Thomas Carlyle Quotes on God
Thomas Carlyle's writing on God is less doctrinal than visionary, and the quotes gathered here reflect his idiosyncratic, post-Calvinist religiosity. For Carlyle the divine is glimpsed indirectly, through silence, which he calls divine where speech is merely human, and through symbols, since every symbol is some dimmer or clearer revelation of the God-like. He places the human soul on a frontier between a hemisphere of light and another of darkness, between Necessity and Free Will, and he registers the religious uncertainty of his age in the figure of a faith reduced to an anxious wish, a great Perhaps. Drawn from Sartor Resartus and his essays, these passages show Carlyle seeking the sacred in history, work, and nature rather than in formal creed.
Quotes
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“Speech is human , silence is divine , yet also brutish and dead : therefore we must learn both arts .”
Notebooks (1830). -
“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(1827–1855) | Essays , Goethe's Works. -
“Great men are the inspired (speaking and acting) texts of that divine Book of Revelations, wherof a chapter is completed from epoch to epoch, and by some named History.”
Sartor Resartus(1833–1834) | Bk. II, ch. 8. -
“All work, even cotton spinning, is noble; work is alone noble ... A life of ease is not for any man, nor for any god.”
Past and Present(1843) | Bk. III, ch. 4. -
“The three great elements of modern civilization, gunpowder, printing, and the Protestant religion.”
Critical and Miscellaneous Essays(1827–1855) | The State of German Literature (1827). -
“His religion at best is an anxious wish, — like that of Rabelais , a great Perhaps.”
Critical and Miscellaneous Essays(1827–1855) | Burns ; compare: "The grand perhaps", Browning, Bishop Bloughram's Apology . -
“For is not a Symbol ever, to him who has eyes for it, some dimmer or clearer revelation of the God-like?”
Sartor Resartus(1833–1834) | Bk. III, ch. 3. -
“In books lies the soul of the whole Past Time; the articulate audible voice of the Past, when the body and material substance of it has altogether vanished like a dream.”
The Hero as Man of Letters -
“It is no longer the moral, religious, spiritual condition of the people that is our concern, but their physical, practical, economical condition, as regulated by public laws.”
Signs of the Times(1829)