"A mind that has seen, and suffered, and done, speaks to us of what it has tried and conquered."
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Thomas Carlyle quotes (page 31 of 41)
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"It is no very good symptom, either of nations or individuals, that they deal much in vaticination. Happy men are full of the present, for its bounty suffices them; and wise men also, for its duties engage them. Our grand business undoubtedly is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what clearly lies at hand."
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"Nature is the time-vesture of God that reveals Him to the wise, and hides him from the foolish."
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"Thought, true labor of any kind, highest virtue itself, is it not the daughter of Pain?"
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"I never heard tell of any clever man that came of entirely stupid people."
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"We are to remember what an umpire Nature is; what a greatness, composure of depth and tolerance there is in her. You take wheat to cast into the Earth's bosom; your wheat may be mixed with chaff, chopped straw, barn-sweepings, dust and all imaginable rubbish; no matter: you cast it into the kind just Earth; she grows the wheat, - the whole rubbish she silently absorbs, shrouds it in, says nothing of the rubbish."
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"What this country needs is a man who knows God other than by heresay."
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"Is not cant the materia prima of the devil, from which all falsehoods, imbecilities, abominations, body themselves, from which no true thing can come? For cant is itself the properly a double-distilled lie, the second power of a lie."
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"The Great Man's sincerity is of the kind he cannot speak of, is not conscious of: nay, I suppose, he is conscious rather of insincerity; for what man can walk accurately by the law of truth for one day? No, the Great Man does not boast himself sincere, far from that; perhaps does not ask himself if he is so: I would say rather, his sincerity does not depend on himself; he cannot help being sincere!"
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"In the true Literary Man there is thus ever, acknowledged or not by the world, a sacredness: he is the light of the world; the world's Priest; -- guiding it, like a sacred Pillar of Fire, in its dark pilgrimage through the waste of Time."
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"If I had my way, the world would hear a pretty stern command - Exit Christ."
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"The grand result of schooling is a mind with just vision to discern, with free force to do: the grand schoolmaster is Practice."
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"I know so little about any history. How little do I know even about the history of myself."
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"And there are Ben [Jonson] and William Shakespeare in wit-combat, sure enough; Ben bearing down like a mighty Spanish war-ship, fraught with all learning and artillery; Shakespeare whisking away from him - whisking right through him, athwart the big bulk and timbers of him; like a miraculous Celestial Light-ship, woven all of sheet-lightning and sunbeams!"
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"The highest ensign that men ever met and embraced under, the Cross itself, had no meaning save an accidental extrinsic one."
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"Parties on the back of Parties, at war with the world and with each other."
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"Such is the world. Understand it, despise it, love it; cheerfully hold on thy way through it, with thy eye on highest loadstars!"
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"They wrong man greatly who say he is to be seduced by ease. Difficulty, abnegation, martyrdom, death are the allurements that act on the heart of man."
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"A battle is a terrible conjugation of the verb to kill: I kill, thou killest, he kills, we kill, they kill, all kill."
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"Over the times thou hast no power. . . . Solely over one man thou hast quite absolute power. Him redeem and make honest."
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