Background Image

...

Learn To Be Good Readers, Which Is Perhaps A More Difficult Thing Than You Imagine. Learn To Be Discriminative In Your Reading; To Read Faithfully, And With Your Best Attention, All Kinds Of Things Which You Have A Real Interest In,--a Real, Not An Imaginary,--and Which You Find To Be Really Fit For What You Are Engaged In.

-Thomas Carlyle

...

Please Wait....
Translating....

Learn To Be Good

Thomas Carlyle

...

Learn To Be Good Readers, Which Is Perhaps A More Difficult Thing Than You Imagine. Learn To Be Discriminative In Your Reading; To Read Faithfully, And With Your Best Attention, All Kinds Of Things Which You Have A Real Interest In,--a Real, Not An Imaginary,--and Which You Find To Be Really Fit For What You Are Engaged In.

Views: 8

Topic

More From Thomas Carlyle

This London City, With All Of Its Houses, Palaces, Steam-engines, Cathedrals, And Huge Immeasurable Traffic An Tumult, What Is It But A Thought, But Millions Of Thoughts Made Into One-a Huge Immeasurable Spirit Of A Thought, Embodied In Brick, In Iron, Smoke, Dust, Palaces, Parliaments, Hackney Coaches, Katherine Docks, And The Rest Of It! Not A Brick Was Made But Some Man Had To Think Of The Making Of That Brick.

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

Goethe's Devil Is A Cultivated Personage And Acquainted With The Modern Sciences; Sneers At Witchcraft And The Black Art Even While Employing Them, And Doubts Most Things, Nay, Half Disbelieves Even His Own Existence.

Pin Thy Faith To No Man's Sleeve. Hast Thou Not Two Eyes Of Thy Own?

Nay, In Every Epoch Of The World, The Great Event, Parent Of All Others, Is It Not The Arrival Of A Thinker In The World?

One Must Verify Or Expel His Doubts, And Convert Them Into The Certainty Of Yes Or No.

If Jesus Christ Were To Come Today, People Would Not Even Crucify Him. They Would Ask Him To Dinner, And Hear What He Had To Say, And Make Fun Of It.

Thought Will Not Work Except In Silence.

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.

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.

Speech Is Great, But Silence Is Greater.

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

Action Hangs, As It Were, Dissolved In Speech, In Thoughts Whereof Speech Is The Shadow; And Precipitates Itself Therefrom. The Kind Of Speech In A Man Betokens The Kind Of Action You Will Get From Him.

Earnestness Alone Makes Life Eternity.

When We Can Drain The Ocean Into Mill-ponds, And Bottle Up The Force Of Gravity, To Be Sold By Retail, In Gas Jars; Then May We Hope To Comprehend The Infinitudes Of Man's Soul Under Formulas Of Profit And Loss; And Rule Over This Too, As Over A Patent Engine, By Checks, And Valves, And Balances.

A Fair Day's Wage For A Fair Day's Work": It Is As Just A Demand As Governed Men Ever Made Of Governing. It Is The Everlasting Right Of Man.

For The Superior Morality, Of Which We Hear So Much, We Too Would Desire To Be Thankful: At The Same Time, It Were But Blindness To Deny That This Superior Morality Is Properly Rather An Inferior Criminality, Produced Not By Greater Love Of Virtue, But By Greater Perfection Of Police; And Of That Far Subtler And Stronger Police, Called Public Opinion.

The Man Of Life Upright Has A Guiltless Heart, Free From All Dishonest Deeds Or Thought Of Vanity.

And Yet Without Labour There Were No Ease, No Rest, So Much As Conceivable.

Reform Is Not Pleasant, But Grievous; No Person Can Reform Themselves Without Suffering And Hard Work, How Much Less A Nation.

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

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.

Man Is A Tool-using Animal. Without Tools He Is Nothing, With Tools He Is All.

Rest Is A Fine Medicine. Let Your Stomachs Rest, Ye Dyspeptics; Let Your Brain Rest, You Wearied And Worried People Of Business; Let Your Limbs Rest, Ye Children Of Toil!

To Know, To Get Into The Truth Of Anything, Is Ever A Mystic Art, Of Which The Best Logic's Can But Babble On The Surface.

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.

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

History Is The New Poetry.

To A Shower Of Gold Most Things Are Penetrable.

Heroes, It Would Seem, Exist Always And A Certain Worship Of Them.

Rest Is For The Dead.

