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
What we become depends on what we read after all the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is the collection of books.
No sadder proof can be given of a person's own tiny stature, than their disbelief in great people.
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.
The greatest of all faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none.
The great law of culture - and surely this convention before us now is a great law of culture - is: let each person become all that he was created equal of being. That is what this convention will help to achieve.
The history of the world is but the biography of great men.
Well might the ancients make silence a god; for it is the element of all godhood, infinitude, or transcendental greatness,--at once the source and the ocean wherein all such begins and ends.
We have not the love of greatness, but the love of the love of greatness.
Men worship the shows of great men; the most disbelieve that there is any reality of great men to worship.
Man's unhappiness, as I construe, comes of his greatness; it is because there is an Infinite in him, which with all his cunning he cannot quite bury under the Finite.
Man's Unhappiness... comes of his Greatness; it is because there is an Infinite in him, with which all his cunning he cannot quite bury under the Finite... Try him with half of a Universe, of an Omnipotence, he sets to quarreling with the proprietor of the other half, and declares himself the most maltreated of men. Always there is a black spot in our sunshine: It is... the Shadow of Ourselves.
We are to remember what an umpire Nature is; what a greatness, composure of depth and tolerance there is in her. You take wheat to cast into the Earth's bosom; your wheat may be mixed with chaff, chopped straw, barn-sweepings, dust and all imaginable rubbish; no matter: you cast it into the kind just Earth; she grows the wheat, - the whole rubbish she silently absorbs, shrouds it in, says nothing of the rubbish.
We observe with confidence that the truly strong mind, view it as intellect or morality, or under any other aspect, is nowise the mind acquainted with its strength; that here the sign of health is unconsciousness.
It is great, and there is no other greatness-to make one nook of God's Creation more fruitful, better, more worthy of God; to make some human heart a little wiser, manlier, happier-more blessed.