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We call that fire of the black thunder-cloud electricity, and lecture learnedly about it, and grind the like of it out of glass and silk: but what is it? What made it? Whence comes it? Whither goes it?

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
Comes
Lightning
Lecture
Science
Glass
Whence
Made
Glasses
Silk
Like
Clouds
Grind
Goes
Lectures
Fire
Thunder
Call
Cloud
Whither
Black
Electricity
Enquiry

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All history . . . is an inarticulate Bible.
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Nine-tenths of the miseries and vices of mankind proceed from idleness.
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Out of the lowest depths there is a path to the loftiest heights.
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Every noble work is at first impossible.
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Acorns are planted silently by some unnoticed breeze.
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Every human being has a right to hear what other wise human beings have spoken to him. It is one of the Rights of Men a very cruel injustice if you deny it to a man!
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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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He is wise who can instruct us and assist us in the business of virtuous living.
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Thirty millions, mostly fools.
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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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In the poorest cottage are Books: is one Book, wherein for several thousands of years the spirit of man has found light, and nourishment, and an interpreting response to whatever is Deepest in him.
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My books are friends that never fail me.
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Goethe's devil is a cultivated personage and acquainted with the modern sciences sneers at witchcraft and the black art even while employing them, and doubts most things, nay, half disbelieves even his own existence.
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So much of truth, only under an ancient obsolete vesture, but the spirit of it still true, do I find in the Paganism of old nations. Nature is still divine, the revelation of the workings of God the Hero is still worshipable: this, under poor cramped incipient forms, is what all Pagan religions have struggled, as they could, to set forth.
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Nothing ever happens but once in all this world. What I do now I do once for all. It is over and gone, with all its eternity of solemn meaning.
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Once turn to practice, error and truth will no longer consort together.
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The choking, sweltering, deadly, and killing rule of no rule the consecration of cupidity and braying of folly, and dim stupidity and baseness, in most of the affairs of men. Slopshirts attainable three-halfpence cheaper by the ruin of living bodies and immortal souls.
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There is a great discovery still to be made in literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write.
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The first duty of man is to conquer fear he must get rid of it, he cannot act till then.
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Have not I myself known five hundred living soldiers sabred into crows' meat for a piece of glazed cotton, which they call their flag which had you sold it at any market-cross, would not have brought above three groschen?
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