A Quote by Thomas Carlyle

Every poet, be his outward lot what it may, finds himself born in the midst of prose; h e has to struggle from the littleness and obstruction of an actual world into the freedom and infinitude of an ideal.

Thomas Carlyle

Quote Topics

Actual Born Every Finds Freedom Himself His Ideal Lot May Midst Obstruction Outward Poet Prose Struggle World

Quote Author

Thomas Carlyle
Scottish - Philosopher
December 4, 1795 - February 5, 1881

Every man has at times in his mind the Ideal of what he should be, but is not. This ideal may be high and complete, or it may be quite low and insufficient; yet in all men, that really seek to improve, it is better than the actual character... Man never falls so low, that he can see nothing higher than himself.

Theodore Parker

[T]he individual in whom the will for the light is strong and clear finds his heart inextricably bound up with the struggle of the forces of light in his native place and time. Much as he may long for the opportunity of fuller self- expression in a happier world, he knows that for him self-expression is impossible save in the world in which his mind is rooted. The individual in whom the will for the light is weak soon persuades himself that his opportunity lies elsewhere.

Olaf Stapledon

A prose writer gets tired of writing prose, and wants to be a poet. So he begins every line with a capital letter, and keeps on writing prose.

Samuel McChord Crothers

The ideal person is he who, in the midst of the greatest silence and solitude, finds the intensest activity, and in the midst of the intensest activity finds the silence and solitude of the desert.

Swami Vivekananda

Knowledge of ideal beauty is not to be acquired. It is born with us. Innate ideas are in every man, born with him; theyare truly himself.

William Blake

The individual is defined only by his relationship to the world and to other individuals; he exists only by transcending himself, and his freedom can be achieved only through the freedom of others. He justifies his existence by a movement which, like freedom, springs from his heart but which leads outside of himself.

Simone de Beauvoir

A poet’s freedom lies precisely in the impossibility of worldly success. It is the freedom of one who knows he will never be anything but a failure in the world’s estimation, and may do as he pleases. The poet is a man on the sidelines of life, sidelined for life. He belongs to the aristocracy of the outcast, the lowest of the low, below the salt of the earth. A member of the most ancient regime in the world. One that cannot, it seems, be overthrown.

Walter Martin

A pygmy standing on the outward crust of this small planet, his far-reaching spirit stretches outward to the infinite, and there alone finds rest.

Thomas Carlyle

Every rational creature has all nature for his dowry and estate. It is his, if he will. He may divest himself of it; he may creepinto a corner, and abdicate his kingdom, as most men do, but he is entitled to the world by his constitution.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

It is a proverbial expression that every man is the maker of his own fortune, and we usually regard it as implying that every man by his folly or wisdom prepares good or evil for himself. But we may view it in another light, namely, that we may so accommodate ourselves to the dispositions of Providence as to be happy in our lot, whatever may be its privations.

Alexander von Humboldt

It should be the highest ambition of every American to extend his views beyond himself, and to bear in mind that his conduct will not only affect himself, his country, and his immediate posterity; but that its influence may be co-extensive with the world, and stamp political happiness or misery on ages yet unborn.

George Washington

Hope is the virgin of the ideal world, who opens beaten to as in the midst of every tempest.

Arsene Houssaye

Every man having been born free and master of himself, no one else may under any pretext whatever subject him without his consent. To assert that the son of a slave is born a slave is to assert that he is not born a man.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Every man is born to the world of chaos and all his life passes with struggle to create an order!

Mehmet Murat Ildan

Every attempt, by whatever authority, to fix a maximum of productive labor by a given worker in a given time is an unjust restriction upon his freedom and a limitation of his right to make the most of himself in order that he may rise in the scale of the social and economic order in which he lives. The notion that all human beings born into this world enter at birth into a definite social and economic classification, in which classification they must remain permanently through life, is wholly false and fatal to a progressive civilization.