Background Image

...

A Greater Number Of God's Creatures Believe In Mahomet's Word At This Hour Than In Any Other Word Whatever. Are We To Suppose That It Was A Miserable Piece Of Spiritual Legerdemain, This Which So Many Creatures Of The Almighty Have Lived By And Died By?

-Thomas Carlyle

...

Please Wait....
Translating....

A Greater Number Of

Thomas Carlyle

...

A Greater Number Of God's Creatures Believe In Mahomet's Word At This Hour Than In Any Other Word Whatever. Are We To Suppose That It Was A Miserable Piece Of Spiritual Legerdemain, This Which So Many Creatures Of The Almighty Have Lived By And Died By?

Views: 8

Topic

More From Thomas Carlyle

He That Has A Secret Should Not Only Hide It, But Hide That He Has It To Hide.

Laughter Is One Of The Very Privileges Of Reason, Being Confined To The Human Species.

Hero-worship Exists, Has Existed, And Will Forever Exist, Universally, Among Mankind.

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.

Society Is Founded Upon Cloth.

One Is Weary Of Hearing About The Omnipotence Of Money. I Will Say Rather That, For A Genuine Man, It Is Not Evil To Be Poor.

We Have Chosen Mahomet Not As The Most Eminent Prophet; But As The One We Are Freest To Speak Of. He Is By No Means The Truest Of Prophets; But I Do Esteem Him A True One.

Tell A Person They Are Brave And You Help Them Become So.

Histories Are As Perfect As The Historian Is Wise, And Is Gifted With An Eye And A Soul.

See Deep Enough, And You See Musically.

Music And Healing

In Books Lies The Soul Fo The Whole Past Time.

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.

Nature Is The Time-vesture Of God That Reveals Him To The Wise, And Hides Him From The Foolish.

It Is No Very Good Symptom, Either Of Nations Or Individuals, That They Deal Much In Vaticination. Happy Men Are Full Of The Present, For Its Bounty Suffices Them; And Wise Men Also, For Its Duties Engage Them. Our Grand Business Undoubtedly Is Not To See What Lies Dimly At A Distance, But To Do What Clearly Lies At Hand.

May Blessings Be Upon The Head Of Cadmus, The Phoenicians, Or Whoever It Was That Invented Books.

O Thou Who Art Able To Write A Book Which Once In The Two Centuries Or Oftener There Is A Man Gifted To Do, Envy Not Him Whom They Name City-builder, And Inexpressibly Pity Him Whom They Name Conqueror Or City-burner.

Dinners Are Defined As 'the Ultimate Act Of Communion;' Men That Can Have Communion In Nothing Else, Can Sympathetically Eat Together, Can Still Rise Into Some Glow Of Brotherhood Over Food And Wine.

Science Must Have Originated In The Feeling That Something Was Wrong.

By Nature Man Hates Change; Seldom Will He Quit His Old Home Till It Has Actually Fallen Around His Ears.

A Word Spoken In Season, At The Right Moment; Is The Mother Of Ages.

The All Of Things Is An Infinite Conjugation Of The Verb To Do .

Are Not Our Greatest Men As Good As Lost? The Men That Walk Daily Among Us, Warming Us, Feeding Us, Walk Shrouded In Darkness, Mere Mythic Men.

Eternity Looks Grander And Kinder If Time Grow Meaner And More Hostile.

Doubt Of Any Kind Cannot Be Resolved Except By Action.

Life Is A Series Of Lessons That Have To Be Understood.

Generations Are As The Days Of Toilsome Mankind; Death And Birth Are The Vesper And The Matin Bells That Summon Mankind To Sleep And To Rise Refreshed For New Advancement. What The Father Has Made, The Son Can Make And Enjoy; But Has Also Work Of His Own Appointed Him. Thus All Things Wax And Roll Onwards: Arts, Establishments, Opinions, Nothing Is Ever Completed, But Ever Completing.

Permanence, Perseverance And Persistence In Spite Of All Obstacle S, Discouragement S, And Impossibilities: It Is This, That In All Things Distinguishes The Strong Soul From The Weak.

