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| Thomas Carlyle
A man without a goal is like a ship without a rudder. A sad spectacle. If they be inhabited, what a scope for misery and folly. If they be not inhabited, what a waste of space. A well-written life is almost as rare as a well-spent one. 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. As a first approximation, I define belief not as the object of believing (a dogma, a program, etc.) but as the subject's investment in a proposition, the act of saying it and considering it as true. Be not a slave of words. 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. Culture is the process by which a person becomes all that they were created capable of being. Every new opinion, at its starting, is precisely in a minority of one. Everywhere the human soul stands between a hemisphere of light and another of darkness; on the confines of the two everlasting empires, necessity and free will. For man is not the creature and product of Mechanism; but, in a far truer sense, its creator and producer. 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. I've got a great ambition to die of exhaustion rather than boredom. If an eloquent speaker speak not the truth, is there a more horrid kind of object in creation? If you do not wish a man to do a thing, you had better get him to talk about it; for the more men talk, the more likely they are to do nothing else. Ill-health, of body or of mind, is defeat. Health alone is victory. Let all men, if they can manage it, contrive to be healthy! Imagination is a poor matter when it has to part company with understanding. 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. Isolation is the sum total of wretchedness to a man. 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. It is a vain hope to make people happy by politics. Little other than a red tape Talking-machine, and unhappy Bag of Parliamentary Eloquence. Love is not altogether a delirium, yet it has many points in common therewith. Man is a tool-using Animal. Nowhere do you find him without tools; without tools he is nothing, with tools he is all. Men seldom, or rather never for a length of time and deliberately, rebel against anything that does not deserve rebelling against. 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. No iron chain, or outward force of any kind, can ever compel the soul of a person to believe or to disbelieve. Nothing stops the man who desires to achieve. Every obstacle is simply a course to develop his achievement muscle. It's a strengthening of his powers of accomplishment. Old age is not a matter for sorrow. It is matter for thanks if we have left our work done behind us. Originality is a thing we constantly clamour for, and constantly quarrel with. Our main business is not to see what lies dimly in the distance but to do what lies clearly at hand. Reform is not pleasant, but grievous; no person can reform themselves without suffering and hard work, how much less a nation. Silence is as deep as eternity, speech a shallow as time. Teach a parrot the terms supply and demand and you've got an economist. Tell a man he is brave, and you help him to become so. That there should one Man die ignorant who had capacity for Knowledge, this I call a tragedy. The block of granite which was an obstacle in the pathway of the weak, became a stepping-stone in the pathway of the strong. The condition of the most passionate enthusiast is to be preferred over the individual who, because of the fear of making a mistake, won't in the end affirm or deny anything. The courage we desire and prize is not the courage to die decently but to live manfully. The cut of a garment speaks of intellect and talent and the color of temperament and heart. The greatest mistake is to imagine that we never err.The greatest of faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none. The king is the man who can.The novel can't compete with cars, the movies, television, and liquor. A guy who's had a good feed and tanked up on good wine gives his old lady a kiss after supper and his day is over. Finished. The only happiness a brave person ever troubles themselves in asking about, is happiness enough to get their work done. The work an unknown good man has done is like a vein of water flowing hidden underground, secretly making the ground green. The world is a republic of mediocrities, and always was. There is a great discovery still to be made in literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write. There is precious instruction to be got by finding we were wrong. Let a man try faithfully, manfully, to be right; he will grow daily more and more right. This world, after all our science and sciences, is still a miracle wonderful, inscrutable, magical and more, to whosoever will think of it. 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. Under all speech that is good for anything there lies a silence that is better, Silence is deep as Eternity; speech is shallow as Time. War is a quarrel between two thieves too cowardly to fight their own battle. 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. When the oak is felled the forest echoes with its fall, but a hundred acorns are sown silently by an unnoticed breeze. |
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