Thomas Carlyle

Hadst thou not Greek enough to understand thus much: The end of man is an Action, and not a Thought, though it were the noblest.

With stupidity and sound digestion man may front much.

Sarcasm I now see to be, in general, the language of the Devil; for which reason I have, long since, as good as renounced it.

What you see, yet can not see over, is as good as infinite.

Wonder is the basis of worship.

Man's unhappiness, as I construe, comes of his greatness; it is because there is an Infinite in him, which with all his cunning he cannot quite bury under the Finite.

Be not the slave of Words.

Man is a tool-using animal...Without tools he is nothing, with tools he is all.

He who first shortened the labor of copyists by device of movable types was disbanding hired armies, and cashiering most kings and senates, and creating a whole new democratic world: he had invented the art of printing.

No man who has once heartily and wholly laughed can be altogether irreclaimably bad.

The Book had in a high degree excited us to self-activity, which is the best effect of any book.

The work we desire and prize is not the courage to die decently, but to live manfully.

All work is as seed sown; it grows and spreads, and sows itself anew.

The stupendous Fourth Estate, whose wide world-embracing influences what eye can take in?

Whoso belongs only to his own age, and reverences only its gilt Popinjays or smoot-smeared Mumbojumbos, must needs die with it.

Aesop's Fly, sitting on the axle of the chariot, has been much laughed at for exclaiming: What a dust I do raise!

With what scientific stoicism he walks through the land of wonders, unwondering.

Our grand business undoubtedly is, not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand.

Our “Theories of Taste,” as they are called, wherein the deep, infinite, unspeakable Love of Wisdom and Beauty, which dwells in all men, is “explained,” made mechanically visible, from “Association” and the like, ...

Wonder, indeed, is, on all hands, dying out: it is the sign of uncultivation to wonder.

An intellectual dapperling of these times boasts chiefly of his irresistible perspicacity, his “dwelling in the daylight of truth,” and so forth; which, on examination, turns out to be a dwelling in the rush-light of “closet logic,” and a …

We are no longer instinctively driven to apprehend, and lay to heart, what is Good and Lovely, but rather to inquire, as onlookers, how it is produced, whence it comes, whither it goes. Our favourite Philosophers have no love and no …

Our true Deity is Mechanism. It has subdued external Nature for us, and we think it will do all other things. We are Giants in physical power: in a deeper than metaphorical sense, we are Titans, that strive, by heaping mountain on …

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.