Make Yourself An Honest Man, And Then You May Be Sure There Is One Less Rascal In The World.

Well Might The Ancients Make Silence A God; For It Is The Element Of All Godhood, Infinitude, Or Transcendental Greatness,--at Once The Source And The Ocean Wherein All Such Begins And Ends.

A Person Who Is Gifted Sees The Essential Point And Leaves The Rest As Surplus.

Focus And Concentration

The Secret Of Business Is To Know Something That Nobody Else Knows. The Greatest Of Faults, I Should Say Is To Be Conscious Of None.

In Books Lies The Soul Of The Whole Past Time; The Articulate Audible Voice Of The Past, When The Body And Material Substance Of It Has Altogether Vanished Like A Dream.

No Ghost Was Every Seen By Two Pair Of Eyes.

Love Not Pleasure; Love God. This Is The Everlasting Yea, Wherein All Contradiction Is Solved.

The English Are A Dumb People. They Can Do Great Acts, But Not Describe Them.

Once Turn To Practice, Error And Truth Will No Longer Consort Together.

With Stupidity And Sound Digestion, Man May Front Much.

The Leafy Blossoming Present Time Springs From The Whole Past, Remembered And Unrememberable.

O Poor Mortals, How Ye Make This Earth Bitter For Each Other.

It Is Great, And There Is No Other Greatness-to Make One Nook Of God's Creation More Fruitful, Better, More Worthy Of God; To Make Some Human Heart A Little Wiser, Manlier, Happier-more Blessed.

A Man With A Half Volition Goes Backwards And Forwards, And Makes No Way On The Smoothest Road; A Man With A Whole Volition Advances On The Roughest, And Will Reach His Purpose, If There Be Even A Little Worthiness In It. The Man Without A Purpose Is Like A Ship Without A Rudder - A Waif, A Nothing, A No Man. Have A Purpose In Life And Having It, Throw Such Strength Of Mind And Muscle Into Your Work As God Has Given You.

How, Without Clothes, Could We Possess The Master Organ, Soul's Seat And True Pineal Gland Of The Body Social--i Mean A Purse?

There Can Be No Acting Or Doing Of Any Kind Till It Be Recognized That There Is A Thing To Be Done; The Thing Once Recognized, Doing In A Thousand Shapes Becomes Possible.

Lies Exist Only To Be Extinguished.

The Genuine Essence Of Truth Never Dies.

Stern Accuracy In Inquiring, Bold Imagination In Describing, These Are The Cogs On Which History Soars Or Flutters And Wobbles.

Love Not Pleasure; Love God.

If You Are Ever In Doubt As To Whether To Kiss A Pretty Girl, Always Give Her The Benefit Of The Doubt.

One Is Hardly Sensible Of Fatigue While He Marches To Music.

We Are To Remember What An Umpire Nature Is; What A Greatness, Composure Of Depth And Tolerance There Is In Her. You Take Wheat To Cast Into The Earth's Bosom; Your Wheat May Be Mixed With Chaff, Chopped Straw, Barn-sweepings, Dust And All Imaginable Rubbish; No Matter: You Cast It Into The Kind Just Earth; She Grows The Wheat, - The Whole Rubbish She Silently Absorbs, Shrouds It In, Says Nothing Of The Rubbish.

In Every Phenomenon The Beginning Remains Always The Most Notable Moment.

Man Is Emphatically A Proselytizing Creature.

We Have Our Little Theory On All Human And Divine Things. Poetry, The Workings Of Genius Itself, Which, In All Times, With One Or Another Meaning, Has Been Called Inspiration, And Held To Be Mysterious And Inscrutable, Is No Longer Without Its Scientific Exposition. The Building Of The Lofty Rhyme Is Like Any Other Masonry Or Bricklaying: We Have Theories Of Its Rise, Height, Decline And Fall -- Which Latter, It Would Seem, Is Now Near, Among All People.

A Frightful Dialect For The Stupid, The Pedant And Dullard Sort.

A Man Ought To Inquire And Find Out What He Really And Truly Has An Appetite For; What Suits His Constitution; And That, Doctors Tell Him, Is The Very Thing He Ought To Have In General. And So With Books.

