Quote

Universal history, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here.

Thomas Carlyle

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Thomas Carlyle
Age: 85 †
Born: 1795
Born: December 4
Died: 1881
Died: February 5
Essayist
Historian
Linguist
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Mathematician
Novelist
Philosopher
Teacher
Translator
Writer
Philosopher of Chelsea
Accomplished
Bottom
Worked
Universal
History
Great
Men
World

More quotes by Thomas Carlyle

Image
Scarcely two hundred years back can Fame recollect articulately at all and there she but maunders and mumbles.
Thomas Carlyle
Image
The archenemy is the arch stupid!
Thomas Carlyle
Image
Reform, like charity, must begin at home.
Thomas Carlyle
Image
The stifled hum of midnight, when traffic has lain down to rest, and the chariot wheels of Vanity, still rolling here and there through distant streets, are bearing her to halls roofed in and lighted to the due pitch for her and only vice and misery, to prowl or to moan like night birds, are abroad.
Thomas Carlyle
Image
Battles, in these ages, are transacted by mechanism with the slightest possible development of human individuality or spontaneity men now even die, and kill one another, in an artificial manner.
Thomas Carlyle
Image
War is a quarrel between two thieves too cowardly to fight their own battle therefore they take boys from one village and another village, stick them into uniforms, equip them with guns, and let them loose like wild beasts against one other.
Thomas Carlyle
Image
Culture is the process by which a person becomes all that they were created capable of being.
Thomas Carlyle
Image
The tragedy of life is not so much what men suffer, but rather what they miss.
Thomas Carlyle
Image
A force as of madness in the hands of reason has done all that was ever done in the world.
Thomas Carlyle
Image
It is the heart always that sees, before the head can see.
Thomas Carlyle
Image
What a wretched thing is all fame! A renown of the highest sort endures, say, for two thousand years. And then? Why, then, a fathomless eternity swallows it. Work for eternity not the meagre rhetorical eternity of the periodical critics, but for the real eternity wherein dwelleth the Divine.
Thomas Carlyle
Image
Genuine Work alone, what thou workest faithfully, that is eternal, as the Almighty Founder and World-Builder himself.
Thomas Carlyle
Image
Silence is as deep as eternity, speech a shallow as time.
Thomas Carlyle
Image
Hero-worship exists, has existed, and will forever exist, universally, among mankind.
Thomas Carlyle
Image
In the long-run every Government is the exact symbol of its People, with their wisdom and unwisdom we have to say, Like People like Government.
Thomas Carlyle
Image
I have seen gleams in the face and eyes of the man that have let you look into a higher country.
Thomas Carlyle
Image
The true epic of our times is not Arm's and the Man, but Tools and the Man--an infinitely wider kind of epic.
Thomas Carlyle
Image
A battle is a terrible conjugation of the verb to kill: I kill, thou killest, he kills, we kill, they kill, all kill.
Thomas Carlyle
Image
The true Sovereign of the world, who moulds the world like soft wax, according to his pleasure, is he who lovingly sees into the world.
Thomas Carlyle
Image
Trust not the heart of that man for whom old clothes are not venerable.
Thomas Carlyle