The Eye Sees What It Brings The Power To See.

All Destruction, By Violent Revolution Or However It Be, Is But New Creation On A Wider Scale.

Of Our Thinking It Is But The Upper Surface That We Shape Into Articulate Thought; Underneath The Region Of Argument And Conscious Discourse Lies The Region Of Meditation.

A Battle Is A Terrible Conjugation Of The Verb To Kill: I Kill, Thou Killest, He Kills, We Kill, They Kill, All Kill.

The Coldest Word Was Once A Glowing New Metaphor.

It Is Part Of My Creed That The Only Poetry Is History, Could We Tell It Right.

Beautiful It Is, And A Gleam From The Same Eternal Pole-star Visible Amid The Destinies Of Men, That All Talent, All Intellect, Is In The First Plane Moral. What A World Were This Otherwise!

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.

Is Not Every Meanest Day The Confluence Of Two Eternities?

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

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

Imperfection Clings To A Person, And If They Wait Till They Are Brushed Off Entirely, They Would Spin For Ever On Their Axis, Advancing Nowhere.

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

A Man Lives By Believing Something.

The Public Is Anold Woman.let Her Maunderand Mumble.

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?

Speech That Leads Not To Action, Still More That Hinders It, Is A Nuisance On The Earth.

The Press Is The Fourth Estate Of The Realm.

He Who Has Health, Has Hope; And He Who Has Hope, Has Everything.

Persons, With Big Wigs Many Of Them And Austere Aspect, Whom I Take To Be Professors Of The Dismal Science… Coining “dismal Science” As A Nickname For Political Economy

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!

Cease To Brag To Me Of America, And Its Model Institutions And Constitutions. America, Too, Will Have To Strain Its Energies, Crack Its Sinews, And All But Break Its Heart, As The Rest Of Us Have Had To Do, In Thousand-fold Wrestle With The Pythons, And Mud-demons, Before It Can Become A Babitation For The Gods.

Habit And Imitation--there Is Nothing More Perennial In Us Than These Two. They Are The Source Of All Working, And All Apprenticeship, Of All Practice, And All Learning, In This World.

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.

The King Is The Man Who Can.

Creation Is Great, And Cannot Be Understood.

We Do Everything By Custom, Even Believe By It; Our Very Axioms, Let Us Boast Of Free-thinking As We May, Are Oftenest Simply Such Beliefs As We Have Never Heard Questioned.

Isolation Is The Sum Total Of Wretchedness To A Man.

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

Instead Of Saying That Man Is The Creature Of Circumstance, It Would Be Nearer The Mark To Say That Man Is The Architect Of Circumstance. It Is Character Which Builds An Existence Out Of Circumstance. From The Same Materials One Man Builds Palaces, Another Hovels; One Warehouses, Another Villas; Bricks And Mortar Are Mortar And Bricks Until The Architect Can Make Them Something Else.

Bricks And Mortar

There Is No Life Of A Man, Faithfully Recorded, But Is A Heroic Poem Of Its Sort, Rhymed Or Unrhymed.

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.

The Age Of Miracles Is Forever Here.

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.

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

We Remove Mountains, And Make Seas Our Smooth Highway; Nothing Can Resist Us. We War With Rude Nature; And, By Our Resistless Engines, Come Off Always Victorious, And Loaded With Spoils.

All Work, Even Cotton-spinning, Is Noble; Work Is Alone Noble.

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.

Hardened Round Us, Encasing Wholly Every Notion We Form Is A Wrapping Of Traditions, Hearsay's, And Mere Words.

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

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.

A Thought Once Awakened Does Not Again Slumber.

Battles, In These Ages, Are Transacted By Mechanism; With The Slightest Possible Development Of Human Individuality Or Spontaneity; Men Now Even Die, And Kill One Another, In An Artificial Manner.

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

Man Makes Circumstances, And Spiritually As Well As Economically, Is The Artificer Of His Own Fortune.

Infinite Is The Help Man Can Yield To Man.

This We Take It Is The Grand Characteristic Of Our Age. By Our Skill In Mechanism, It Has Come To Pass, That In The Management Ofexternal Things We Excel All Other Ages; While In Whatever Respects The Pure Moral Nature, In True Dignity Of Soul And Character, We Are Perhaps Inferior To Most Civilised Ages.

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

No Age Seemed The Age Of Romance To Itself.

