Man is not what one calls a happy animal; his appetite for sweet victual is so enormous. How, in this wild Universe, which storms in on him, infinite, vague-menacing, shall poor man find, say not happiness, but existence, and footing to stand on, if it be not by girding himself together for continual endeavour and endurance? Woe, if in his heart there dwelt no devout Faith; if the word Duty had lost its meaning for him!
“I do not think altogether the worse of a book for having survived the author a generation or two. I have more confidence in the dead than the living.” — Hazlitt
29 July 2018
Continual Endeavour and Endurance
Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution, Vol. I (London: George Bell and Sons, 1902), p. 62: