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
If you are ever in doubt as to whether to kiss a pretty girl, always give her the benefit of the doubt.
War is a quarrel between two thieves too cowardly to fight their own battle.
A man willing to work, and unable to find work, is perhaps the saddest sight that fortune's inequality exhibits under this sun.
All that mankind has done, thought or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books.
Rest is for the dead.
Skepticism, as I said, is not intellectual only; it is moral also; a chronic atrophy and disease of the whole soul. A man lives by believing something; not by debating and arguing about many things. A sad case for him when all that he can manage to believe is something he can button in his pocket, and with one or the other organ eat and digest! Lower than that he will not get.
Have not I myself known five hundred living soldiers sabred into crows' meat for a piece of glazed cotton, which they call their flag; which had you sold it at any market-cross, would not have brought above three groschen?
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.
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.
All men, if they work not as in the great taskmaster's eye, will work wrong, and work unhappily for themselves and for you.
The person who cannot laugh is not only ready for treason, and deceptions, their whole life is already a treason and deception.
Laughter is the cipher key wherewith we decipher the whole man
Burke said there were Three Estates in Parliament; but, in the Reporter's gallery yonder, there sat a fourth estate more important far than they all.
Men are to be guided only by their self-interests. Good government is a good balancing of these; and, except a keen eye and appetite for self-interest, requires no virtue in any quarter. To both parties it is emphatically a machine: to the discontented, a taxing-machine; to the contented, a machine for securing property. Its duties and its faults are not those of a father, but of an active parish-constable.