328 quotes
The three great elements of modern civilization, gunpowder, printing, and the Protestant religion.
Critical and Miscellaneous Essays (1827)
All that Mankind has done, thought, gained or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of Books.
Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840)
Of a truth, men are mystically united: a mystic bond of brotherhood makes all men one.
Genuine Work alone, what thou workest faithfully, that is eternal, as the Almighty Founder and World-Builder himself.
Man is a tool-using animal...Without tools he is nothing, with tools he is all.
Sartor Resartus (1833)
The work an unknown good man has done is like a vein of water flowing hidden underground, secretly making the ground green.
He who would write heroic poems should make his whole life a heroic poem.
Critical and Miscellaneous Essays (1827)
A gifted noble people; a people of wild strong feelings, and of iron restraint over these: the characteristic of noble-mindedness, of genius.
Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840)
A mystic bond of brotherhood makes all men one.
Critical and Miscellaneous Essays (1827)
Literary men are...a perpetual priesthood.
Critical and Miscellaneous Essays (1827)
Everywhere the human soul stands between a hemisphere of light and another of darkness on the confines of two everlasting hostile empires, — Necessity and Free Will.
Critical and Miscellaneous Essays (1827)
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.
Sartor Resartus (1833)
O reader, to what shifts is poor Society reduced, struggling to give still some account of herself, in epochs when Cash Payment has become the sole nexus of man to men!
Chartism (1840)
Midas-eared Mammonism, double-barrelled Dilettantism, and their thousand adjuncts and corollaries, are not the Law by which God Almighty has appointed this His universe to go.
What is done is done; has already blended itself with the boundless, ever living, ever working universe, and will also work there for good or evil, openly or secretly, throughout all time.
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 French Revolution. A History (1837)
We have oftener than once endeavoured to attach some meaning to that aphorism, vulgarly imputed to Shaftesbury, which however we can find nowhere in his works, that "ridicule is the test of truth."
Critical and Miscellaneous Essays (1827)
Of all acts is not, for a man, repentance the most divine? The greatest of faults is to be conscious of none.
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.
If time is precious, no book that will not improve by repeated readings deserves to be read at all.