Quote collection
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"Force, force, everywhere force; we ourselves a mysterious force in the centre of that. "There is not a leaf rotting on the highway but has Force in it: how else could it rot?" [As used in his time, by the word force, Carlyle means energy.]"
"We have not read an author till we have seen his object, whatever it may be, as he saw it."
"O Heaven, it is mysterious, it is awful to consider that we not only carry each a future Ghost within him; but are, in very deed, Ghosts!"
"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."
"Well might the ancients make silence a god; for it is the element of all godhood, infinitude, or transcendental greatness,--at once the source and the ocean wherein all such begins and ends."
"Work earnestly at anything, you will by degrees learn to work at all things."
"The modern majesty consists in work. What a man can do is his greatest ornament, and he always consults his dignity by doing it."
"And yet without labour there were no ease, no rest, so much as conceivable."
"He who talks much about virtue in the abstract, begins to be suspected; it is shrewdly guessed that where there is great preaching there will be little almsgiving."
"Labor, wide as the earth, has its summit in heaven."
"A word spoken in season, at the right moment; is the mother of ages."
"Speech that leads not to action, still more that hinders it, is a nuisance on the earth."
"Learn to be good readers, which is perhaps a more difficult thing than you imagine. Learn to be discriminative in your reading; to read faithfully, and with your best attention, all kinds of things which you have a real interest in,--a real, not an imaginary,--and which you find to be really fit for what you are engaged in."
"The end of Man is an Action, and not a Thought, though it were the noblest?"
"Speech is human, silence is divine, yet also brutish and dead: therefore we must learn both arts."
"The true past departs not, no truth or goodness realized by man ever dies, or can die; but all is still here, and, recognized or not, lives and works through endless change."
"In this world there is one godlike thing, the essence of all that was or ever will be of godlike in this world: the veneration done to Human Worth by the hearts of men."
"We observe with confidence that the truly strong mind, view it as intellect or morality, or under any other aspect, is nowise the mind acquainted with its strength; that here the sign of health is unconsciousness."
"The true epic of our times is not "Arm's and the Man," but "Tools and the Man"--an infinitely wider kind of epic."
"If I say that Shakespeare is the greatest of intellects, I have said all concerning him. But there is more in Shakespeare's intellect than we have yet seen. It is what I call an unconscious intellect; there is more virtue in it that he himself is aware of."