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
Speech is great, but silence is greater.
For suffering and enduring there is no remedy, but striving and doing.
No person was every rightly understood until they had been first regarded with a certain feeling, not of tolerance, but of sympathy.
We call it a Society; and go about professing openly the totalest separation, isolation. Our life is not a mutual helpfulness; but rather, cloaked under due laws-of-war, named fair competition and so forth, it is a mutual hostility.
The end of man is action, and not thought, though it be of the noblest.
Violence does even justice unjustly.
Government is emphatically a machine: to the discontented a taxing machine, to the contented a machine for securing property.
The Bible is the truest utterance that ever came by alphabetic letters from the soul of man, through which, as through a window divinely opened, all men can look into the stillness of eternity, and discern in glimpses their far-distant, long-forgotten home.
I have no patience whatever with these gorilla damnifications of humanity.
No violent extreme endures.
Necessity dispenseth with decorum.
A sad spectacle. If they be inhabited, what a scope for misery and folly. If they be not inhabited, what a waste of space.
If you do not wish a man to do a thing, you had better get him to talk about it; for the more men talk, the more likely they are to do nothing else.
If an eloquent speaker speak not the truth, is there a more horrid kind of object in creation?