Thomas Carlyle Quotes on Time
Thomas Carlyle's reflections on time are dominated by his philosophy of history, and the quotes gathered here present its central claims. In his most famous and most contested formulation, the history of the world is but the biography of great men, for Carlyle held that history is moved by heroic individuals who serve as the inspired texts of a divine Book of Revelations. He treats time and eternity as distinct registers, capturing the contrast in his Swiss-inspired aphorism that speech is of time, silence is of eternity. Knowledge itself, he argues, is recorded Experience and a product of History, so that the past remains a living inheritance rather than a dead record. Drawn from On Heroes and Sartor Resartus, these passages show history as Carlyle's chief lens on human time.
Quotes
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“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.”
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“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)