Thomas Carlyle : table talk.

  • Thomas Carlyle
Date:
1890
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Thomas Carlyle : table talk. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    56/72 page 50
    Nature is true and not a lie. No lie you can speak or act but it will come, after longer or shorter circulation, like a Bill drawn on Nature’s Reality, and be presented there for payment—with the answer “ No effects.” Rascaldom has no strong-box. I will have all things condense themselves, take shape and body, if they are to have my sympathy. I have a body myself; in the brown leaf, sport of the Autumn winds,. I find what mocks all prophecyings, even Hebrew ones,— Royal Societies, and Scientific Associations, eating venison at Glasgow, not once reckoned in. The actual well seen is the ideal. The actual what really is and exists: the past, the present, the future no- less, do all lie there. Our thoughts, good or bad, are not in our command, but everyone of us has at all hours duties to do, and these he can do negligently, like a slave, or faithfully like a true servant. u Do the duty that is nearest thee”—that first and that well; all the rest will disclose themselves with increasing clearness, and make their successive demand. Not what I have but what I do is my kingdom. The folly of that impossible precept know thyself till it be translated into this partially possible one, know what thou canst work at. Blessed is he who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness. We are to bethink us that the epic verily is, not arms and the man, but tools and the man—an infinitely wider kind of epic. There is nothing in this world that will keep the Devil out of one but hard labour. Of my devils at least I may say : this kind goeth not out by fasting and prayer.
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