Heroes Have Gone Out; Quacks Have Come In; The Reign Of Quacks Has Not Ended With The Nineteenth Century. The Sceptre Is Held With A Firmer Grasp; The Empire Has A Wider Boundary. We Are All The Slaves Of Quackery In One Shape Or Another. Indeed, One Portion Of Our Being Is Always Playing The Successful Quack To The Other.

A Background Of Wrath, Which Can Be Stirred Up To The Murderous Infernal Pitch, Does Lie In Every Man.

There Are Depths In Man That Go To The Lowest Hell, And Heights That Reach The Highest Heaven, For Are Not Both Heaven And Hell Made Out Of Him, Everlasting Miracle And Mystery That He Is.

The Past Is Always Attractive Because It Is Drained Of Fear.

What You See, But Can't See Over Is As Good As Infinite.

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.

There Is Endless Merit In A Man's Knowing When To Have Done.

All Human Souls, Never So Bedarkened, Love Light; Light Once Kindled Spreads Till All Is Luminous.

So Much Of Truth, Only Under An Ancient Obsolete Vesture, But The Spirit Of It Still True, Do I Find In The Paganism Of Old Nations. Nature Is Still Divine, The Revelation Of The Workings Of God; The Hero Is Still Worshipable: This, Under Poor Cramped Incipient Forms, Is What All Pagan Religions Have Struggled, As They Could, To Set Forth.

It Is In General More Profitable To Reckon Up Our Defeats Than To Boast Of Our Attainments.

The Goal Of Yesterday Will Be Our Starting-point To-morrow.

Lord Bacon Could As Easily Have Created The Planets As He Could Have Written Hamlet.

The First Duty Of Man Is To Conquer Fear; He Must Get Rid Of It, He Cannot Act Till Then.

Courtesy Is The Due Of Man To Man; Not Of Suit-of-clothes To Suit-of-clothes.

Work Earnestly At Anything, You Will By Degrees Learn To Work At All Things.

This World, After All Our Science And Sciences, Is Still A Miracle; Wonderful, Inscrutable, Magical And More, To Whosoever Will Think Of It.

Magic In The World

Music Is Well Said To Be The Speech Of Angels.

They Only Are Wise Who Know That They Know Nothing.

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!" Richter: German Humorist & Prose Writer.

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.

Men Do Less Than They Ought, Unless They Do All They Can.

Creation Is Great, And Cannot Be Understood.

Faith Is Loyalty To Some Inspired Teacher, Some Spiritual Hero.

If Time Is Precious, No Book That Will Not Improve By Repeated Readings Deserves To Be Read At All.

Labor, Wide As The Earth, Has Its Summit In Heaven.

In The Long-run Every Government Is The Exact Symbol Of Its People, With Their Wisdom And Unwisdom; We Have To Say, Like People Like Government.

Man's Earthly Interests,'are All Hooked And Buttoned Together, And Held Up, By Clothes.

Necessity Dispenseth With Decorum.

O Thou That Pinest In The Imprisonment Of The Actual, And Criest Bitterly To The Gods For A Kingdom Wherein To Rule And Create, Know This For A Truth: The Thing Thou Seekest Is Already Here, "here Or Nowhere," Couldst Thou Only See.

Do Nothing, Only Keep Agitating, Debating; And Things Will Destroy Themselves.

Produce, Produce! Were It But The Pitifulest, Infinitesimal Fraction Of A Product, Produce It In God's Name. 'tis The Utmost Thou Hast In Thee? Out With It Then! Up, Up! Whatsoever Thy Hand Findeth To Do, Do It With Thy Whole Might.

He Who Has No Vision Of Eternity Has No Hold On Time.

What Are Your Axioms, And Categories, And Systems, And Aphorisms? Words, Words.... Be Not The Slave Of Words.

The Situation That Has Not Its Duty, Its Ideal, Was Never Yet Occupied By Man. Yes, Here, In This Poor, Miserable, Hampered, Despicable Actual, Wherein Thou Even Now Standest, Here Or Nowhere Is Thy Ideal; Work It Out Therefrom, And, Working, Believe, Live, Be Free. Fool! The Ideal Is In Thyself.

