It would be worthy of the age to print together the collected Scriptures or Sacred Writings of the several nations, the Chinese, t...he Hindoos, the Persians, the Hebrews, and others, as the Scripture of mankind. The New Testament is still, perhaps, too much on the lips and in the hearts of men to be called a Scripture in this sense. Such a juxtaposition and comparison might help to liberalize the faith of men.... This would be the Bible, or Book of Books, which let the missionaries carry to the uttermost parts of the earth.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In his writings, we should say that he, as conspicuously as any, though with little enough expressed or even conscious sympathy, r...epresents the Reformer class, and all the better for not being the acknowledged leader of any. In him the universal plaint is most settled, unappeasable, and serious. Until a thousand named and nameless grievances are righted, there will be no repose for him in the lap of nature, or the seclusion of science and literature. By foreseeing it, he hastens the crisis in the affairs of England, and is as good as many years added to her history.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
He has the earnestness of a prophet. In an age of pedantry and dilettantism, he has no grain of these in his composition. There is... nowhere else, surely, in recent readable English, or other books, such direct and effectual teaching, reproving, encouraging, stimulating, earnestly, vehemently, almost like Mahomet, like Luther.... His writings are a gospel to the young of this generation; they will hear his manly, brotherly speech with responsive joy, and press forward to older or newer gospels.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
One merit in Carlyle, let the subject be what it may, is the freedom of prospect he allows, the entire absence of cant and dogma. ...He removes many cartloads of rubbish, and leaves open a broad highway. His writings are all unfenced on the side of the future and the possible. Though he does but inadvertently direct our eyes to the open heavens, nevertheless he lets us wander broadly underneath, and shows them to us reflected in innumerable pools and lakes.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
But to consider this Subject in its most ridiculous Lights, Advertisements are of great Use to the Vulgar: First of all, as they a...re Instruments of Ambition. A Man that is by no Means big enough for the Gazette, may easily creep into the Advertisements.... A Second Use which this Sort of Writings have been turned to of late Years, has been the Management of Controversy, insomuch that above half the Advertisements one meets with now-a-Days are purely Polemical.... The Third and last Use of these Writings is, to inform the World where they may be furnished with almost every Thing that is necessary for Life. If a Man has Pains in his Head, Cholicks in his Bowels, or Spots in his Clothes, he may here meet with proper Cures and Remedies.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Who does not know history's first law to be that an author must not dare to tell anything but the truth? And its second that he mu...st make bold to tell the whole truth? That there must be no suggestion of partiality anywhere in his writings? Nor of malice?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Here stands the row of enormous stelæ that have furnished the date that links the Mayan calendar to ours. These stones standing g...rimly in line, swelling with the enormous strength of their halfobliterated carvings, still give you, through all the confusion of races and empires long dead, of languages and writings that can never be understood, a feeling of serene order and form... so that after seeing them, the railroad and the guns and the overseers and the loading sheds and the uptodate malaria hospital, all the carefully organized machinery for efficiently squeezing...the sweat and blood of the yellow brown and white mongrel race of workers who live in the rows of company shacks...seems feeble and flabby, not organization at all, not order at all.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The idea of childhood as a social invention, in retrospect, is hardly credible. In the Bible, in writings of the Greeks and Romans..., and in the works of the first great educator of the modern era, Comenius, children were recognized as being both different from adults and different from one another with respect to their stages of development. To be sure, the scientific study of children and the increased length of life in modern times have enhanced our understanding of age differences, but they have always been acknowledged.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Great geniuses have the shortest biographies. Their cousins can tell you nothing about them. They lived in their writings, and so ...their house and street life was trivial and commonplace. If you would know their tastes and complexions, the most admiring of their readers most resembles them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »