On Heroes, Hero Worship and the Heroic in History Quotes

“What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books.”
― Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero Worship and the Heroic in History

“Make yourself an honest man, and then you may be sure that there is one less scoundrel in the world.”
― Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero Worship and the Heroic in History

“The lies (Western slander) which well-meaning zeal has heaped round this man (Muhammad) are disgraceful to ourselves only.”
― Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero Worship and the Heroic in History

“The true University of these days is a Collection of Books.”
― Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero Worship and the Heroic in History

“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, On Heroes, Hero Worship and the Heroic in History

“In books lies the soul fo the whole past time.”
― Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History

“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, On Heroes, Hero Worship and the Heroic in History

“Intellect is not speaking and logicising; it is seeing and ascertaining.”
― Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero Worship and the Heroic in History

“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, On Heroes, Hero Worship and the Heroic in History

“Literature, so far as it is Literature, is an ‘apocalypse of Nature,’ a revealing of the ‘open secret.”
― Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History

“الإنسان بالغباء وحسن الهضم يستطيع أن يواجه الكثير من الحياة))”
― توماس كارليل, On Heroes, Hero Worship and the Heroic in History

“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, On Heroes, Hero Worship and the Heroic in History

“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, On Heroes, Hero Worship and the Heroic in History

“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, On Heroes, Hero Worship and the Heroic in History

“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, On Heroes, Hero Worship and the Heroic in History

“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, On Heroes, Hero Worship and the Heroic in History

“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, On Heroes, Hero Worship and the Heroic in History

“Find a man whose words paint you a likeness, you have found a man worth something; mark his manner of doing it, as very characteristic of him.”
― Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes and Hero Worship and the Heroic in History

“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, On Heroes Hero Worship and the Heroic in History

“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, On Heroes, Hero Worship and the Heroic in History

“The first duty for a man is still that of subduing Fear. We must get rid of Fear; we cannot act at all till then. A man's acts are slavish, not true but specious; his very thoughts are false, he thinks too as a slave and coward till he have got Fear under his feet. Odin's creed, if we disentangle the real kernel of it, is true to this hour. A man shall and must be valiant; he must march forward and quit himself like a man - trusting imperturbably in the appointment and choice of the upper Powers; and on the whole not fear at all. Now and always, the completeness of his victory over Fear will determine how much of a man he is.”
― Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero Worship and the Heroic in History

“existence. If we think of it, all that a University, or final highest School can do for us, is still but what the first School began doing,—teach us to read. We learn to read, in various languages, in various sciences; we learn the alphabet and letters of all manner of Books. But the place where we are to get knowledge, even theoretic knowledge, is the Books themselves! It depends on what we read, after all manner of Professors have done their best for us. The true University of these days is a Collection of Books.”
― Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes and Hero Worship and the Heroic in History

“Great Men, taken up in any way, are profitable company.”
― Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes and Hero Worship and the Heroic in History

“Such a man is what we call an original man; he comes to us at first-hand. A messenger he, sent from the Infinite Unknown with tidings to us. We may call him Poet, Prophet, God;—in one way or other, we all feel that the words he utters are as no other man's words. Direct from the Inner Fact of things... Really his utterances, are they not a kind of "revelation;"... It is from the heart of the world that he comes; he is portion of the primal reality of things. God has made many revelations: but this man too, has not God made him, the latest and newest of all? The "inspiration of the Almighty giveth him understanding:" we must listen before all to him.”
― Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero Worship and the Heroic in History

“Worship of a Hero is transcendent admiration of a Great Man. I say great men are still admirable; I say there is, at bottom, nothing else admirable! No nobler feeling than this of admiration for one higher than himself dwells in the breast of man. It is to this hour, and at all hours, the vivifying influence in man's life. Religion I find stand upon it; not Paganism only, but far higher and truer religions,—all religion hitherto known. Hero-worship, heartfelt prostrate admiration, submission, burning, boundless, for a noblest godlike Form of Man,—is not that the germ of Christianity itself? The greatest of all Heroes is One—whom we do not name here! Let sacred silence meditate that sacred matter; you will find it the ultimate perfection of a principle extant throughout man's whole history on earth.”
― Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero Worship and the Heroic in History

“For if we will think of it, no Time need have gone to ruin, could it have found a man great enough, a man wise and good enough: wisdom to discern truly what the Time wanted, valor to lead it on the right road thither; these are the salvation of any Time. But I liken common languid Times, with their unbelief, distress, perplexity, with their languid doubting characters and embarrassed circumstances, impotently crumbling down into ever worse distress towards final ruin;—all this I liken to dry dead fuel, waiting for the lightning out of Heaven that shall kindle it. The great man, with his free force direct out of God's own hand, is the lightning. His word is the wise healing word which all can believe in. All blazes round him now, when he has once struck on it, into fire like his own... In all epochs of the world's history, we shall find the Great Man to have been the indispensable savior of his epoch;—the lightning, without which the fuel never would have burnt. The History of the World, I said already, was the Biography of Great Men”
― Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero Worship and the Heroic in History

“[C]onsider what mere Time will do in such cases; how if a man was great while living, he becomes tenfold greater when dead. What an enormous camera obscura magnifier is Tradition! How a thing grows in the human Memory, in the human Imagination, when love, worship and all that lies in the human Heart, is there to encourage it. And in the darkness, in the entire ignorance; without date or document, no book, no Arundel-marble; only here and there some dumb monumental cairn. Why, in thirty or forty years, were there no books, any great man would grow mythic, the contemporaries who had seen him, being once all dead. And in three hundred years, and in three thousand years—!”
― Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero Worship and the Heroic in History

“What we call pure or impure, is not with her the final question. Not how much chaff is in you; but whether you have any wheat. Pure? I might say to many a man: Yes, you are pure; pure enough; but you are chaff,—insincere hypothesis, hearsay, formality; you never were in contact with the great heart of the Universe at all; you are properly neither pure nor impure; you are nothing, Nature has no business with you.”
― Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero Worship and the Heroic in History

“All God's works are still in a sense symbols of God. Do we not, as I urged, still account it a merit to recognize a certain inexhaustible significance, "poetic beauty" as we name it, in all natural objects whatsoever?”
― Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero Worship and the Heroic in History

“It is an everlasting duty, valid in our day as in that, the duty of being brave. Valor is still value. The first duty for a man is still that of subduing Fear. We must get rid of Fear; we cannot act at all till then. A man's acts are slavish, not true but specious; his very thoughts are false, he thinks too as a slave and coward, till he have got Fear under his feet.”
― Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero Worship and the Heroic in History