What a wretched thing is all fame! A renown of the highest sort endures, say, for two thousand years. And then? Why, then, a fathomless eternity swallows it. Work for eternity; not the meagre rhetorical eternity of the periodical critics, but for the real eternity wherein dwelleth the Divine.
Thomas CarlyleAll that mankind has done, thought or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books.
Thomas CarlyleIt is the first of all problems for a man to find out what kind of work he is to do in this universe.
Thomas CarlyleO Heaven, it is mysterious, it is awful to consider that we not only carry each a future Ghost within him; but are, in very deed, Ghosts!
Thomas CarlyleThese Arabs, the man Mahomet, and that one century, - is it not as if a spark had fallen, one spark, on a world of what proves explosive powder, blazes heaven-high from Delhi to Granada! I said, the Great man was always as lightning out of Heaven; the rest of men waited for him like fuel, and then they too would flame.
Thomas Carlyle