That Monstrous Tuberosity Of Civilised Life, The Capital Of England.

The Cut Of A Garment Speaks Of Intellect And Talent And The Color Of Temperament And Heart.

Egotism Is The Source And Summary Of All Faults And Miseries.

A Thought Once Awakened Does Not Again Slumber.

How Indestructibly The Good Grows, And Propagates Itself, Even Among The Weedy Entanglements Of Evil.

With Respect To Duels, Indeed, I Have My Own Ideas. Few Things In This So Surprising World Strike Me With More Surprise. Two Little Visual Spectra Of Men, Hovering With Insecure Enough Cohesion In The Midst Of The Unfathomable, And To Dissolve Therein, At Any Rate, Very Soon, Make Pause At The Distance Of Twelve Paces Asunder; Whirl Around, And Simultaneously By The Cunningest Mechanism, Explode One Another Into Dissolution; And, Offhand, Become Air, And Non-extant--the Little Spitfires!

'genius' Which Means Transcendent Capacity Of Taking Trouble, First Of All.

Naps Are A Way Of Traveling Painlessly Through Time Into The Future.

The Whole Past Is The Procession Of The Present.

I Too Acknowledge The All-out Omnipotence Of Early Culture And Nature; Hereby We Have Either A Doddered Dwarf-bush, Or A High-towering, Wide-shadowing Tree! Either A Sick Yellow Cabbage, Or An Edible Luxuriant Green One. Of A Truth, It Is The Duty Of All Men, Especially Of All Philosophers, To Note Down With Accuracy The Characteristic Circumstances Of Their Education,--what Furthered, What Hindered, What In Any Way Modified It.

The Greatest Of All Heroes Is One--whom We Do Not Name Here! Let Sacred Silence Meditate That Sacred Matter; You Will Find It The Ultimate Perfection Of A Principle Extant Throughout Man's Whole History On Earth.

In Every Object There Is Inexhaustible Meaning; The Eye Sees In It What The Eye Brings Means Of Seeing.

If You Are Looking At Data Over And Over You Better Be Taking Away Valuable Insight Every Time. If You Are Constantly Looking At Data That Isn't Leading To Strategic Action Stop Wasting Your Time And Look For More Actionable Analytics.

Let Me Have My Own Way In Exactly Everything And A Sunnier And Pleasanter Creature Does Not Exist.

Teaching School Is But Another Word For Sure And Not Very Slow Destruction.

No Sadder Proof Can Be Given By A Man Of His Own Littleness Than Disbelief In Great Men.

Talk That Does Not End In Any Kind Of Action Is Better Suppressed Altogether.

If I Say That Shakespeare Is The Greatest Of Intellects, I Have Said All Concerning Him. But There Is More In Shakespeare's Intellect Than We Have Yet Seen. It Is What I Call An Unconscious Intellect; There Is More Virtue In It That He Himself Is Aware Of.

A Noble Book! All Men's Book!

It Is The First Of All Problems For A Man To Find Out What Kind Of Work He Is To Do In This Universe.

They Have Their Belief, These Poor Tibet People, That Providence Sends Down Always An Incarnation Of Himself Into Every Generation. At Bottom Some Belief In A Kind Of Pope! At Bottom Still Better, A Belief That There Is A Greatest Man; That He Is Discoverable; That, Once Discovered, We Ought To Treat Him With An Obedience Which Knows No Bounds. This Is The Truth Of Grand Lamaism; The "discoverability" Is The Only Error Here.

I've Got A Great Ambition To Die Of Exhaustion Rather Than Boredom.

Taste, If It Mean Anything But A Paltry Connoisseurship, Must Mean A General Susceptibility To Truth And Nobleness, A Sense To Discern, And A Heart To Love And Reverence All Beauty, Order, Goodness, Wheresoever, Or In Whatsoever Forms And Accompaniments They Are To Be Seen. This Surely Implies, As Its Chief Condition, Not Any Given External Rank Or Situation, But A Finely-gifted Mind, Purified Into Harmony With Itself, Into Keenness And Justness Of Vision; Above All, Kindled Into Love And Generous Admiration.

