Thomas Carlyle on Life

"To this man life is already as earnest and awful, and beautiful and terrible, as death."

"All work, even cotton spinning, is noble; work is alone noble ... A life of ease is not for any man, nor for any god."

"Work is the grand cure for all the maladies and miseries that ever beset mankind,—honest work, which you intend getting done."

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

"It is now almost my sole rule of life to clear myself of cants and formulas, as of poisonous Nessus shirts."

"Nothing that was worthy in the past departs; no truth or goodness realized by man ever dies, or can die."

"The panting breathless haste and vehemence of a man struggling in the thick of battle for life and salvation; this is the mood he is in!"

"The fine arts once divorcing themselves from truth are quite certain to fall mad, if they do not die."

"One life; a little gleam of Time between two Eternities; no second chance to us for evermore!"

"Can there be a more horrible object in existence than an eloquent man not speaking the truth?"

"I came hither 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."

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

"The Soldier is perhaps one of the most difficult things to realise; but Governments, had they not realised him, could not have existed: accordingly he is here."

"Europe has made much; great cities, great empires, encyclopaedias, creeds, bodies of opinion and practice: but it has made little of the class of Dante's Thought."

"It can be said of him , when he departed he took a man's life along with him. No sounder piece of British manhood was put together in that eighteenth century of time."

"Everywhere in life, the true question is not what we gain, but what we do."

"He who would write heroic poems should make his whole life a heroic poem."

"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."

"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."

"A well-written Life is almost as rare as a well-spent one."

"A spontaneous, passionate, yet just, true-meaning man! Full of wild faculty, fire and light; of wild worth, all uncultured; working out his life-task in the depths of the Desert there."

"It is a most earnest thing to be alive in this world; to die is not sport for a man. Man's life never was a sport to him; it was a stern reality, altogether a serious matter to be alive!"

"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."

"Men, I say, never did believe idle songs, never risked their soul's life on allegories: men in all times, especially in early earnest times, have had an instinct for detecting quacks, for detesting quacks."

"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."

"Consider the great elements of human enjoyment, the attainments and possessions that exalt man's life to its present height, and see what part of these he owes to institutions, to Mechanism of any kind; and what to the instinctive, unbounded force, which Nature herself lent him."

"There is clear truth in the idea that a struggle from the lower classes of society, towards the upper regions and rewards of society, must ever continue. Strong men are born there, who ought to stand elsewhere than there."

"The crop of spiritual talent that is born to you, of human nobleness and intellect and heroic faculty, this is infinitely more important than your crops of cotton or corn, or wine or herrings or whale-oil, which the Newspapers record with such anxiety every season."

"I called it a small light shining and shaping in the huge vortex of Norse darkness. Yet the darkness itself was alive; consider that. It was the eager inarticulate uninstructed Mind of the whole Norse People, longing only to become articulate, to go on articulating ever farther!"

"Wise command, wise obedience: the capability of these two is the net measure of culture, and human virtue, in every man; all good lies in the possession of these two capabilities; all evil, wretchedness and ill-success in the want of these."