Sartor Resartus Quotes

“Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together; that at length they may emerge, full-formed and majestic, into the daylight of Life, which they are thenceforth to rule. Not William the Silent only, but all the considerable men I have known, and the most undiplomatic and unstrategic of these, forbore to babble of what they were creating and projecting. Nay, in thy own mean perplexities, do thou thyself but hold thy tongue for one day: on the morrow, how much clearer are thy purposes and duties; what wreck and rubbish have those mute workmen within thee swept away, when intrusive noises were shut out! Speech is too often not, as the Frenchman defined it, the art of concealing Thought; but of quite stifling and suspending Thought, so that there is none to conceal. Speech too is great, but not the greatest. As the Swiss Inscription says: Sprecfien ist silbern, Schweigen ist golden (Speech is silvern, Silence is golden); or as I might rather express it: Speech is of Time, Silence is of Eternity.”
― Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus

“Nature alone is antique, and the oldest art a mushroom.”
― Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus

“Some comfort it would have been, could I, like a Faust, have fancied myself tempted and tormented of the Devil; for a Hell, as I imagine, without Life, though only Diabolic Life, were more frightful: but in our age of Downpulling and Disbelief, the very Devil has been pulled down, you cannot so much as believe in a Devil. To me the Universe was all void of Life, of Purpose, of Volition, even of Hostility: it was one huge, dead, immeasurable Steam-engine, rolling on, in its dead indifference, to grind me limb from limb.”
― Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus

“Well at ease are the Sleepers for whom Existence is a shallow Dream.”
― Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus

“Strange enough how creatures of the human-kind shut their eyes to plainest facts; and by the mere inertia of Oblivion and Stupidity, live at ease in the midst of Wonders and Terrors. But indeed man is, and was always, a blockhead and dullard; much readier to feel and digest, than to think and consider.”
― Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus

“Speech is of Time, Silence is of Eternity.”
― Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus

“Wondrous indeed is the virtue of a true Book.”
― Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus

“know a Work of Art from a Daub of Artifice)”
― Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus

“the worst waste, that of time.”
― Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus

“Such I hold to be the genuine use of Gunpowder: that it makes all men tall.”
― Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus

“A Dandy is a clothes-wearing Man, a Man whose trade, office and existence consists in the wearing of clothes.”
― Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus

“Not what I Have," continues he, "but what I Do is my Kingdom.”
― Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus

“We looked out on Life, with its strange scaffolding,”
― Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus

“Fool! The Ideal is in thyself, the impediment too is in thyself: thy Condition is but the stuff thou art to shape that same Ideal out of: what matters whether such stuff be of this sort or that, so the Form thou give it be heroic, be poetic? O thou that pinest in the imprisonment of the Actual, and criest bitterly to the gods for a kingdom wherein to rule and create, know this of a truth: the thing thou seekest is already with thee, ‘here or nowhere,’ couldst thou only see!”
― Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus

“Ever in the dullest existence there is a sheen either of Inspiration or of Madness”
― Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus

“Produce! Produce! Were it but the pitifullest infinitesimal fraction of a Product,”
― Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus

“Venerable to me is the hard hand; crooked & coarse; wherein notwithstanding lies a cunning virtue indefeasibly royal as the Scepter of this Planet. Hardly entreated Brother! For us was thy way so bent, for us were thy straight limb & fingers so deformed; thou wert our Conscript on whom the lot fell, & fighting our battles wert so marred. For in thee too lay a God-created Form, but it is not unfolded. Encrusted must it stand with the thick adhesions & defacements of labor, & thy body, thy soul, was no to know Freedom.”
― Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus

“There rose a Thought in me, and I asked myself: 'What art thou afraid of? Wherefore, like a coward, dost thou forever pip and whimper, and go cowering and trembling? Despicable biped! what is the sum-total of the worst that lies before thee? Death? Well, Death; and say the pangs of Tophet too, and all that the Devil and Man may, will or can do against thee! Hast thou not a heart; canst thou not suffer whatsoever it be; and, as a Child of Freedom, though outcast, trample Tophet itself under thy feet, while it consumes thee? Let it come, then; I will meet it and defy it!' And as I so thought, there rushed like a stream of fire over my whole soul; and I shook base Fear away from me forever. I was strong, of unknown strength; a spirit, almost a god. Ever from that time, the temper of my misery was changed: not Fear or whining Sorrow was it, but Indignation and grim fire-eyed Defiance.”
― Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus

“The situation that has not its Duty, its Ideal, was never yet occupied by man. Yes here, in this poor, miserable, hampered, despicable Actual, wherein thou even now standest, here or nowhere is thy Ideal: work it out therefrom; and working, believe, live, be free.”
― Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus

“let him who gropes painfully in darkness or uncertain light, and prays vehemently that the dawn may ripen into day, lay this other precept well to heart, which to me was of invaluable service: ‘Do the duty which lies nearest thee,’ which thou knowest to be a Duty! Thy second duty will already have become clearer.”
― Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus

“Truly a Thinking Man is the worst enemy the Prince of Darkness can have; every time such a one announces himself, I doubt not, there runs a shudder through the Nether Empire; and new Emissaries are trained, with new tactics, to, if possible, entrap him, and hoodwink and handcuff him.”
― Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus

“With respect to Duels, indeed, I have my own ideas. Few things, in this so surprising world, strike me with more surprise. Two little visual Spectra of men, hovering with insecure enough cohesion in the midst of the UNFATHOMABLE, and to dissolve therein, at any rate, very soon,—make pause at the distance of twelve paces asunder; whirl round; and, simultaneously by the cunningest mechanism, explode one another into Dissolution; and off-hand become Air, and Non-extant! Deuce on it (verdammt), the little spitfires!—Nay, I think with old Hugo von Trimberg: 'God must needs laugh outright, could such a thing be, to see his wondrous Manikins here below.”
― Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus

“To our less philosophical readers, for example, it is now clear that the so passionate Teufelsdrockh precipitated through "a shivered Universe" in this extraordinary way, has only one of three things which he can next do: Establish himself in Bedlam; begin writing Satanic Poetry; or blow out his brains.”
― Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus

“Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together; that at length they may emerge, full-formed and majestic, into the daylight of Life, which they are thenceforth to rule.”
― Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus

“Even in the dullest existence, there is a sheen either of Inspiration or of Madness (thou partly hast it in thy choice, which of the two) that gleams in from the circumambient Eternity, and colours with its own hues our little islet of Time.”
― Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus

“Fancy that thou deservest to be hanged (as is most likely), thou wilt feel it happiness to be only shot: fancy that thou deservest to be hanged in a hair-halter, it will be a luxury to die in hemp.”
― Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus

“The man who cannot laugh is not only fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils; but his whole life is already a treason and a stratagem.”
― Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus

“within the most starched cravat there passes a windpipe and wesand, and under the thickliest embroidered waistcoat beats a heart.”
― Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus

“Highest of all Symbols are those wherein the Artist or Poet has risen into Prophet, and all men can recognize a present God, and worship the Same: I mean religious Symbols. Various enough have been such religious Symbols, what we call Religions; as men stood in this stage of culture or the other, and could worse or better body forth the Godlike: some Symbols with a transient intrinsic worth; many with only an extrinsic. If thou ask to what height man has carried it in this manner, look on our divinest Symbol: on Jesus of Nazareth, and his Life, and his Biography, and what followed therefrom. Higher has the human Thought not yet reached: this is Christianity and Christendom; a Symbol of quite perennial, infinite character; whose significance will ever demand to be anew inquired into, and anew made manifest. [...] A Hierarch, therefore, and Pontiff of the World will we call him, the Poet and inspired Maker; who, Prometheus-like, can shape new Symbols, and bring new Fire from Heaven to fix it there. Such too will not always be wanting; neither perhaps now are. Meanwhile, as the average of matters goes, we account him Legislator and wise who can so much as tell when a Symbol has grown old, and gently remove it. [...] I said to myself: Here also we have a Symbol well-nigh superannuated. Alas, move whithersoever you may, are not the tatters and rags of superannuated worn-out Symbols (in this Ragfair of a World) dropping off everywhere, to hoodwink, to halter, to tether you; nay, if you shake them not aside, threatening to accumulate, and perhaps produce suffocation?”
― Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus

“new-got gold is said to burn the pockets till it be cast forth into circulation, much more may new truth.”
― Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus: The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdröckh