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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.

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
Must
Fancy
Giving
Romance
Dance
Understanding
Toilsome
Age
Thorny
Science
Graceful
Place
Pilgrimage
Give
Transition

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Every man has a coward and hero in his soul.
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Acorns are planted silently by some unnoticed breeze.
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A man ought to inquire and find out what he really and truly has an appetite for what suits his constitution and that, doctors tell him, is the very thing he ought to have in general. And so with books.
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Caution is the lower story of prudence.
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It is a fact which escapes no one, that, generally speaking, whoso is acquainted with his worth has but a little stock to cultivate acquaintance with.
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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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The eye sees what it brings the power to see.
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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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The Present is the living sum-total of the whole Past.
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The situation that has not its duty, its ideal, was never yet occupied by man. Yes, here, in this poor, miserable, hampered, despicable actual, wherein thou even now standest, here or nowhere is thy ideal work it out therefrom, and, working, believe, live, be free. Fool! the ideal is in thyself.
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Just in ratio as knowledge increases, faith diminishes.
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There is but one temple in this Universe: The Body. We speak to God whenever we lay our hands upon it.
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When we can drain the Ocean into mill-ponds, and bottle up the Force of Gravity, to be sold by retail, in gas jars then may we hope to comprehend the infinitudes of man's soul under formulas of Profit and Loss and rule over this too, as over a patent engine, by checks, and valves, and balances.
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Philosophy dwells aloft in the Temple of Science, the divinity of its inmost shrine her dictates descend among men, but she herself descends not : whoso would behold her must climb with long and laborious effort, nay, still linger in the forecourt, till manifold trial have proved him worthy of admission into the interior solemnities.
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Language is called the garment of thought: however, it should rather be, language is the flesh-garment, the body, of thought.
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All men, if they work not as in the great taskmaster's eye, will work wrong, and work unhappily for themselves and for you.
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Cash-payment never was, or could except for a few years be, the union-bond of man to man. Cash never yet paid one man fully his deserts to another nor could it, nor can it, now or henceforth to the end of the world.
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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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Whose school-hours are all the days and nights of our existence.
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