Life & Wisdom Quote by Thomas Carlyle

Carlyle’s line is a bracing refusal of polite fantasy. Life, he insists, is contact sport: you push, you get pushed, and any notion of moving through society without causing friction is either naive or dishonest. The verb choice matters. “Jostling” is casual, even comic, but “elbow himself through” turns the everyday bustle into a moral stance - not just bumping into people, but asserting space in a crowded world. The sting comes in the last phrase: “giving and receiving offence.” Offence isn’t an accident here; it’s the toll charged by proximity.

The subtext is Carlyle’s suspicion of comfort and his contempt for the softening rituals of bourgeois civility. He’s writing from a 19th-century Britain reshaped by industrialization, urban density, class churn, and political agitation - a world where anonymity and competition make “friction” feel like the default human temperature. Against that backdrop, the quote reads less like social advice than a warning: if you expect harmony, you’ll misread reality and probably resent people for acting like people.

Carlyle also smuggles in a stern ethic. “No man lives” frames this as a condition of being alive, not a personal failing. Offence becomes reciprocal and unavoidable, which is both consoling and demanding: if you’re perpetually scandalized, you’re not morally refined; you’re unprepared. The line works because it licenses toughness without quite celebrating cruelty - a realist’s permission slip to stop pretending that innocence can survive close quarters.