“With men of a speculative turn, there come seasons, meditative, sweet, yet awful hours, when in wonder and fear you ask yourself that unanswerable question: Who am I; The thing that can say ‘I’? ...[Your] sight reaches forth into the void Deep, and you are alone with the Universe, and silently commune with it, as one mysterious Presence with another. ...Who am I; what is ME?  A voice, a Motion, an Appearance- some embodied visualized Idea in the Eternal Mind?  ...but whence?  How?  Where to?”
     Thomas Carlyle

“...[A true] man deals much in the feeling of Wonder; insists on the necessity and high worth of universal Wonder; which he holds to be the only reasonable tempter for the denizen of so singular a Planet as ours.  Wonder...is the basis of Worship; The reign of wonder is perennial, indestructible in Man. ...[And] science, which is to destroy Wonder, and in its stead substitute Mensuration and Numeration, finds small favour [with us]... Above all, that class of Logic-choppers, and trebble-pipe Scoffers, and professed Enemies of Wonder; who, in these days, so numerously patrol as night-constables about the Mechanic’s Institute of Science, and cackle, like true Old-Roman geese and goslings round their Capitol, on any alarm, or on none; nay, who often, as illumined Sceptics, walk abroad into peaceable society, in full day-light, with rattle and lantern, and insist on guiding you and guarding you therewith, though the Sun is shining... That whole class is inexpressibly wearisome. ...[For] the man who cannot wonder, who does not habitually wonder...is but a Pair of Spectacles behind which there is no Eye.”
     Thomas Carlyle

“What are your Axioms, and Categories, and Systems, and Aphorisms?  Words, words. High Air-Castles are cunningly built of Words, the Words well bedded also in good Logic-mortar, wherein, however, no knowledge will come to lodge.”
     Thomas Carlyle

“...all Symbols are properly Clothes; ...all forms whereby Spirit manifests itself to sense whether outwardly or in the imagination, are Clothes... [And so] happy [is] he who can look through the Clothes of a Man...into the Man himself...an inscrutable venerable mystery.”
     Thomas Carlyle

Thomas Carlyle quotes from THE WAY OF WONDER, by Jack Haas