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History Quotes by Thomas Carlyle

41 History quotes by Thomas Carlyle

All History quotes Thomas Carlyle’s page

Thomas Carlyle paints history as a dramatic stage where war is terrible and dead ashes pile up. He claims that a true biography is the only real history and that the present is a sum of all past events. He also remarks that perfect history does not exist.

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History is the distillation of rumour.

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History: A distillation of rumor.

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History is philosophy teaching by experience.

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History, a distillation of rumour.

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History is a great dust heap.

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History after all is the true poetry.

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In a certain sense all men are historians.

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Histories are a kind of distilled newspapers.

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Histories are as perfect as the Historian is wise, and is gifted with an eye and a soul.

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Happy the people whose annals are blank in the history books!

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It is part of my creed that the only poetry is history, could we tell it right.

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Happy the people whose annals are blank in history books.

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Parties on the back of Parties, at war with the world and with each other.

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There is no heroic poem in the world but is at bottom a biography, the life of a man.

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I know so little about any history. How little do I know even about the history of myself.

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No great man lives in vain. The history of the world is but the biography of great men.

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What are your historical Facts still more your biographical Wilt thou know a man by stringing-together beadrolls of what thou namest Facts

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At the bottom there is no perfect history; there is none such conceivable. All past centuries have rotted down, and gone confusedly…

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For, strictly considered, what is all Knowledge too but recorded Experience, and a product of History; of which, therefore, Reasoning and Belief,…

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Rich as we are in biography, a well-written life is almost as rare as a well-spent one; and there are certainly many…

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Also, what mountains of dead ashes, wreck and burnt bones, does assiduous pedantry dig up from the past time and name it…

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History, as it lies at the root of all science, is also the first distinct product of man's spiritual nature, his earliest…

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“A Dandy is a clothes-wearing Man, a Man whose trade, office and existence consists in the wearing of clothes.”

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History is a mighty dramos, enacted upon the theatre of times, with suns for lamps and eternity for a background.

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The greatest of all heroes is One--whom we do not name here! Let sacred silence meditate that sacred matter; you will find…

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“For there was need once more of a Divine Revelation to the torpid frivolous children of men, if they were not to…

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History is the new poetry.

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The whole past is the procession of the present.

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All history . . . is an inarticulate Bible.

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History is the essence of innumerable biographies.

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Biography is the only true history.

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What is all knowledge except recorded experience, and a product of history?

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“The history of the world is but a biography of great men.”

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The Present is the living sum-total of the whole Past.

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Stern accuracy in inquiring, bold imagination in describing, these are the cogs on which history soars or flutters and wobbles.

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History shows that the majority of people that have done anything great have passed their youth in seclusion.

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Armed Soldier, terrible as Death, relentless as Doom; doing God's judgement on the Enemies of God. It is a phenomenon not of…

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What is all Knowledge too but recorded Experience, and a product of History; of which, therefore, Reasoning and Belief, no less than…

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Great men are the inspired texts of that divine Book of Revelations, whereof a chapter is completed from epoch to epoch, and…

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Universal history, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the History of the Great Men who…

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More by Thomas Carlyle

O thou that pinest in the imprisonment of the Actual, and criest bitterly to the gods for a kingdom wherein to rule and create,…

Whose school-hours are all the days and nights of our existence.

No sadder proof can be given by a man of his own littleness than disbelief in great men.

Fame, we may understand, is no sure test of merit, but only a probability of such: it is an accident, not a property, of…

The sincere alone can recognize sincerity.

Be a pattern to others, and then all will go well; for as a whole city is affected by the licentious passions and vices…

The glory of a workman, still more of a master workman, that he does his work well, ought to be his most precious possession;…

All human things do require to have an ideal in them; to have some soul in them.

Insurrection, never so necessary, is a most sad necessity; and governors who wait for that to instruct them are surely getting into the fatalest…

What is philosophy but a continual battle against custom?

Let Time and Chance combine, combine! Let Time and Chance combine! The fairest love from heaven above, That love of yours was mine, My…

Thought will not work except in silence.

The public is anold woman.Let her maunderand mumble.

Does not every true man feel that he is himself made higher by doing reverence to what is really above him?

The press is the fourth estate of the realm.