Thomas Carlyle Quotes on Time

Quotes

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

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

• Attributed to Thomas Carlyle:

  “No great man lives in vain.”

• “My Own Four Walls” (c. 1825) Froude, James Anthony (1882). Thomas Carlyle: A history of the first forty years of his life, 1795-1835 . p. 189. OCLC 603024 .”

  Not all his men may sever this, It yields to friends ', not monarchs ', calls; My whinstone house my castle is — I have my own four walls.

• “Great men are the inspired (speaking and acting) texts of that divine Book of Revelations, wherof a chapter is completed from epoch to epoch, and by some named History.”

  Sartor Resartus(1833–1834) | Bk. II, ch. 8.

• “As the Swiss inscription says: Sprechen ist silbern, Schweigen ist golden — "Speech is silvern, Silence is golden"; or, as I might rather express it: speech is of time, silence is of eternity.”

  Sartor Resartus(1833–1834) | Bk. III, ch. 3.

• “Nothing that was worthy in the past departs; no truth or goodness realized by man ever dies, or can die.”

  Sir Walter Scott(1838)

• “In books lies the soul of the whole Past Time; the articulate audible voice of the Past, when the body and material substance of it has altogether vanished like a dream.”

  The Hero as Man of Letters

• “It is the very joy of man's heart to admire, where he can; nothing so lifts him from all his mean imprisonments, were it but for moments, as true admiration.”

  Past and Present(1843)

• “What is all Knowledge too but recorded Experience, and a product of History; of which, therefore, Reasoning and Belief, no less than Action and Passion, are essential materials?”

  Carlyle, Essays , On History. Quote reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 419-23.

• “Under all speech that is good for anything there lies a silence that is better. Silence is deep as Eternity ; speech is shallow as Time .”

  Sir Walter Scott(1838)