Thomas Carlyle

[Economics is] not a “gay science,” I should say, like some we have heard of; no, a dreary, desolate, and, indeed, quite abject and distressing one: what we might call, by way of eminence, the dismal science .

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[ Commenting on Margaret Fuller’s remark, “I accept the universe,” ca. 1843 :] Gad! she’d better.

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All that mankind has done, thought, gained or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books.

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Burke said there were Three Estates in Parliament; but, in the Reporters’ Gallery yonder, there sat a Fourth Estate , more important far than they all.

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It is not what a man outwardly has or wants that constitutes the happiness or misery of him. Nakedness, hunger, distress of all kinds, death itself have been cheerfully suffered, when the heart was right. It is the feeling of injustice that is insupportable to all men.

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It were a real increase of human happiness, could all young men from the age of nineteen be covered under barrels, or rendered otherwise invisible; and there left to follow their lawful studies and callings, till they emerged, sadder and wiser, at the age of twenty-five.

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There is no heroic poem in the world but is at bottom a biography, the life of a man; also, it may be said, there is no life of a man, faithfully recorded, but is a heroic poem of its sort, rhymed or unrhymed.

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If a book come from the heart, it will contrive to reach other hearts; all art and authorcraft are of small amount to that.

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Does not every true man feel that he is himself made higher by doing reverence to what is really above him?

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This world, after all our science and sciences, is still a miracle; wonderful, inscrutable, magical and more, to whosoever will think of it.

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He that will not work according to his faculty, let him peris!) according to his necessity: there is no law juster than that.

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He that can work is a born king of something.

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Wonder is the basis of worship.

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Clear undeniable right, clear undeniable might: either of these once ascertained puts an end to battle. All battle is a confused experiment to ascertain one and both of these.

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No man sees far; the most see no farther than their noses.

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The world is an old woman, and mistakes any gilt farthing for a gold coin; whereby being often cheated, she will thenceforth trust nothing but the common copper.

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Rightly viewed no meanest object is insignificant; all objects are as windows, through which the philosophic eye looks into infinitude itself.

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A man willing to work, and unable to find work, is perhaps the saddest sight that fortune's inequality exhibits under this sun.

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Light; or, failing that, lightning: the world can take its choice.

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To know, to get into the truth of anything, is ever a mystic act, of which the best logics can but babble on the surface.

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Hardened round us, encasing wholly every notion we form, is a wrappage of traditions, hearsays, mere words.

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With stupidity and sound digestion man may front much.

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Speech is too often not the art of concealing thought, but of quite stifling and suspending thought, so that there is none to conceal.

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I should say sincerity, a deep, great, genuine sincerity, is the first characteristic of all men in any way heroic.

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Speech is of time, silence is of eternity.

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The fearful Unbelief is unbelief in yourself.

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The ideal is in thyself, the impediment too is in thyself.

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Long stormy spring-time, wet contentious April, winter chilling the lap of very May; but at length the season of summer does come.

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Wise poets that wrapt Truth in tales, / Knew her themselves through all her veils.

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How does the poet speak to men with power, but by being still more a man than they?

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To the mean eye all things are trivial, as certainly as to the jaundiced they are yellow.

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What you see, yet can not see over, is as good as infinite.

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It is meritorious to insist on forms; religion and all else naturally clothes itself in forms. Everywhere the formed world is the only habitable one.

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When the oak-tree is felled, the whole forest echoes with it; but a hundred acorns are planted silently by some unnoticed breeze.

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Music is well said to be the speech of angels; in fact, nothing among the utterances allowed to man is felt to be so divine. It brings us near to the Infinite.

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Oblivion is the dark page, whereon Memory writes her light-beam characters, and makes them legible; were it all light, nothing could be read there, any more than if it were all darkness.

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Then fly betimes, for only they / Conquer Love that run away.

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The man who cannot laugh is not only fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils; but his whole life is already a treason and a stratagem.

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For all right judgment of any man or thing it is useful, nay, essential, to see his good qualities before pronouncing on his bad.

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It is the heart always that sees, before the head can see.

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