Quote

Instead of saying that man is the creature of circumstance, it would be nearer the mark to say that man is the architect of circumstance.

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
Mark
Creatures
Mortar
Circumstances
Nearer
Instead
Apathy
Saying
Circumstance
Action
Architect
Would
Creature
Men
Empathy

More quotes by Thomas Carlyle

Image
There is but one temple in this Universe: The Body. We speak to God whenever we lay our hands upon it.
Thomas Carlyle
Image
Do nothing, only keep agitating, debating and things will destroy themselves.
Thomas Carlyle
Image
Biography is the only true history.
Thomas Carlyle
Image
Goethe's devil is a cultivated personage and acquainted with the modern sciences sneers at witchcraft and the black art even while employing them, and doubts most things, nay, half disbelieves even his own existence.
Thomas Carlyle
Image
So much of truth, only under an ancient obsolete vesture, but the spirit of it still true, do I find in the Paganism of old nations. Nature is still divine, the revelation of the workings of God the Hero is still worshipable: this, under poor cramped incipient forms, is what all Pagan religions have struggled, as they could, to set forth.
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
History is the distillation of rumour.
Thomas Carlyle
Image
Time is the silent, never-resting thing ... rolling, rushing on, swift, silent, like an all-embracing oceantide, on which we and all the universe swim.
Thomas Carlyle
Image
The true past departs not, no truth or goodness realized by man ever dies, or can die but all is still here, and, recognized or not, lives and works through endless change.
Thomas Carlyle
Image
Culture is the process by which a person becomes all that they were created capable of being.
Thomas Carlyle
Image
The highest ensign that men ever met and embraced under, the Cross itself, had no meaning save an accidental extrinsic one.
Thomas Carlyle
Image
The first duty of man is to conquer fear he must get rid of it, he cannot act till then.
Thomas Carlyle
Image
The public is anold woman.Let her maunderand mumble.
Thomas Carlyle
Image
Love not Pleasure love God.
Thomas Carlyle
Image
One monster there is in the world, the idle man.
Thomas Carlyle
Image
History is the essence of innumerable biographies.
Thomas Carlyle
Image
Cash-payment never was, or could except for a few years be, the union-bond of man to man. Cash never yet paid one man fully his deserts to another nor could it, nor can it, now or henceforth to the end of the world.
Thomas Carlyle
Image
Thought once awakened does not again slumber unfolds itself into a System of Thought grows, in man after man, generation after generation, - till its full stature is reached, and such System of Thought can grow no farther, but must give place to another.
Thomas Carlyle
Image
Every day that is born into the world comes like a burst of music and rings the whole day through, and you make of it a dance, a dirge, or a life march, as you will.
Thomas Carlyle
Image
'Genius' which means transcendent capacity of taking trouble, first of all.
Thomas Carlyle