Laughter Is The Cipher Key Wherewith We Decipher The Whole Man

Not Brute Force But Only Persuasion And Faith Are The Kings Of This World.

O Time! Time! How It Brings Forth And Devours! And The Roaring Flood Of Existence Rushes On Forever Similar, Forever Changing!

Every Human Being Has A Right To Hear What Other Wise Human Beings Have Spoken To Him. It Is One Of The Rights Of Men; A Very Cruel Injustice If You Deny It To A Man!

Affectation Is The Product Of Falsehood.

Man's Unhappiness, As I Construe, Comes Of His Greatness; It Is Because There Is An Infinite In Him, With Which All His Cunning He Cannot Quite Bury Under The Finite... Try Him With Half Of A Universe, Of An Omnipotence, He Sets To Quarreling With The Proprietor Of The Other Half, And Declares Himself The Most Maltreated Of Men. Always There Is A Black Spot In Our Sunshine: It Is Even, As I Said, The Shadow Of Ourselves.

A Man Must Indeed Be A Hero To Appear Such In The Eyes Of His Valet.

In This World There Is One Godlike Thing, The Essence Of All That Was Or Ever Will Be Of Godlike In This World: The Veneration Done To Human Worth By The Hearts Of Men.

A Judicious Man Looks At Statistics, Not To "get Knowledge, But To Save Himself From Having Ignorance Foisted 'on Him".

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.

A Man's Felicity Consists Not In The Outward And Visible Blessing Of Fortune, But In The Inward And Unseen Perfections And Riches Of The Mind.

I Grow Daily To Honour Facts More And More, And Theory Less And Less. A Fact, It Seems To Me, Is A Great Thing; A Sentence Printed, If Not By God, Then At Least By The Devil.

Authors Are The Vanguard In The March Of Mind, The Intellectual Backwoodsmen, Reclaiming From The Idle Wilderness New Territories For The Thought And Activity Of Their Happier Brethren.

There Is Often More Spiritual Force In A Proverb Than In Whole Philosophical Systems.

To Reform A World, To Reform A Nation, No Wise Man Will Undertake; And All But Foolish Men Know, That The Only Solid, Though A Far Slower Reformation, Is What Each Begins And Perfects On Himself.

Worship Of A Hero Is Transcendent Admiration Of A Great Man.

No Man Lives Without Jostling And Being Jostled; In All Ways He Has To Elbow Himself Through The World, Giving And Receiving Offence.

The Spiritual Is The Parent Of The Practical.

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.

For, Strictly Considered, What Is All Knowledge Too But Recorded Experience, And A Product Of History; Of Which, Therefore, Reasoning And Belief, No Less Than Action And Passion, Are Essential Materials?

Men's Hearts Ought Not To Be Set Against One Another, But Set With One Another And All Against Evil Only.

The Devil Has His Elect.

For Suffering And Enduring There Is No Remedy, But Striving And Doing.

Pain And Suffering

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 The Hardest Rock. The Hasty Torrent Rushes Over It With Hideous Uproar, And Leaves No Trace Behind.

Genius Is An Infinite Capacity For Taking Pains.

The True Past Departs Not, No Truth Or Goodness Realized By Man Ever Dies, Or Can Die; But All Is Still Here, And, Recognized Or Not, Lives And Works Through Endless Change.

And There Are Ben [jonson] And William Shakespeare In Wit-combat, Sure Enough; Ben Bearing Down Like A Mighty Spanish War-ship, Fraught With All Learning And Artillery; Shakespeare Whisking Away From Him - Whisking Right Through Him, Athwart The Big Bulk And Timbers Of Him; Like A Miraculous Celestial Light-ship, Woven All Of Sheet-lightning And Sunbeams!

To Us Also, Through Every Star, Through Every Blade Of Grass, Is Not God Made Visible If We Will Open Our Minds And Our Eyes.

Friendship, In The Old Heroic Sense Of That Term, No Longer Exists. It Is In Reality No Longer Expected Or Recognized As A Virtue Among Men.

