Frasi di Thomas Carlyle

pagina 6

“Tra gli uomini c'è una naturale aristocrazia, i cui fondamenti sono la virtù e il talento.”

“Il blocco di granito che era un ostacolo sul cammino dei deboli agevola il cammino dei forti.”

“Il nostro compito principale non consiste nel vedere vagamente in lontananza, ma nel fare ciò che abbiamo chiaramente a portata di mano.”

“Il sarcasmo è il linguaggio del diavolo: per questo da molto tempo vi ho praticamente rinunciato.”

“Un uomo che abbia almeno una volta riso di gusto non può essere, tutto sommato, irrimediabilmente malvagio.”

“Gli abiti hanno fatto di noi degli uomini, c'è ora il serio pericolo che facciano di noi degli attaccapanni.”

“Gli uomini fanno meno di ciò che dovrebbero se non fanno tutto ciò che possono.”

“Nessun grand'uomo vive invano: la storia del mondo non è che la biografia degli uomini grandi.”

“Il regale Mirabeau […] un uomo, una realtà.”

“Non è difficile capire la profonda incompatibilità reciproca che divide i due [Robespierre e Danton]; con qual terrore di odio femmineo la povera Formula verdemare guarda la straordinaria, colossale Realtà, e diventa più verde nell'osservarla […] Due prodotti di tali dimensioni sono troppo per una sola rivoluzione.”

“[Georges Jacques Danton] Pur con tante scorie, era un uomo, un'ardente realtà del grande grembo di fuoco della natura stessa.”

“[Maximilien de Robespierre], Arido, implacabile e impotente, monotono e affettato, infecondo come il vento di Harmattan.”

“Felice colui che ha trovato il suo lavoro; non chieda altra felicità.”

“Il cozzo di tutto il sistema solare e di tutti i sistemi stellari ti potrebbe uccidere una volta sola.”

“Il mio regno non è quel che ho, ma quel che faccio.”

“Quando si abbatte una quercia, la sua caduta echeggia in tutta la foresta, ma cento ghiande possono essere seminate in silenzio da un venticello che nessuno nota.”

“Un uomo che vuol lavorare e non trova lavoro è forse lo spettacolo più triste che l'ineguaglianza della fortuna possa offrire sulla terra.”

“A una pioggia d'oro molte cose sono penetrabili.”

“Direi che il maggior difetto è non esserne consci di alcuno.”

“È meglio sopprimere del tutto i discorsi che non conducono ad alcun tipo d'azione.”

“Felici i popoli i cui annali sono vuoti nei libri di storia!”

“Il lavoro è la cura suprema di tutte le miserie e i mali che hanno mai afflitto l'umanità.”

“Il merito dell'originalità non è la novità, bensì la sincerità.”

“Il mondo è una repubblica di mediocri, e sempre sarà così.”

“Il sentimentalista è il più arido tra tutti i mortali.”

“Inghilterra: trenta milioni, in maggioranza cretini.”

“L'opinione popolare è la più grossa bugia che esista.”

“La Francia fu per lungo tempo un dispotismo temperato dagli epigrammi.”

“La vera università di questi giorni è una collezione di libri.”

“Non ho mai sentito che un uomo intelligente sia mai nato da una famiglia completamente stupida.”

“Ogni lavoro, anche filare il cotone, è nobile; il lavoro è l'unica cosa nobile.”

“Per ogni uomo che resiste alla prosperità, ce ne sono cento che resistono alle avversità.”

“Un uomo non può fare bene un paio di scarpe a meno che non lo faccia devotamente.”

“Una vita ben scritta è quasi tanto rara quanto una ben spesa.”

“There is clear truth in the idea that a struggle from the lower classes of society, towards the upper regions and rewards of society, must ever continue. Strong men are born there, who ought to stand elsewhere than there.”

“A man perfects himself by work much more than by reading.”

“That there should one Man die ignorant who had capacity for Knowledge, this I call a tragedy.”

“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.”

“Or indeed we may say again, it is in what I called Portrait-painting, delineating of men and things, especially of men, that Shakspeare is great. All the greatness of the man comes out decisively here. It is unexampled, I think, that calm creative perspicacity of Shakspeare. The thing he looks at reveals not this or that face of it, but its inmost heart and generic secret: it dissolves itself as in light before him, so that he discerns the perfect structure of it. Creative, we said: poetic creation, what is this too but seeing the thing sufficiently? The word that will describe the thing, follows of itself from such clear intense sight of the thing. And is not Shakspeare's morality, his valour, candour, tolerance, truthfulness; his whole victorious strength and greatness, which can triumph over such obstructions, visible there too? Great as the world!”

“Literary men are…a perpetual priesthood.”

“Who is there that can recognize real intellect, and do reverence to it; and discriminate it well from sham intellect, which is so much more abundant, and deserves the reverse of reverence? He that himself has it!—One really human Intellect, invested with command, and charged to reform Downing Street for us, would continually attract real intellect to those regions, and with a divine magnetism search it out from the modest corners where it lies hid. And every new accession of intellect to Downing Street would bring to it benefit only, and would increase such divine attraction in it, the parent of all benefit there and elsewhere!”

“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.”

“The stupendous Fourth Estate, whose wide world-embracing influences what eye can take in?”

“The English are a dumb people. They can do great acts, but not describe them.”

“These are the two vices that beset Government Offices; both of them originating in insufficient Intellect,—that sad insufficiency from which, directly or indirectly, all evil whatsoever springs!”