A Mind That Has Seen, And Suffered, And Done, Speaks To Us Of What It Has Tried And Conquered.

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.

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

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

The Meaning Of Song Goes Deep. Who In Logical Words Can Explain The Effect Music Has On Us? A Kind Of Inarticulate, Unfathomable Speech, Which Leads Us To The Edge Of The Infinite, And Lets Us For A Moment Gaze Into That!

The Grand Result Of Schooling Is A Mind With Just Vision To Discern, With Free Force To Do: The Grand Schoolmaster Is Practice.

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.

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.

Evil, Once Manfully Fronted, Ceases To Be Evil; There Is Generous Battle-hope In Place Of Dead, Passive Misery; The Evil Itself Has Become A Kind Of Good.

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!

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.

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

Let Each Become All That He Was Created Capable Of Being.

All Deep Things Are Song. It Seems Somehow The Very Central Essence Of Us, Song; As If All The Rest Were But Wrappages And Hulls!

Today Is Not Yesterday: We Ourselves Change; How Can Our Works And Thoughts, If They Are Always To Be The Fittest, Continue Always The Same? Change, Indeed Is Painful; Yet Ever Needful; And If Memory Have Its Force And Worth, So Also Has Hope.

Laws, Written, If Not On Stone Tables, Yet On The Azure Of Infinitude, In The Inner Heart Of God's Creation, Certain As Life, Certain As Death, Are There, And Thou Shalt Not Disobey Them.

I Never Heard Tell Of Any Clever Man That Came Of Entirely Stupid People.

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 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.

The Person Who Cannot Laugh Is Not Only Ready For Treason, And Deceptions, Their Whole Life Is Already A Treason And Deception.

The Present Is The Living Sum-total Of The Whole Past.

In Every Man's Writings, The Character Of The Writer Must Lie Recorded.

Conclusive Facts Are Inseparable From Inconclusive Except By A Head That Already Understands And Knows.

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.

Give Us, O Give Us The Man Who Sings At His Work! Be His Occupation What It May, He Is Equal To Any Of Those Who Follow The Same Pursuit In Silent Sullenness. He Will Do More In The Same Time . . . He Will Do It Better . . . He Will Persevere Longer. One Is Scarcely Sensible To Fatigue While He Marches To Music. The Very Stars Are Said To Make Harmony As They Revolve In Their Spheres.

Literature Is The Thought Of Thinking Souls.

Cash-payment Never Was, Or Could Except For A Few Years Be, The Union-bond Of Man To Man. Cash Never Yet Paid One Man Fully His Deserts To Another; Nor Could It, Nor Can It, Now Or Henceforth To The End Of The World.

Government Is Emphatically A Machine: To The Discontented A Taxing Machine, To The Contented A Machine For Securing Property.

What We Become Depends On What We Read After All Of The Professors Have Finished With Us. The Greatest University Of All Is A Collection Of Books.

The Civil Authority, Or That Part Of It Which Remained Faithful To Their Trust And True To The Ends Of The Covenant, Did, In Answer To Their Consciences, Turn Out A Tyrant, In A Way Which The Christians In Aftertimes Will Mention With Honor, And All Tyrants In The World Look At With Fear.

I Don't Like To Talk Much With People Who Always Agree With Me. It Is Amusing To Coquette With An Echo For A Little While, But One Soon Tires Of It.

There Is In Man A Higher Than Love Of Happiness; He Can Do Without Happiness, And Instead Thereof Find Blessedness.

I Had A Lifelong Quarrel With God, But In The End We Made Up.

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

For Every One Hundred Men Who Can Stand Adversity There Is Only One Who Can Withstand Prosperity.

Wonderful Force Of Public Opinion! We Must Act And Walk In All Points As It Prescribes; Follow The Traffic It Bids Us, Realize The Sum Of Money, The Degree Of Influence It Expects Of Us, Or We Shall Be Lightly Esteemed; Certain Mouthfuls Of Articulate Wind Will Be Blown At Us, And This What Mortal Courage Can Front?

The Great Man's Sincerity Is Of The Kind He Cannot Speak Of, Is Not Conscious Of: Nay, I Suppose, He Is Conscious Rather Of Insincerity; For What Man Can Walk Accurately By The Law Of Truth For One Day? No, The Great Man Does Not Boast Himself Sincere, Far From That; Perhaps Does Not Ask Himself If He Is So: I Would Say Rather, His Sincerity Does Not Depend On Himself; He Cannot Help Being Sincere!

