates, a Plato, a Hooker, or Taylor, who inculcates on men the necessity and infinite worth of moral goodness, the great truth that our happiness depends on the mind which is within us, and not on the circumstances which are without us; but a Smith, a De Lolme, a Bentham, who chiefly inculcates the reverse of this,—that our happiness depends entirely on external circumstances; nay, that the strength and dignity of the mind within us is itself the creature and consequence of these. Were the laws, the government, in good order, all were well with us; the rest would care for itself! Dissentients from this opinion, expressed or implied, are now rarely to be met with; widely and angrily as men differ in its application, the principle is admitted by all.”

Help us translate this quote

Thomas Carlyle

1820s, Signs of the Times (1829)

“in the learned professions as in the unlearned, and in human things throughout, in every place and in every time, the true function of intellect is not that of talking, but of understanding and discerning with a view to performing!”

Help us translate this quote

Thomas Carlyle

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

“Europe has made much; great cities, great empires, encyclopaedias, creeds, bodies of opinion and practice: but it has made little of the class of Dante's Thought.”

Help us translate this quote

Thomas Carlyle

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

“Burns's Brother Gilbert, a man of much sense and worth, has told me that Robert, in his young days, in spite of their hardship, was usually the gayest of speech; a fellow of infinite frolic, laughter, sense and heart; far pleasanter to hear there, stript cutting peats in the bog, or such like, than he ever afterwards knew him. I can well believe it. This basis of mirth, a primal element of sunshine and joyfulness, coupled with his other deep and earnest qualities, is one of the most attractive characteristics of Burns. A large fund of Hope dwells in him; spite of his tragical history, he is not a mourning man. He shakes his sorrows gallantly aside; bounds forth victorious over them.”

Help us translate this quote

Thomas Carlyle

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

“Nature admits no lie.”

Help us translate this quote

Thomas Carlyle

Latter Day Pamphlet, No. 5. (1850).
1820s, Critical and Miscellaneous Essays (1827–1855)

“History a distillation of Rumour.”

Help us translate this quote

Thomas Carlyle

Pt. I, Bk. VII, ch. 5.
1830s, The French Revolution. A History (1837)

“The habits of study acquired at Universities are of the highest importance in after-life. At the season when you are in young years the whole mind is, as it were, fluid, and is capable of forming itself into any shape that the owner of the mind pleases to order it to form itself into. The mind is in a fluid state, but it hardens up gradually to the consistency of rock or iron, and you cannot alter the habits of an old man, but as he has begun he will proceed and go on to the last.”

Help us translate this quote

Thomas Carlyle

1860s, On The Choice Of Books (1866)

“He who would write heroic poems should make his whole life a heroic poem.”

Help us translate this quote

Thomas Carlyle

Life of Schiller.
1820s, Critical and Miscellaneous Essays (1827–1855)

“With his sharp power of vision, resolute power of action, I doubt not he could have learned to write Books withal, and speak fluently enough;—he did harder things than writing of Books. This kind of man is precisely he who is fit for doing manfully all things you will set him on doing.”

Help us translate this quote

Thomas Carlyle

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

“I feel that these old Northmen wore looking into Nature with open eye and soul: most earnest, honest; childlike, and yet manlike; with a great-hearted simplicity and depth and freshness, in a true, loving, admiring, unfearing way.”

Help us translate this quote

Thomas Carlyle

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

“With stupidity and sound digestion man may front much.”

Help us translate this quote

Thomas Carlyle

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

“Wonder, indeed, is, on all hands, dying out: it is the sign of uncultivation to wonder.”

Help us translate this quote

Thomas Carlyle

1820s, Signs of the Times (1829)

“Probably some ninety-nine out of every hundred of our gifted souls, who have to seek a career for themselves, go this beaver road. Whereby the first half-result, national wealth namely, is plentifully realized; and only the second half, or wisdom to guide it, is dreadfully behindhand.”

Help us translate this quote

Thomas Carlyle

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

“It is truly a lordly spectacle how this great soul takes in all kinds of men and objects, a Falstaff, an Othello, a Juliet, a Coriolanus; sets them all forth to us in their round completeness; loving, just, the equal brother of all. Novum Organum, and all the intellect you will find in Bacon, is of a quite secondary order; earthy, material, poor in comparison with this. Among modern men, one finds, in strictness, almost nothing of the same rank. Goethe alone, since the days of Shakspeare, reminds me of it. Of him too you say that he saw the object; you may say what he himself says of Shakspeare: 'His characters are like watches with dial-plates of transparent crystal; they show you the hour like others, and the inward mechanism also is all visible.”