Lost Friendship

Man, It Is Not Thy Works, Which Are Mortal, Infinitely Little, And The Greatest No Greater Than The Least, But Only The Spirit Thou Workest In, That Can Have Worth Or Continuance.

Man Is A Tool-using Animal.

Eyes Bright, With Many Tears, Behind Them.

The Greatest Mistake Is To Imagine That We Never Err.

He That Will Not Work According To His Faculty, Let Him Perish According To His Necessity: There Is No Law Juster Than That.

The True Sovereign Of The World, Who Moulds The World Like Soft Wax, According To His Pleasure, Is He Who Lovingly Sees Into The World.

The World Is A Republic Of Mediocrities, And Always Was.

Social Science, Is Not A 'gay Science' But Rueful, Which Finds The Secret Of This Universe In 'supply And Demand' And Reduces The Duty Of Human Governors To That Of Letting Men Alone. Not A 'gay Science', No, A Dreary, Desolate, And Indeed Quite Abject And Distressing One; What We Might Call, The Dismal Science

What An Enormous Magnifier Is Tradition! How A Thing Grows In The Human Memory And In The Human Imagination, When Love, Worship, And All That Lies In The Human Heart, Is There To Encourage It

Democracy Will Prevail When Men Believe The Vote Of Judas As Good As That Of Jesus Christ.

Little Other Than A Red Tape Talking-machine, And Unhappy Bag Of Parliamentary Eloquence.

Be Not A Slave Of Words.

Show Me The Man You Honor; I Know By That Symptom, Better Than By Any Other, What Kind Of Man You Yourself Are. For You Show Me There What Your Ideal Of Manhood Is; What Kind Of Man You Long Inexpressibly To Be.

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?

The Authentic Insight And Experience Of Any Human Soul, Were It But Insight And Experience In Hewing Of Wood And Drawing Of Water, Is Real Knowledge, A Real Possession And Acquirement.

The Outer Passes Away; The Innermost Is The Same Yesterday, Today, And Forever.

All Sorts Of Heroes Are Intrinsically Of The Same Material; That Given A Great Soul, Open To The Divine Significance Of Life, Then There Is Given A Man Fit To Speak Of This, To Sing Of This, To Fight And Work For This, In A Great, Victorious, Enduring Manner; There Is Given A Hero, -- The Outward Shape Of Whom Will Depend On The Time And The Environment He Finds Himself In.

Freedom Is The One Purport, Wisely Aimed At, Or Unwisely, Of All Man's Struggles, Toilings And Sufferings, In This Earth.

No Great Man Lives In Vain. The History Of The World Is But The Biography Of Great Men.

No Nobler Feeling Than This, Of Admiration For One Higher Than Himself, Dwells In The Breast Of Man. It Is To This Hour, And At All Hours, The Vivifying Influence In Man's Life.

The Builder Of This Universe Was Wise, He Plann'd All Souls, All Systems, Planets, Particles: The Plan He Shap'd All Worlds And Æons By, Was-heavens!-was Thy Small Nine-and-thirty Articles!

To Say That We Have A Clear Conscience Is To Utter A Solecism; Had We Never Sinned We Should Have Had No Conscience. Were Defeat Unknown, Neither Would Victory Be Celebrated By Songs Of Triumph.

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.

Thou Fool! Nature Alone Is Antique, And The Oldest Art A Mushroom; That Idle Crag Thou Sittest On Is Six Thousand Years Of Age.

We Call It A Society; And Go About Professing Openly The Totalest Separation, Isolation. Our Life Is Not A Mutual Helpfulness; But Rather, Cloaked Under Due Laws-of-war, Named Fair Competition And So Forth, It Is A Mutual Hostility.

Every Man Has A Coward And Hero In His Soul.

Of All The Things Which Man Can Do Or Make Here Below, By Far The Most Momentous, Wonderful, And Worthy Are The Things We Call Books.

The End Of Man Is An Action, And Not A Thought, Though It Were The Noblest?

Democracy Means Despair Of Finding Any Heroes To Govern You, And Contented Putting Up With The Want Of Them.

