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Government is emphatically a machine: to the discontented a taxing machine, to the contented a machine for securing property.

Thomas Carlyle

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Thomas Carlyle
Age: 85 †
Born: 1795
Born: December 4
Died: 1881
Died: February 5
Essayist
Historian
Linguist
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Mathematician
Novelist
Philosopher
Teacher
Translator
Writer
Philosopher of Chelsea
Contented
Machine
Machines
Property
Liberty
Emphatically
Government
Discontented
Taxing
Securing

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The true eye for talent presupposes the true reverence for it.
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A sad spectacle. If they be inhabited, what a scope for misery and folly. If they be not inhabited, what a waste of space.
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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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It is a mathematical fact that the casting of this pebble from my hand alters the centre of gravity of the universe.
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Intellect is the soul of man, the only immortal part of him.
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That a Parliament, especially a Parliament with Newspaper Reporters firmly established in it, is an entity which by its very nature cannot do work, but can do talk only.
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Wonderful Force of Public Opinion! We must act and walk in all points as it prescribes follow the traffic it bids us, realize the sum of money, the degree of influence it expects of us, or we shall be lightly esteemed certain mouthfuls of articulate wind will be blown at us, and this what mortal courage can front?
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Instead of saying that man is the creature of circumstance, it would be nearer the mark to say that man is the architect of circumstance.
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The graceful minuet-dance of fancy must give place to the toilsome, thorny pilgrimage of understanding. On the transition from the age of romance to that of science.
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Nine-tenths of the miseries and vices of mankind proceed from idleness.
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How great a Possibility, how small a realized Result.
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Misery which, through long ages, had no spokesman, no helper, will now be its own helper and speak for itself.
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Men are grown mechanical in head and in the heart, as well as in the hand. They have lost faith in individual endeavour, and in natural force of any kind.
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A man--be the heavens ever praised!--is sufficient for himself.
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Little other than a red tape Talking-machine, and unhappy Bag of Parliamentary Eloquence.
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Midas-eared Mammonism, double-barrelled Dilettantism, and their thousand adjuncts and corollaries, are not the Law by which God Almighty has appointed this His universe to go.
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Wondrous is the strength of cheerfulness, altogether past calculation its powers of endurance.
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Thou fool! Nature alone is antique, and the oldest art a mushroom that idle crag thou sittest on is six thousand years of age.
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A man protesting against error is on the way towards uniting himself with all men that believe in truth.
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