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No iron chain, or outward force of any kind, could ever compel the soul of man to believe or to disbelieve: it is his own indefeasible light, that judgment of his he will reign and believe there by the grace of God alone!

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
Kind
Chains
Believe
Judgment
Indefeasible
Men
Grace
Disbelieve
Alone
Compel
Force
Outward
Light
Chain
Soul
Reign
Ever
Iron

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Clean 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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All human souls, never so bedarkened, love light light once kindled spreads till all is luminous.
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You can make even a parrot into a learned political economist - all he must learn are the two words supply and demand.
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O Time! Time! how it brings forth and devours! And the roaring flood of existence rushes on forever similar, forever changing!
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Genuine Work alone, what thou workest faithfully, that is eternal, as the Almighty Founder and World-Builder himself.
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What a wretched thing is all fame! A renown of the highest sort endures, say, for two thousand years. And then? Why, then, a fathomless eternity swallows it. Work for eternity not the meagre rhetorical eternity of the periodical critics, but for the real eternity wherein dwelleth the Divine.
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Books are a triviality. Life alone is great.
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A witty statesman said, you might prove anything by figures.
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The beginning of all wisdom is to look fixedly on clothes, or even with armed eyesight, till they become transparent.
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All true work is sacred. In all true work, were it but true hand work, there is something of divineness. Labor, wide as the earth, has its summit in Heaven.
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If time is precious, no book that will not improve by repeated readings deserves to be read at all.
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Battles, in these ages, are transacted by mechanism with the slightest possible development of human individuality or spontaneity men now even die, and kill one another, in an artificial manner.
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Science must have originated in the feeling that something was wrong.
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Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together that at length they may emerge, full-formed and majestic, into the daylight of Life, which they are thenceforth to rule.
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Authors are the vanguard in the march of mind, the intellectual backwoodsmen, reclaiming from the idle wilderness new territories for the thought and activity of their happier brethren.
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The great law of culture is, Let each become all that he was created capable of being expand, if possible, to his full growth resisting all impediments, casting off all foreign, especially all noxious adhesions, and show himself at length in his own shape and stature be these what they may.
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A vein of poetry exists in the hearts of all men.
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A dandy is a clothes-wearing man--a man whose trade, office, and existence consist in the wearing of clothes. Every faculty of his soul, spirit, person and purse is heroically consecrated to this one object--the wearing of clothes, wisely and well so that, as others dress to live, he lives to dress.
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The eye of the intellect sees in all objects what it brought with it the means of seeing.
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Rest is for the dead.
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