All True Work Is Sacred.

Roguery Is Thought By Some To Be Cunning And Laughable: It Is Neither; It Is Devilish.

Let Him Who Would Move And Convince Others, Be First Moved And Convinced Himself.

We Have Not The Love Of Greatness, But The Love Of The Love Of Greatness.

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.

Silence Is More Eloquent Than Words.

It Is Not Honest Inquiry That Makes Anarchy; But It Is Error, Insincerity, Half Belief And Untruth That Make It.

No Good Book Or Good Thing Of Any Kind Shows It Best Face At First. No The Most Common Quality Of In A True Work Of Art That Has Excellence And Depth, Is That At First Sight It Produces A Certain Disappointment.

The True University Of These Days Is A Collection Of Books.

Genuine Work Alone, What Thou Workest Faithfully, That Is Eternal, As The Almighty Founder And World-builder Himself.

There Is A Perennial Nobleness, And Even Sacredness, In Work. Were He Never So Benighted, Forgetful Of His High Calling, There Is Always Hope In A Man That Actually And Earnestly Works: In Idleness Alone There Is Perpetual Despair.

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.

A Fundamental Mistake To Call Vehemence And Rigidity Strength! A Man Is Not Strong Who Takes Convulsion-fits; Though Six Men Cannot Hold Him Then. He That Can Walk Under The Heaviest Weight Without Staggering, He Is The Strong Man . . . A Man Who Cannot Hold His Peace, Till The Time Come For Speaking And Acting, Is No Right Man.

Doubt, Of Whatever Kind, Can Be Ended By Action Alone.

One Seems To Believe Almost All That They Believe; And When They Stop Short And Call It A Religion, And You Pass On, And Call It Only A Reminiscence Of One, Should You Not Part With The Kiss Of Peace?

Experience Takes Dreadfully High School-wages, But He Teaches Like No Other.

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.

Poetry, Therefore, We Will Call Musical Thought.

Skepticism Means, Not Intellectual Doubt Alone, But Moral Doubt.

Venerable To Me Is The Hard Hand,--crooked, Coarse,--wherein, Notwithstanding, Lies A Cunning Virtue, Indispensably Royal As Of The Sceptre Of The Planet.

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

He Who Cannot Withal Keep His Mind To Himself Cannot Practice Any Considerable Thing Whatsoever.

Trust Not The Heart Of That Man For Whom Old Clothes Are Not Venerable.

The Latest Gospel In This World Is, Know Thy Work And Do It.

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

For All Right Judgment Of Any Man Or Things It Is Useful, Nay, Essential, To See His Good Qualities Before Pronouncing On His Bad.

For Man Is Not The Creature And Product Of Mechanism; But, In A Far Truer Sense, Its Creator And Producer.

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

Music Is Well Said To Be The Speech Of Angels; In Fact, Nothing Among The Utterances Allowed To Man Is Felt To Be So Divine. It Brings Us Near To The Infinite.

Does Not Every True Man Feel That He Is Himself Made Higher By Doing Reverence To What Is Really Above Him?

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

Rare Benevolence, The Minister Of God.

There Is A Great Discovery Still To Be Made In Literature, That Of Paying Literary Men By The Quantity They Do Not Write.

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.

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.

Song Is The Heroics Of Speech.

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.

He Who Would Write Heroic Poems Should Make His Whole Life A Heroic Poem.

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?

Let Him Who Gropes Painfully In Darkness Or Uncertain Light, And Prays Vehemently That The Dawn May Ripen Into Day, Lay This Precept Well To Heart: "do The Duty Which Lies Nearest To Thee," Which Thou Know To Be A Duty! Thy Second Duty Will Already Have Become Clearer.

Oh, Give Us The Man Who Sings At His Work.

A Star Is Beautiful; It Affords Pleasure, Not From What It Is To Do, Or To Give, But Simply By Being What It Is. It Befits The Heavens; It Has Congruity With The Mighty Space In Which It Dwells. It Has Repose; No Force Disturbs Its Eternal Peace. It Has Freedom; No Obstruction Lies Between It And Infinity.

Without Kindness There Can Be No True Joy.

Such Is The World. Understand It, Despise It, Love It; Cheerfully Hold On Thy Way Through It, With Thy Eye On Highest Loadstars!

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

The Block Of Granite Which Was An Obstacle In The Pathway Of The Weak, Became A Stepping-stone In The Pathway Of The Strong.

