Thomas Carlyle Quotes

I see the state of all of us who live, nothing more than phantoms or a weightless shadow.

The Person is a bubble on Time's sea.

There came to him an image of man’s whole life upon the earth. It seemed to him that all man’s life was like a tiny spurt of flame that blazed out briefly in an illimitable and terrifying darkness, and that all man’s grandeur, tragic dignity, his heroic glory, came from the brevity and smallness of this flame. He knew his life was little and would be extinguished, and that only darkness was immense and everlasting. And he knew that he would die with defiance on his lips, and that the shout of his denial would ring with the last pulsing of his heart into the maw of all-engulfing night.

We are time's subjects, and time bids be gone.

Time is life itself, and life resides in the human heart.

A mass of dust, world's momentary slave, Is man, in state of our old Adam made, Soon born to die, soon flourishing to fade.

Man is a substance clad in shadows.

We're here for such a short period of time.

I came like Water, and like Wind I go.

Western Humanism does not ask the fundamental questions about the meaning and limits of personal experience. Humsniists leave aside the mysteries of contingency and transitoriness, for the certainties of research, production, consumption.

The great problem of humanity is life and death. Every person dreams of becoming invisible one day.

I feel our relationship to life, to the rest of the world, is very tenuous. It feels fleeting.

Man is a torch borne in the wind; a dream But of a shadow, summed with all his substance.

Mankind is a dream of a shadow.

The hardest thing for me is the sense of impermanence. All passes; nothing returns.

Nothing is real except the present, and already, I feel the weight of centuries smothering me. Some girl a hundred years ago once lived as I do. And she is dead. I am the present, but I know I, too, will pass. The high moment, the burning flash, come and are gone, continuous quicksand. And I don’t want to die.

I think we all lose in the end because we don't get to stay here forever.

It's true that the biggest value of life is that it's going to stop. I was thinking when I was in New York the last time that all that we see that has importance is man-made. It isn't nature-made. And when I was looking through the window, looking at New York, I was so moved by humanity's desire for immortality-because that's what it is.

We are tiny flames, Helikaon, and we flicker alone in the great dark for no more than a heartbeat. When we strive for wealth, glory and fame, it is meaningless. The nations we fight for will one day cease to be. Even the mountains we gaze upon will crumble to dust. To truly live we must yearn for that which does not die.

Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow.

Were not the gods forms created like me and you, mortal, transient?

I thought about all of the things that everyone ever says to each other, and how everyone is going to die, whether it's in a millisecond, or days, or months, or 76.5 years, if you were just born. Everything that's born has to die, which means our lives are like skyscrapers. The smoke rises at different speeds, but they're all on fire, and we're all trapped.

Life is a winking light in the darkness.

The seed of mortals broods o'er passing things, and hath nought surer than the smoke-cloud's shadow.