328 quotes
You may prove anything by figures.
History, a distillation of rumor.
You are no sister of ours; what shadow of proof is there? Here are our parchments, our padlocks, proving indisputably our money-safes to be ours, and you to have no business with them. Depart!
Past and Present (1843)
In the poorest cottage are Books: is one Book, wherein for several thousands of years the spirit of man has found light, and nourishment, and an interpreting response to whatever is Deepest in him.
Whatsoever is not beaverish seems to go forth in the shape of talk. To such length is human intellect wasted or suppressed in this world!
Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850)
It can be said of him [Scott], 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.
Sir Walter Scott (1838)
For ignobleness cannot, by the nature of it, choose the noble: no, there needs a seeing man who is himself noble, cognizant by internal experience of the symptoms of nobleness.
Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850)
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.
Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840)
The stupendous Fourth Estate, whose wide world-embracing influences what eye can take in?
Boswell's Life of Johnson (1832)
Experience takes dreadfully high school-wages, but he teaches like no other.
My whinstone house my castle is,
I have my own four walls.
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.
My Own Four Walls (1825)
What we might call, by way of Eminence, the Dismal Science.
Hoyt's New Cyclopedia of Practical Quotations (1922)
The Great Man here too, as always, is a Force of Nature. Whatsoever is truly great in him springs up from the inarticulate deeps.
Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840)
Who would govern that can get along without governing? He that is fittest for it, is of all men the unwillingest unless constrained.
Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850)
Human Intellect, if you consider it well, is the exact summary of Human Worth; and the essence of all worth-ships and worships is reverence for that same.
Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850)
At bottom, as was said above, we are to consider Luther as a Prophet Idol-breaker; a bringer-back of men to reality. It is the function of great men and teachers.
Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840)
Obstructions are never wanting: the very things that were once indispensable furtherances become obstructions; and need to be shaken off, and left behind us,—a business often of enormous difficulty.
Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840)
Innumerable are the illusions and legerdemain-tricks of Custom: but of all these, perhaps the cleverest is her knack of persuading us that the Miraculous, by simple repetition, ceases to be Miraculous.
Sartor Resartus (1833)
For 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.