Thomas Carlyle cytaty

strona 7

„Kim się stajemy, zależy od tego, co czytamy, kiedy zakończymy już standardową edukację. Najlepszym uniwersytetem ze wszystkich jest kolekcja książek.”

„Rewolucja francuska to najstraszliwsza rzecz, jaką zrodził Czas.”

„W śmiechu jest klucz, którym jesteśmy w stanie rozszyfrować całego człowieka.”

„Nie mam aspiracji, żeby zrozumieć Wszechświat – on jest o wiele większy ode mnie.”

„Historia świata nie jest niczym innym jak biografią wielkich ludzi.”

„Kapitanowie przemysłu.”

„Słowa przynależą do czasu, milczenie do wieczności.”

„Przyroda nie znosi kłamstwa.”

„Szczęśliwi ludzie, których dzieje nie wypełniają podręczników historii.”

„Wielki człowiek pokazuje swoją wielkość przez sposób, w jaki traktuje maluczkich.”

„Naucz papugę, co to jest podaż i popyt, a otrzymasz ekonomistę.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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!”

“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?”

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

“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!”

“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.”

“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.”

“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”

“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!”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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!”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“A gifted noble people; a people of wild strong feelings, and of iron restraint over these: the characteristic of noble-mindedness, of genius.”

“Do nothing, only keep agitating, debating; and things will destroy themselves.”

“Properly speaking, the Land belongs to these two: To the Almighty God; and to all His Children of Men that have ever worked well on it, or that shall ever work well on it. No generation of men can or could, with never such solemnity and effort, sell Land on any other principle: it is not the property of any generation, we say, but that of all the past generations that have worked on it, and of all the future ones that shall work on it.”

“Oceans of horse-hair, continents of parchment, and learned-sergeant eloquence, were it continued till the learned tongue wore itself small in the indefatigable learned mouth, cannot make unjust just.”

“Adversity is sometimes hard upon a man; but for one man who can stand prosperity, there are a hundred that will stand adversity.”

“I knew Robert Burns, and I knew my father. Yet were you to ask me which had the greater natural faculty, I might perhaps actually pause before replying. Burns had an infinitely wider education, my father a far wholesomer. Besides, the one was a man of musical utterance; the other wholly a man of action, with speech subservient thereto. Never, of all the men I have seen, has one come personally in my way in whom the endowment from nature and the arena from fortune were so utterly out of all proportion. I have said this often, and partly know it. As a man of speculation — had culture ever unfolded him — he must have gone wild and desperate as Burns; hut he was a man of conduct, and work keeps all right. What strange shapable creatures we are!”

“this same Man-of-Letters Hero must be regarded as our most important modern person. He, such as he may be, is the soul of all.”

“Every toiling Manchester, its smoke and soot all burnt, ought it not, among so many world-wide conquests, to have a hundred acres or so of free greenfield, with trees on it, conquered, for its little children to disport in; for its all-conquering workers to take a breath of twilight air in? You would say so! A willing Legislature could say so with effect. A willing Legislature could say very many things! And to whatsoever 'vested interest,' or such like, stood up, gainsaying merely, "I shall lose profits,"—the willing Legislature would answer, "Yes, but my sons and daughters will gain health, and life, and a soul."—”

“Philosophy complains that Custom has hoodwinked us, from the first; that we do everything by Custom, even Believe by it; that our very Axioms, let us boast of Free-thinking as we may, are oftenest simply such Beliefs as we have never heard questioned. Nay, what is Philosophy throughout but a continual battle against Custom; an ever-renewed effort to transcend the sphere of blind Custom, and so become Transcendental?”

“The more I reflect on it, the more I must admire how completely nature had taught him; how completely he was devoted to his work, to the task of his life, and content to let all pass by unheeded that had not relation to this. It is a singular fact, for example, that though a man of such openness and clearness, he had never, I believe, read three pages of Burns's poems. Not even when all about him became noisy and enthusiastic, I the loudest, on that matter, did he feel it worth while to renew his investigation of it, or once turn his face towards it. The poetry he liked (he did not call it poetry) was truth, and the wisdom of reality. Burns, indeed, could have done nothing for him. As high a greatness hung over his world as over that of Burns — the ever-present greatness of the Infinite itself. Neither was he, like Burns, called to rebel against the world, but to labor patiently at his task there, uniting the possible with the necessary to bring out the real, wherein also lay an ideal.”