The work an unknown good man has done is like a vein of water flowing hidden underground, secretly making the ground green.
Thomas CarlyleRead
There is a great discovery still to be made in literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Carlyle suggests that the value of literary work often lies in what is intentionally left unsaid or unwritten.
In this quote, Thomas Carlyle expresses the idea that not all literary expression is found in the words that are written down. He emphasizes that there is an intrinsic value in the omissions and the silence in literature, implying that the essence of great writing can sometimes be found in restraint and the choices of what not to include. This perspective challenges traditional views of literary work that focus solely on the volume of text produced, suggesting instead that the skill lies in knowing when to withhold and how to create depth through absence.
Themes
LiteratureWritingOmissionValueExpression
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion about the complexities of writing, one could quote Carlyle to highlight the importance of what is left unsaid.
More from Thomas Carlyle
All quotes βThirty millions, mostly fools.
Thomas CarlyleRead
For the superior morality, of which we hear so much, we too would desire to be thankful: at the same time, it were but blindness to deny that this superior morality is properly rather an inferior criminality, produced not by greater love of Virtue, but by greater perfection of Police; and of that far subtler and stronger Police, called Public Opinion.
Thomas CarlyleRead
Enjoying things which are pleasant; that is not the evil; it is the reducing of our moral self to slavery by them that is.
Thomas CarlyleRead
Clean undeniable right, clear undeniable might: either of these once ascertained puts an end to battle. All battle is a confused experiment to ascertain one and both of these.
Thomas CarlyleRead
Philosophy dwells aloft in the Temple of Science, the divinity of its inmost shrine; her dictates descend among men, but she herself descends not : whoso would behold her must climb with long and laborious effort, nay, still linger in the forecourt, till manifold trial have proved him worthy of admission into the interior solemnities.
Thomas CarlyleRead
Similar quotes
With the single exception of Homer, there is no eminent writer, not even Sir Walter Scott, whom I can despise so entirely as I despise Shakespeare when I measure my mind against his. . . . It would positively be a relief to me to dig him up and throw stones at him.
George Bernard ShawRead
Long books, when read, are usually overpraised, because the reader wishes to convince others and himself that he has not wasted his time.
E. M. ForsterRead
There was, in my view, an unwritten contract with the reader that the writer must honour. No single element of an imagined world or any of its characters should be allowed to dissolve on an authorial whim. The invented had to be as solid and as self-consistent as the actual. This was a contract founded on mutual trust.
Ian McewanRead
I belong to Russian literature, but I am an American citizen, and I think it's the best possible combination.
Joseph BrodskyRead
I think that most of us, anyway, read these stories that we know are not "true" because we're hungry for another kind of truth: the mythic truth about human nature in general, the particular truth about those life-communities that define our own identity, and the most specific truth of all: our own self-story. Fiction, because it is not about someone who lived in the real world, always has the possibility of being about oneself. --From the Introduction
Orson Scott CardRead
What fiction offers us is an intimacy shorn of the messy contingencies of human existence - gender, race, class or age. Those moments of transcendence when we exclaim 'You know exactly what I mean!' depend for much of their force on the anonymous character of the intimacy between writer and reader.
Will SelfRead