Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlylewas a Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher. Considered one of the most important social commentators of his time, he presented many lectures during his lifetime with certain acclaim in the Victorian era. One of those conferences resulted in his famous work On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and The Heroic in History where he explains that the key role in history lies in the actions of the "Great Man", claiming that "History is nothing but the biography of the...
NationalityScottish
ProfessionPhilosopher
Date of Birth4 December 1795
Doubt of any kind cannot be resolved except by action.
Worship of a hero is transcendent admiration of a great man.
Hero-worship exists, has existed, and will forever exist, universally, among mankind.
Great men are the inspired texts of that divine Book of Revelations, whereof a chapter is completed from epoch to epoch, and by some named History.
France was long a despotism tempered by epigrams.
Naps are a way of traveling painlessly through time into the future.
Great men are the modelers, patterns, and in a wide sense creators, of whatsoever the general mass of men contrived to do and attain.
Music... a kind of inarticulate, unfathomable speech, which leads to the edge of the Infinite.
It is in general more profitable to reckon up our defeats than to boast of our attainments.
I have seen gleams in the face and eyes of the man that have let you look into a higher country.
No man sees far, most see no farther than their noses.
Nay, in every epoch of the world, the great event, parent of all others, is it not the arrival of a Thinker in the world?
Statistics is a science which ought to be honourable, the basis of many most important sciences; but it is not to be carried on by steam, this science, any more than others are; a wise head is requisite for carrying it on.
A man perfects himself by working. Foul jungles are cleared away, fair seed-fields rise instead, and stately cities; and with the man himself first ceases to be a jungle, and foul unwholesome desert thereby. The man is now a man.