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
It is the heart always that sees, before the head can see.
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.
What we might call, by way of eminence, the Dismal Science
When the oak is felled the whole forest echoes with its fall, but a hundred acorns are sown in silence by an unnoticed breeze
Man is a tool-using Animal. Nowhere do you find him without tools; without tools he is nothing, with tools he is all.
Life is a little gleam of time between two eternity s.
Wonderful ''Force of Public Opinion!'' We must act and walk in all points as it prescribes; follow the traffic it bids us, realize the sum of money, the degree of ''influence'' it expects of us, or we shall be lightly esteemed; certain mouthfuls of articulate wind will be blown at us, and this what mortal courage can front?
No sadder proof can be given of a person's own tiny stature, than their disbelief in great people.
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.
If time is precious, no book that will not improve by repeated readings deserves to be read at all.
That great mystery of TIME, were there no other; the illimitable, silent, never-resting thing called Time, rolling, rushing on, swift, silent, like an all-embracing ocean tide, on which we and all the Universe swim like exhalations, like apparitions which are, and then are not: this is forever very literally a miracle; a thing to strike us dumb,-for we have no word to speak about it.
The outer passes away; the innermost is the same yesterday, today, and forever.
Youth is to all the glad season of life; but often only by what it hopes, not by what it attains, or what it escapes.
The past is all holy to us; the dead are all holy; even they that were wicked when alive.