Help us translate this quote

Thomas Carlyle

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

“No lie you can speak or act but it will come, after longer or shorter circulation, like a Bill drawn on Nature's Reality, and be presented there for payment, — with the answer, No effects.”

Help us translate this quote

Thomas Carlyle

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

“I plead guilty to valuing such a man beyond all other sorts of men. Smooth-shaven Respectabilities not a few one finds, that are not good for much. Small thanks to a man for keeping his hands clean, who would not touch the work but with gloves on!”

Help us translate this quote

Thomas Carlyle

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

“The built house seems all so fit,- everyway as it should be, as if it came there by its own law and the nature of things,- we forget the rude disorderly quarry it was shaped from. The very perfection of the house, as if Nature herself had made it, hides the builder's merit. Perfect, more perfect than any other man, we may call Shakspeare in this: he discerns, knows as by instinct, what condition he works under, what his materials are, what his own force and its relation to them is. It is not a transitory glance of insight that will suffice; it is deliberate illumination of the whole matter; it is a calmly seeing eye; a great intellect, in short. How a man, of some wide thing that he has witnessed, will construct a narrative, what kind of picture and delineation he will give of it,- is the best measure you could get of what intellect is in the man. Which circumstance is vital and shall stand prominent; which unessential, fit to be suppressed; where is the true beginning, the true sequence and ending? To find out this, you task the whole force of insight that is in the man. He must understand the thing; according to the depth of his understanding, will the fitness of his answer be.”

Help us translate this quote

Thomas Carlyle

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

“To all men it is evident that the social interests of one hundred and fifty Millions of us depend on the mysterious industry there carried on; and likewise that the dissatisfaction with it is great, universal, and continually increasing in intensity,—in fact, mounting, we might say, to the pitch of settled despair.”

Help us translate this quote

Thomas Carlyle

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

“On the whole, we will repeat that this Religion of Mahomet's is a kind of Christianity; has a genuine element of what is spiritually highest looking through it, not to be hidden by all its imperfections. The Scandinavian God Wish, the god of all rude men, — this has been enlarged into a Heaven by Mahomet; but a Heaven symbolical of sacred Duty, and to be earned by faith and well-doing, by valiant action, and a divine patience which is still more valiant. It is Scandinavian Paganism, and a truly celestial element superadded to that. Call it not false; look not at the falsehood of it, look at the truth of it. For these twelve centuries, it has been the religion and life-guidance of the fifth part of the whole kindred of Mankind. Above all things, it has been a religion heartily believed. These Arabs believe their religion, and try to live by it! No Christians, since the early ages, or only perhaps the English Puritans in modern times, have ever stood by their Faith as the Moslem do by theirs, — believing it wholly, fronting Time with it, and Eternity with it.”

Help us translate this quote

Thomas Carlyle

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

“He that has a secret should not only hide it, but hide that he has it to hide.”

Help us translate this quote

Thomas Carlyle

Pt. II, Bk. I, ch. 7.
1830s, The French Revolution. A History (1837)

“We have oftener than once endeavoured to attach some meaning to that aphorism, vulgarly imputed to Shaftesbury, which however we can find nowhere in his works, that "ridicule is the test of truth."”

Help us translate this quote

Thomas Carlyle livre Characteristics

Voltaire, Foreign Review, (1829); compare: "How comes it to pass, then, that we appear such cowards in reasoning, and are so afraid to stand the test of ridicule?", Shaftesbury, Characteristics. A Letter concerning Enthusiasm, sect. 2.; "Truth, 't is supposed, may bear all lights; and one of those principal lights or natural mediums by which things are to be viewed in order to a thorough recognition is ridicule itself", Shaftesbury, Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour, sect. 1.; "'T was the saying of an ancient sage [Gorgias Leontinus, apud Aristotle's "Rhetoric," lib. iii. c. 18], that humour was the only test of gravity, and gravity of humour. For a subject which would not bear raillery was suspicious; and a jest which would not bear a serious examination was certainly false wit", ibid. sect. 5.
1820s, Critical and Miscellaneous Essays (1827–1855)