Life & Wisdom Quote by Thomas Carlyle

Carlyle rigs the sentence like a moral trap: you feel the tug toward silence before you can defend speech. By pairing “eternity” with “silence,” he isn’t just praising quiet; he’s drafting it into the cosmic register. Silence becomes the medium of the infinite, the space where the self stops performing and starts reckoning. Then he cuts speech down to size with a brutal demotion: “shallow as time.” Time is already the human limit, the realm of schedules, politics, chatter, and decay. If silence is depth, speech is surface noise skimming across a world that won’t hold still long enough to be fully described.

The line’s power comes from its asymmetry. He doesn’t argue. He declares, with a Calvinist severity that was in Carlyle’s bloodstream, that language is suspect by nature: too social, too transactional, too easily bent into cant. That’s classic Carlyle: the Victorian prophet who distrusted the age’s talkiness - parliamentary rhetoric, newspaper opinion, industrial “progress” marketed in slogans - and hungered for something harder, older, truer. In his world, the real is not what gets said, but what withstands saying.

Subtext: speech is often an instrument of self-deception, a way to domesticate terror, grief, awe. Silence refuses that comfort. It doesn’t “express” eternity; it resembles it, not by being mystical, but by being uncompromisingly blank. The jab at time hints at a deeper anxiety: words expire. Silence, like the truths Carlyle chased, doesn’t.