3 quotations linked to Latter-Day Pamphlets by or associated with Thomas Carlyle, with source notes, explanations and related topics.
The present time, reform, work, responsibility, leadership, social crisis and Carlyle’s polemical response to mid-Victorian institutions.
Use these links when you want to inspect the wording in its wider work or edition.
“learn how to live.”
The phrase appears in a national crisis argument: old methods are described as exhausted, so survival requires learning a different way of organizing collective life.
Source note: Latter-Day Pamphlets, No. IV “The New Downing Street”; Project Gutenberg #1140. Carlyle is discussing England amid nineteenth-century political and social crisis, not giving a context-free personal wellness instruction.
“Here is my work, here or nowhere.”
Carlyle’s imagined capable leader locates responsibility in the actual sphere available to him rather than waiting for a more convenient setting in which to act.
Source note: Latter-Day Pamphlets, No. IV “The New Downing Street”; Project Gutenberg #1140. The sentence occurs inside Carlyle’s controversial political argument about leadership; this collection uses it for work/responsibility while retaining that historical context.
“the sum of knowledge for all of us.”
Carlyle says understanding the present includes asking what the present situation requires people to do, joining interpretation of one’s time with practical judgment.
Source note: Latter-Day Pamphlets, No. I “The Present Time”; Project Gutenberg #1140. The excerpt completes Carlyle’s sentence about knowing the present time and what it bids people do; the local political context remains essential.