Quote

Every poet, be his outward lot what it may, finds himself born in the midst of prose h e has to struggle from the littleness and obstruction of an actual world into the freedom and infinitude of an ideal.

Thomas Carlyle

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Freedom
Prose
Born
Finds
May
Midst
Every
Actual
World
Ideal
Infinitude
Ideals
Littleness
Poet
Obstruction
Struggle
Outward

More quotes by Thomas Carlyle

Image
Every man has a coward and hero in his soul.
Thomas Carlyle
Image
Who is it that loves me and will love me forever with an affection which no chance, no misery, no crime of mine can do away? It is you, my mother.
Thomas Carlyle
Image
No age seemed the age of romance to itself.
Thomas Carlyle
Image
The stifled hum of midnight, when traffic has lain down to rest, and the chariot wheels of Vanity, still rolling here and there through distant streets, are bearing her to halls roofed in and lighted to the due pitch for her and only vice and misery, to prowl or to moan like night birds, are abroad.
Thomas Carlyle
Image
A battle is a terrible conjugation of the verb to kill: I kill, thou killest, he kills, we kill, they kill, all kill.
Thomas Carlyle
Image
Whose school-hours are all the days and nights of our existence.
Thomas Carlyle
Image
Genuine Work alone, what thou workest faithfully, that is eternal, as the Almighty Founder and World-Builder himself.
Thomas Carlyle
Image
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?
Thomas Carlyle
Image
Time is the silent, never-resting thing ... rolling, rushing on, swift, silent, like an all-embracing oceantide, on which we and all the universe swim.
Thomas Carlyle
Image
I have seen gleams in the face and eyes of the man that have let you look into a higher country.
Thomas Carlyle
Image
A stammering man is never a worthless one. Physiology can tell you why. It is an excess of sensibility to the presence of his fellow creature, that makes him stammer.
Thomas Carlyle
Image
Language is called the garment of thought: however, it should rather be, language is the flesh-garment, the body, of thought.
Thomas Carlyle
Image
I want to meet my God awake.
Thomas Carlyle
Image
Little other than a red tape Talking-machine, and unhappy Bag of Parliamentary Eloquence.
Thomas Carlyle
Image
The archenemy is the arch stupid!
Thomas Carlyle
Image
Earnestness alone makes life eternity.
Thomas Carlyle
Image
Fame, we may understand, is no sure test of merit, but only a probability of such: it is an accident, not a property, of a man like light, it can give little or nothing, but at most may show what is given.
Thomas Carlyle
Image
Freedom is the one purport, wisely aimed at, or unwisely, of all man's struggles, toilings and sufferings, in this earth.
Thomas Carlyle
Image
Good Christian people, here lies for you an inestimable loan take all heed thereof, in all carefulness, employ it: with high recompense, or else with heavy penalty, will it one day be required back.
Thomas Carlyle
Image
Secrecy is the element of all goodness even virtue, even beauty is mysterious.
Thomas Carlyle