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
Earnestness alone makes life eternity.
The latest gospel in this world is, know thy work and do it.
Unity, agreement, is always silent or soft-voiced; it is only discord that loudly proclaims itself.
Democracy will itself accomplish the salutary universal change from delusive to real, and make a new blessed world of us by and by.
A dandy is a clothes-wearing man--a man whose trade, office, and existence consist in the wearing of clothes. Every faculty of his soul, spirit, person and purse is heroically consecrated to this one object--the wearing of clothes, wisely and well; so that, as others dress to live, he lives to dress.
To say that we have a clear conscience is to utter a solecism; had we never sinned we should have had no conscience. Were defeat unknown, neither would victory be celebrated by songs of triumph.
It is a fact which escapes no one, that, generally speaking, whoso is acquainted with his worth has but a little stock to cultivate acquaintance with.
Money, in truth, can do much, but it cannot do all. We must know the province of it, and confine it there, and even spurn it back when it wishes to get farther.
The secret of business is to know something that nobody else knows. The greatest of faults, I should say is to be conscious of none.
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.
The highest ensign that men ever met and embraced under, the Cross itself, had no meaning save an accidental extrinsic one.
Show me the man you honor; I know by that symptom, better than by any other, what kind of man you yourself are. For you show me there what your ideal of manhood is; what kind of man you long inexpressibly to be.
Neither let mistakes and wrong directions - of which every man, in his studies and elsewhere, falls into many - discourage you. There is precious instruction to be got by finding that we are wrong. Let a man try faithfully, manfully to be right, he will grow daily more and more right. It is, at bottom, the condition which all men have to cultivate themselves. Our very walking is an incessant falling - a falling and a catching of ourselves before we come actually to the pavement! - it is emblematic of all things a man does.
And there are Ben [Jonson] and William Shakespeare in wit-combat, sure enough; Ben bearing down like a mighty Spanish war-ship, fraught with all learning and artillery; Shakespeare whisking away from him - whisking right through him, athwart the big bulk and timbers of him; like a miraculous Celestial Light-ship, woven all of sheet-lightning and sunbeams!