Quotes
Quotes - Carlyle
Except by name, Jean Paul Friedrich Richter is little known out of Germany. The only thing connected with him, we think, that has reached this country is his saying,--imported by Madame de Staël, and thankfully pocketed by most newspaper critics,--"Providence has given to the French the empire of the land; to the English that of the sea; to the Germans that of--the air!"
He who would write heroic poems should make his whole life a heroic poem.
Literary men are ... a perpetual priesthood.
I came hither [Craigenputtoch] solely with the design to simplify my way of life and to secure the independence through which I could be enabled to remain true to myself.
Clever men are good, but they are not the best.
We are firm believers in the maxim that for all right judgment of any man or thing it is useful, nay, essential, to see his good qualities before pronouncing on his bad.
How does the poet speak to men with power, but by being still more a man than they?
A poet without love were a physical and metaphysical impossibility.
His religion at best is an anxious wish,--like that of Rabelais, a great Perhaps.
We have oftener than once endeavoured to attach some meaning to that aphorism, vulgarly imputed to Shaftesbury, which however we can find nowhere in his works, that "ridicule is the test of truth."
There is no heroic poem in the world but is at bottom a biography, the life of a man; also it may be said, there is no life of a man, faithfully recorded, but is a heroic poem of its sort, rhymed or unrhymed.
Silence is deep as Eternity, speech is shallow as Time.
To the very last, he [Napoleon] had a kind of idea; that, namely, of la carrière ouverte aux talents,--the tools to him that can handle them.
Blessed is the healthy nature; it is the coherent, sweetly co-operative, not incoherent, self-distracting, self-destructive one!
The uttered part of a man's life, let us always repeat, bears to the unuttered, unconscious part a small unknown proportion. He himself never knows it, much less do others.
Literature is the Thought of thinking Souls.
It can be said of him, when he departed he took a Man's life with him. No sounder piece of British manhood was put together in that eighteenth century of Time.
The eye of the intellect "sees in all objects what it brought with it the means of seeing."
Love is ever the beginning of Knowledge as fire is of light.
Music is well said to be the speech of angels.
A mystic bond of brotherhood makes all men one.
Everywhere the human soul stands between a hemisphere of light and another of darkness on the confines of two everlasting hostile empires,--Necessity and Free Will.
He that works and does some Poem, not he that merely says one, is worthy of the name of Poet.
The Public is an old woman. Let her maunder and mumble.
It is now almost my sole rule of life to clear myself of cants and formulas, as of poisonous Nessus shirts.
