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
With stupidity and sound digestion, man may front much.
Fame, we may understand, is no sure test of merit, but only a probability of such; it is an accident, not a property of man.
Every poet, be his outward lot what it may, finds himself born in the midst of prose; h e has to struggle from the littleness and obstruction of an actual world into the freedom and infinitude of an ideal.
We do everything by custom, even believe by it; our very axioms, let us boast of free-thinking as we may, are oftenest simply such beliefs as we have never heard questioned.
There is no permanent place in this universe for evil... Evil may hide behind this fallacy and that, but it will be hunted from fallacy to fallacy until there is no more fallacy for it to hide behind.
We have not read an author till we have seen his object, whatever it may be, as he saw it.
May blessings be upon the head of Cadmus, the Phoenicians, or whoever it was that invented books.
Every man is my superior in that I may learn from him.