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
Thought, true labor of any kind, highest virtue itself, is it not the daughter of Pain?
Histories are a kind of distilled newspapers.
Once turn to practice, error and truth will no longer consort together.
He that has done nothing has known nothing.
At worst, is not this an unjust world, full of nothing but beasts of prey, four-footed or two-footed?
A man perfects himself by working. Foul jungles are cleared away, fair seed-fields rise instead, and stately cities; and with the man himself first ceases to be a jungle, and foul unwholesome desert thereby. The man is now a man.
Man is emphatically a proselytizing creature.
Nothing ever happens but once in all this world. What I do now I do once for all. It is over and gone, with all its eternity of solemn meaning.
Man is, and was always, a block-head and dullard; much readier to feel and digest, than to think and consider.
There is precious instruction to be got by finding we were wrong.
The grand result of schooling is a mind with just vision to discern, with free force to do: the grand schoolmaster is Practice.
This little life has its duties that are great-that are alone great, and that go up to heaven and down to hell.
Innumerable are the illusions and legerdemain-tricks of custom: but of all of these, perhaps the cleverest is her knack of persuading us that the miraculous, by simple repetition, ceases to be miraculous.
Conclusive facts are inseparable from inconclusive except by a head that already understands and knows.