“War is a quarrel between two thieves too cowardly to fight their own battle; therefore they take boys from one village and another village, stick them into uniforms, equip them with guns, and let them loose like wild beasts against each other.”

“Innumerable men had passed by, across this Universe, with a dumb vague wonder, such as the very animals may feel; or with a painful, fruitlessly inquiring wonder, such as men only feel;—till the great Thinker came, the original man, the Seer; whose shaped spoken Thought awakes the slumbering capability of all into Thought. It is ever the way with the Thinker, the spiritual Hero. What he says, all men were not far from saying, were longing to say. The Thoughts of all start up, as from painful enchanted sleep, round his Thought; answering to it, Yes, even so! Joyful to men as the dawning of day from night;—is it not, indeed, the awakening for them from no-being into being, from death into life? We still honor such a man; call him Poet, Genius, and so forth: but to these wild men he was a very magician, a worker of miraculous unexpected blessing for them; a Prophet, a God!”

“in the whole world, that day, there was not a more entirely unimportant-looking pair of people than this Miner and his Wife. And yet what were all Emperors, Popes and Potentates, in comparison? There was born here, once more, a Mighty Man; whose light was to flame as the beacon over long centuries and epochs of the world; the whole world and its history was waiting for this man. It is strange, it is great.”

“Work is the grand cure for all the maladies and miseries that ever beset mankind,—honest work, which you intend getting done.”

“Here numerous persons, with big wigs many of them, and austere aspect, whom I take to be Professors of the Dismal Science, start up in an agitated vehement manner: but the Premier resolutely beckons them down again”

“the most remarkable piece of reading that you may be recommended to take and try if you can study is a book by Goethe—one of his last books, which he wrote when he was an old man, about seventy years of age—I think one of the most beautiful he ever wrote, full of mild wisdom, and which is found to be very touching by those who have eyes to discern and hearts to feel it. It is one of the pieces in "Wilhelm Meister's Travels." I read it through many years ago; and, of course, I had to read into it very hard when I was translating it (applause), and it has always dwelt in my mind as about the most remarkable bit of writing that I have known to be executed in these late centuries. I have often said, there are ten pages of that which, if ambition had been my only rule, I would rather have written than have written all the books that have appeared since I came into the world.”

“It is all work and forgotten work, this peopled, clothed, articulate-speaking, high-towered, wide-acred World. The hands of forgotten brave men have made it a World for us; they,— honour to them; they, in spite of the idle and the dastard. This English Land, here and now, is the summary of what was found of wise, and noble, and accordant with God's Truth, in all the generations of English Men. Our English Speech is speakable because there were Hero-Poets of our blood and lineage; speakable in proportion to the number of these. This Land of England has its conquerors, possessors, which change from epoch to epoch, from day to day; but its real conquerors, creators, and eternal proprietors are these following, and their representatives if you can find them: All the Heroic Souls that ever were in England, each in their degree; all the men that ever cut a thistle, drained a puddle out of England, contrived a wise scheme in England, did or said a true and valiant thing in England.”

“Wise command, wise obedience: the capability of these two is the net measure of culture, and human virtue, in every man; all good lies in the possession of these two capabilities; all evil, wretchedness and ill-success in the want of these.”

“For is not a Symbol ever, to him who has eyes for it, some dimmer or clearer revelation of the God-like?”

“It is the property of every Hero, in every time, in every place and situation, that he come back to reality; that he stand upon things, and not shows of things. According as he loves, and venerates, articulately or with deep speechless thought, the awful realities of things, so will the hollow shows of things, however regular, decorous, accredited by Koreishes or Conclaves, be intolerable and detestable to him.”

“The force that had been lent my father he honorably expended in manful well-doing. A portion of this planet bears beneficent traces of his strong hand and strong head. Nothing that he undertook to do but he did it faithfully and like a true man. I shall look on the houses he built with a certain proud interest. They stand firm and sound to the heart all over his little district.”

“The young generations of the world, who had in them the freshness of young children, and yet the depth of earnest men, who did not think that they had finished off all things in Heaven and Earth by merely giving them scientific names, but had to gaze direct at them there, with awe and wonder: they felt better what of divinity is in man and Nature; they, without being mad, could worship Nature, and man more than anything else in Nature.”

“Clever men are good, but they are not the best.”

“The work we desire and prize is not the courage to die decently, but to live manfully.”

“For love is ever the beginning of Knowledge, as fire is of light.”

“Let us honor all honest human power of contrivance in its degree. The beaver intellect, so long as it steadfastly refuses to be vulpine, and answers the tempter pointing out short routes to it with an honest "No, no," is truly respectable to me; and many a highflying speaker and singer whom I have known, has appeared to me much less of a developed man than certain of my mill-owning, agricultural, commercial, mechanical, or otherwise industrial friends, who have held their peace all their days and gone on in the silent state. If a man can keep his intellect silent, and make it even into honest beaverism, several very manful moralities, in danger of wreck on other courses, may comport well with that, and give it a genuine and partly human character; and I will tell him, in these days he may do far worse with himself and his intellect than change it into beaverism, and make honest money with it.”

“For being a man worth any thousand men, the response your Knox, your Cromwell gets, is an argument for two centuries whether he was a man at all. God's greatest gift to this Earth is sneeringly flung away.”

“The barrenest of all mortals is the sentimentalist.”