O Heaven, It Is Mysterious, It Is Awful To Consider That We Not Only Carry Each A Future Ghost Within Him; But Are, In Very Deed, Ghosts!

Culture Is The Process By Which A Person Becomes All That They Were Created Capable Of Being.

The Tragedy Of Life Is Not So Much What Men Suffer, But Rather What They Miss.

High Air-castles Are Cunningly Built Of Words, The Words Well Bedded Also In Good Logic-mortar; Wherein, However, No Knowledge Will Come To Lodge.

A Man--be The Heavens Ever Praised!--is Sufficient For Himself.

Silence Is The Element In Which Great Things Fashion Themselves Together; That At Length They May Emerge, Full-formed And Majestic, Into The Daylight Of Life, Which They Are Thenceforth To Rule.

If I Had My Way, The World Would Hear A Pretty Stern Command - Exit Christ.

To The Wisest Man, Wide As Is His Vision. Nature Remains Of Quite Infinite Depth, Of Quite Infinite Expansion And All Experience Thereof Limits Itself To Some Few Computed Centuries And Measured Square Miles.

We Are Not Altogether Here To Tolerate. We Are Here To Resist, To Control And Vanquish Withal.

The Difference Between Socrates And Jesus? The Great Conscious And The Immeasurably Great Unconscious.

The Orator Persuades And Carries All With Him, He Knows Not How; The Rhetorician Can Prove That He Ought To Have Persuaded And Carried All With Him.

Manhood Begins When We Have In Any Way Made Truce With Necessity; Begins Even When We Have Surrendered To Necessity, As The Most Part Only Do; But Begins Joyfully And Hopefully Only When We Have Reconciled Ourselves To Necessity; And Thus, In Reality, Triumphed Over It, And Felt That In Necessity We Are Free.

Before Philosophy Can Teach By Experience, The Philosophy Has To Be In Readiness, The Experience Must Be Gathered And Intelligibly Recorded.

God Almighty Never Created A Man Half As Wise As He Looks.

What The Light Of Your Mind, Which Is The Direct Inspiration Of The Almighty, Pronounces Incredible, That, In God's Name, Leave Uncredited. At Your Peril Do Not Try Believing That!

A Man's Perfection Is His Work.

Innumerable Are The Illusions And Legerdemain-tricks Of Custom: But Of All Of These, Perhaps The Cleverest Is Her Knack Of Persuading Us That The Miraculous, By Simple Repetition, Ceases To Be Miraculous.

Men Are To Be Guided Only By Their Self-interests. Good Government Is A Good Balancing Of These; And, Except A Keen Eye And Appetite For Self-interest, Requires No Virtue In Any Quarter. To Both Parties It Is Emphatically A Machine: To The Discontented, A Taxing-machine; To The Contented, A Machine For Securing Property. Its Duties And Its Faults Are Not Those Of A Father, But Of An Active Parish-constable.

The Deadliest Sin Were The Consciousness Of No Sin

The Best Effect Of Any Book Is That It Excites The Reader To Self Activity.

A Loving Heart Is The Beginning Of All Knowledge.

History: A Distillation Of Rumor.

Be A Pattern To Others, And Then All Will Go Well; For As A Whole City Is Affected By The Licentious Passions And Vices Of Great Men, So It Is Likewise Reformed By Their Moderation.

A Man Perfects Himself By Working.

Misery Which, Through Long Ages, Had No Spokesman, No Helper, Will Now Be Its Own Helper And Speak For Itself.

All Greatness Is Unconscious, Or It Is Little And Naught.

Contented Saturnine Human Figures, A Dozen Or So Of Them, Sitting Around A Large Long Table...perfect Equality Is To Be The Rule; No Rising Or Notice Taken When Anybody Enters Or Leaves. Let The Entering Man Take His Place And Pipe, Without Obligatory Remarks; If He Cannot Smoke...let Him At Least Affect To Do So, And Not Ruffle The Established Stream Of Things.

We Arc The Miracle Of Miracles, The Great Inscrutable Mystery Of God.

France Was Long A Despotism Tempered By Epigrams.

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.

Trending Author

Alexander Pushkin

Walter Chrysler

Category