Quote#Nature
Our true Deity is Mechanism. It has subdued external Nature for us,…
Quote byThomas Carlyle · 1795–1881
Commonly attributed — not confirmed in an authoritative edition. Cited on Wikiquote to: Signs of the Times (1829).
English (original)
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 mountain, to conquer Heaven also.
— Thomas Carlyle
More from Thomas Carlyle
The weakest living creature, by concentrating his powers on a single object, can accomplish something. The strongest, by dispensing his over many, may fail to accomplish anything. The drop, by continually falling, bores its passage through …
Speech is human, silence is divine, yet also brutish and dead: therefore we must learn both arts.
[I am] fast becoming a patriot of the most decided stamp. Scornfully as I used to speak and think of Scotland in my hours of bitterness and irritation, I never fail to stand up manfully in defence of it thro' thick and thin, whenever a …
Not all his men may sever this, It yields to friends', not monarchs', calls; My whinstone house my castle is— I have my own four walls.
Again, and again, we say, the great, the creative and enduring is ever a secret to itself; only the small, the barren and transient is otherwise.
A man's honest, earnest opinion is the most precious of all he possesses: let him communicate this, if he is to communicate anything.