Speech Is Human, Silence Is Divine, Yet Also Brutish And Dead: Therefore We Must Learn Both Arts.

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!

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

Burke Said There Were Three Estates In Parliament; But, In The Reporter's Gallery Yonder, There Sat A Fourth Estate More Important Far Than They All.

The Choking, Sweltering, Deadly, And Killing Rule Of No Rule; The Consecration Of Cupidity And Braying Of Folly, And Dim Stupidity And Baseness, In Most Of The Affairs Of Men. Slopshirts Attainable Three-halfpence Cheaper By The Ruin Of Living Bodies And Immortal Souls.

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.

It Is A Strange Trade That Of Advocacy. Your Intellect, Your Highest Heavenly Gift Is Hung Up In The Shop Window Like A Loaded Pistol For Sale.

What, In The Devil's Name, Is The Use Of Respectability, With Never So Many Gigs And Silver Spoons, If Thou Inwardly Art The Pitifulness Of All Men?

Books Are A Triviality. Life Alone Is Great.

It Is A Mathematical Fact That The Casting Of This Pebble From My Hand Alters The Centre Of Gravity Of The Universe.

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

There Is Something In Man Which Your Science Cannot Satisfy.

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

Adversity Is The Diamond Dust Heaven Polishes Its Jewels With.

Does It Ever Give Thee Pause That Men Used To Have A Soul? Not By Hearsay Alone, Or As A Figure Of Speech, But As A Thruth That They Knew And Acted Upon. Verily It Was Another World Then, But Yet It Is A Pity We Have Lost The Tidings Of Our Souls. We Shall Have To Go In Search Of Them Again Or Worse In All Ways Shall Befall Us.

The Soul Gives Unity To What It Looks At With Love.

The Errors Of A Wise Man Are Literally More Instructive Than The Truths Of A Fool. The Wise Man Travels In Lofty, Far-seeing Regions; The Fool In Low-lying, High-fenced Lanes; Retracing The Footsteps Of The Former, To Discover Where He Diviated, Whole Provinces Of The Universe Are Laid Open To Us; In The Path Of The Latter, Granting Even That He Has Not Deviated At All, Little Is Laid Open To Us But Two Wheel-ruts And Two Hedges.

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

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

Have A Purpose In Life, And Having It, Throw Into Your Work Such Strength Of Mind And Muscle As God Has Given You.

Laughter Means Sympathy.

Without Oblivion, There Is No Remembrance Possible. When Both Oblivion And Memory Are Wise, When The General Soul Of Man Is Clear, Melodious, True, There May Come A Modern Iliad As Memorial Of The Past.

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.

At The Bottom There Is No Perfect History; There Is None Such Conceivable. All Past Centuries Have Rotted Down, And Gone Confusedly Dumb And Quiet.

The Spiritual Is The Parent Of The Practical.

It Were A Real Increase Of Human Happiness, Could All Young Men From The Age Of Nineteen Be Covered Under Barrels, Or Rendered Otherwise Invisible; And There Left To Follow Their Lawful Studies And Callings, Till They Emerged, Sadder And Wiser, At The Age Of Twenty-five.

The Barrenest Of All Mortals Is The Sentimentalist.

War Is A Quarrel Between Two Thieves Too Cowardly To Fight Their Own Battle.

A Man's Religion Consists, Not Of The Many Things He Is In Doubt Of And Tries To Believe, But Of The Few He Is Assured Of And Has No Need Of Effort For Believing.

Instead Of Saying That Man Is The Creature Of Circumstance, It Would Be Nearer The Mark To Say That Man Is The Architect Of Circumstance.

Bricks And Mortar

He That Works And Does Some Poem, Not He That Merely Says One, Is Worthy Of The Name Of Poet.

The Greatest Security Against Sin Is To Be Shocked At Its Presence.

All Work Is As Seed Sown; It Grows And Spreads, And Sows Itself Anew.

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.

Why Tell Me That A Man Is A Fine Speaker, If It Is Not The Truth That He Is Speaking?

Armed Soldier, Terrible As Death, Relentless As Doom; Doing God's Judgement On The Enemies Of God. It Is A Phenomenon Not Of Joyful Nature; No, But Of Awful, To Be Looked At With Pious Terror And Awe.

A Collection Of Books Is The Best Of All Universities.

Trending Author

Maria Weston Chapman

Category