On Heroes, Hero Worship and the Heroic in History

On Heroes, Hero Worship and the Heroic in History

by Thomas Carlyle

BUY NOW

Paperback, 142 pages

Published November 2006 by Hard Press (first published 1841)

tags: philosophy, fantasy, religion, essays, mythology, history, literature, politics, writing, 19th century, classics, nonfiction

Book Quotes

“Make yourself an honest man, and then you may be sure that there is one less scoundrel in the world.”

― Thomas Carlyle

topics: Honesty

“The lies (Western slander) which well-meaning zeal has heaped round this man (Muhammad) are disgraceful to ourselves only.”

― Thomas Carlyle

topics: History, Hoax, Islam, Lies, Muhammad, Religion

“The true University of these days is a Collection of Books.”

― Thomas Carlyle

topics: The Hero As A Man Of Letters

“It is a great shame for anyone to listen to the accusation that Islam is a lie and that Muhammad was a fabricator and a deceiver. We saw that he remained steadfast upon his principles, with firm determination; kind and generous, compassionate, pious, virtuous, with real manhood, hardworking and sincere. Besides all these qualities, he was lenient with others, tolerant, kind, cheerful and praiseworthy and perhaps he would joke and tease his companions. He was just, truthful, smart, pure, magnanimous and present-minded; his face was radiant as if he had lights within him to illuminate the darkest of nights; he was a great man by nature who was not educated in a school nor nurtured by a teacher as he was not in need of any of this.”

― Thomas Carlyle

topics: Islam

“In books lies the soul fo the whole past time.”

― Thomas Carlyle

“There needs not a great soul to make a hero; there needs a god-created soul which will be true to its origin; that will be a great soul!”

― Thomas Carlyle

topics: Hero, Soul

“You may take my purse; but I cannot have my moral Self annihilated. The purse is any Highwayman's who might meet me with a loaded pistol: but the Self is mine and God my Maker's; it is not yours; and I will resist you to the death, and revolt against you ...”

― Thomas Carlyle

topics: Freedom, Integrity, Moral Courage

“Intellect is not speaking and logicising; it is seeing and ascertaining.”

― Thomas Carlyle

topics: Ascertain, Intellect, Logic

“Literature, so far as it is Literature, is an ‘apocalypse of Nature,’ a revealing of the ‘open secret.”

― Thomas Carlyle

“الإنسان بالغباء وحسن الهضم يستطيع أن يواجه الكثير من الحياة))”

― Thomas Carlyle

“وأي دليل أشهر ببراءة الإسلام من الميل إلى الملاذ من شهر رمضان تلجم فيه الشهوات، وتزجر النفس عن غاياتها، وتقرع عن مآربها؟ وهذا هو منتهى العقل والحزم. فإن مباشرة اللذات ليس بالمنكر. وإنما المنكر هو أن تذل النفس لجبار الشهوات، وتنقاد لحادى الأوطار والرغبات. ولعل أمجد الخصال وأشرف المكارم هو أن يكون للمرء من نفسه على نفسه سلطان، وأن يجعل من لذاته لا سلاسل وأغلالا تعيبه وتعتاص عليه إذا هم أن يصدعها، بل حُلِيًّا وزخارف متى شاء فلا أهون عليه من خلعها، ولا أسهل من نزعها. وكذلك أمر رمضان سواء كان مقصودا من محمد معينًا، أو كان وحي الغريزة وإلهامًا فطريًّا فهو والله نعم الأمر”

― Thomas Carlyle

“The suffering man ought really to consume his own smoke; there is no good in emitting smoke till you have made it into fire.”

― Thomas Carlyle

topics: Suffering

“This green flowery rock-built earth, the trees, the mountains, rivers, many-sounding seas;—that great deep sea of azure that swims overhead; the winds sweeping through it; the black cloud fashioning itself together, now pouring out fire, now hail and rain; what is it? Ay, what? At bottom we do not yet know; we can never know at all. It is not by our superior insight that we escape the difficulty; it is by our superior levity, our inattention, our want of insight. It is by not thinking that we cease to wonder at it. Hardened round us, encasing wholly every notion we form, is a wrappage of traditions, hearsays, mere words. We call that fire of the black thunder-cloud "electricity," and lecture learnedly about it, and grind the like of it out of glass and silk: but what is it? What made it? Whence comes it? Whither goes it? Science has done much for us; but it is a poor science that would hide from us the great deep sacred infinitude of Nescience, whither we can never penetrate, on which all science swims as a mere superficial film. This world, after all our science and sciences, is still a miracle; wonderful, inscrutable, magical and more, to whosoever will think of it.”

― Thomas Carlyle

topics: Nature, Religion, Science

“All things that have been in this world, all things that are or will be in it, have to vanish: we have our sad farewell to give them.”

― Thomas Carlyle

“The Poet who could merely sit on a chair, and compose stanzas, would never make a stanza worth much. He could not sing the Heroic warrior, unless he himself were at least a Heroic warrior too.”

― Thomas Carlyle

topics: Participation

“There are impertinent inquiries made; your rule is, to leave the inquirer uninformed on the matter; not, if you can help it, misinformed, but precisely as dark as he was!”

― Thomas Carlyle

topics: In The Dark, Misinformed, Questions, Rules

“It is a thing forever changing, this of Hero-worship: different in each age, difficult to do well in any age. Indeed, the heart of the whole business of the age, one may say, is to do it well.”

― Thomas Carlyle

“A man's religion is the chief fact with regard to him... By religion I do not mean here the church-creed which he professes, the articles of faith which he will sign... We see men of all kinds of professed creeds attain to almost all degrees of worth or worthlessness under each or any of them... but the thing a man does practically believe (and this is often enough without asserting it even to himself, much less to others); the thing a man does practically lay to heart, concerning his vital relations to this mysterious universe, and his duty and destiny there, that is in all cases the primary thing for him, and creatively determines all the rest. That is his religion.”

― Thomas Carlyle

topics: True Religion

“The Reality had swept the Formulas away before it.”

― Thomas Carlyle

“We called Dante the melodious Priest of Middle-Age Catholicism. May we not call Shakespeare the still more melodious Priest of a true Catholicism, the ‘Universal Church’ of the Future and of all times? No narrow superstition, harsh asceticism, intolerance, fanatical fierceness or perversion: a Revelation, so far as it goes, that such a thousandfold hidden beauty and divineness dwells in all Nature; which let all men worship as they can!”

― Thomas Carlyle

topics: Shakespeare

Thomas Carlyle

Thomas Carlyle was a Scottish satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher during the Victorian era. He called economics "the dismal science", wrote articles for the Edinburgh Encyclopedia, and became a controversial social commentator.

Coming from a strict Calvinist family, Carlyle was expected by his parents to become a preacher, but while at the University of Edinburgh, he lost his Christian faith. Calvinist values, however, remained with him throughout his life. This combination of a religious temperament with loss of faith in traditional Christianity made Carlyle's work appealing to many Victorians who were grappling with scientific and political changes that threatened the traditional social order.
... Show more

Subscribe

Get Bible verse every day in your inbox

Read on Mobile

Download on App Store

Download on Google Play

Most Searched

Group of Brands