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Happy season of virtuous youth, when shame is still an impassable barrier, and the sacred air-cities of hope have not shrunk into the mean clay hamlets of reality and man, by his nature, is yet infinite and free.

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
Men
Happy
Season
Free
Seasons
Hamlets
Hope
Shame
Impassable
Nature
Sacred
Shrunk
Reality
Infinite
Barrier
Stills
Air
Clay
Still
Youth
Virtuous
Mean
Cities
Barriers

More quotes by Thomas Carlyle

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The coldest word was once a glowing new metaphor.
Thomas Carlyle
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Pin your faith to no ones sleeves, haven't you two eyes of your own.
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There must be a new world if there is to be any world at all!... These days of universal death must be days of universal new birth, if the ruin is not to be total and final! It is Time to make the dullest man consider and ask himself, Whence he came? Whither he is bound?
Thomas Carlyle
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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.
Thomas Carlyle
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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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Affectation is the product of falsehood.
Thomas Carlyle
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It's a man's sincerity and depth of vision that makes him a poet.
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A well-written life is almost as rare as a well-spent one.
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Once turn to practice, error and truth will no longer consort together.
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He that works and does some Poem, not he that merely says one, is worthy of the name of Poet.
Thomas Carlyle
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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.
Thomas Carlyle
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A man perfects himself by working. Foul jungles are cleared away, fair seed-fields rise instead, and stately cities and with the man himself first ceases to be a jungle, and foul unwholesome desert thereby. The man is now a man.
Thomas Carlyle
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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.
Thomas Carlyle
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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.
Thomas Carlyle
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All history . . . is an inarticulate Bible.
Thomas Carlyle
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It is not a lucky word, this name impossible no good comes of those who have it so often in their mouths.
Thomas Carlyle
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Naps are a way of traveling painlessly through time into the future.
Thomas Carlyle
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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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It is the heart always that sees, before the head can see.
Thomas Carlyle
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The infinite, absolute character of Virtue has passed into a finite, conditional one it is no longer a worship of the Beautiful and Good but a calculation of the Profitable.
Thomas Carlyle