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
No great man lives in vain. The history of the world is but the biography of great men.
Show me the person you honor, for I know better by that the kind of person you are. For you show me what your idea of humanity is.
The fearful unbelief is unbelief in yourself.
Success in life, in anything, depends upon the number of persons that one can make himself agreeable to.
A well-written life is almost as rare as a well-spent one.
The world is a republic of mediocrities, and always was.
To know, to get into the truth of anything, is ever a mystic art, of which the best logic's can but babble on the surface.
Of all the things which man can do or make here below, by far the most momentous, wonderful, and worthy are the things we call books.
The word of Mohammad is a voice direct from nature's own heart - all else is wind in comparison.
Oblivion is the dark page, whereon Memory writes her light-beam characters, and makes them legible; were it all light, nothing could be read there, any more than if it were all darkness.
O poor mortals, how ye make this earth bitter for each other.
Painful for a person is rebellious independence, only in loving companionship with his associates does a person feel safe: Only in reverently bowing down before the higher does a person feel exalted.
My books are friends that never fail me.
We have our little theory on all human and divine things. Poetry, the workings of genius itself, which, in all times, with one or another meaning, has been called Inspiration, and held to be mysterious and inscrutable, is no longer without its scientific exposition. The building of the lofty rhyme is like any other masonry or bricklaying: we have theories of its rise, height, decline and fall -- which latter, it would seem, is now near, among all people.