Thomas Carlyle Quotes about Greatness

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

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

Thomas Carlyle

Men, Greatness, History

On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic "The Hero as Divinity" (1841)

All greatness is unconscious, or it is little and naught.

Thomas Carlyle

Greatness, Littles, Unconscious

Thomas Carlyle (1857). “Critical and miscellaneous essays, collected and republ”, p.146

It is great, and there is no other greatness-to make one nook of God's Creation more fruitful, better, more worthy of God; to make some human heart a little wiser, manlier, happier-more blessed.

Thomas Carlyle

Blessed, Heart, Greatness

The difference between Socrates and Jesus? The great conscious and the immeasurably great unconscious.

Thomas Carlyle

Jesus, Greatness, Differences

We have not the love of greatness, but the love of the love of greatness.

Thomas Carlyle

Greatness

Thomas Carlyle, Henry Duff Traill (2010). “The Works of Thomas Carlyle”, p.23, Cambridge University Press

We are to remember what an umpire Nature is; what a greatness, composure of depth and tolerance there is in her. You take wheat to cast into the Earth's bosom; your wheat may be mixed with chaff, chopped straw, barn-sweepings, dust and all imaginable rubbish; no matter: you cast it into the kind just Earth; she grows the wheat, - the whole rubbish she silently absorbs, shrouds it in, says nothing of the rubbish.

Thomas Carlyle

Greatness, Umpires, Dust

Thomas Carlyle (1840). “On Heroes, Hero-worship and the Heroic in History”, p.73, CUP Archive

Man's Unhappiness, as I construe, comes of his Greatness; it is because there is an Infinite in him, with which all his cunning he cannot quite bury under the Finite... Try him with half of a Universe, of an Omnipotence, he sets to quarreling with the proprietor of the other half, and declares himself the most maltreated of men. Always there is a black spot in our sunshine: It is even, as I said, the Shadow of Ourselves.

Thomas Carlyle

Sunshine, Greatness, Men

"Selections from Carlyle".

Well might the ancients make silence a god; for it is the element of all godhood, infinitude, or transcendental greatness,--at once the source and the ocean wherein all such begins and ends.

Thomas Carlyle

Ocean, Greatness, Silence

Thomas Carlyle (1872). “Works”, p.15

Man's unhappiness, as I construe, comes of his greatness; it is because there is an Infinite in him, which with all his cunning he cannot quite bury under the Finite.

Thomas Carlyle

Happiness, Greatness, Men

'Sartor Resartus' (1834) bk. 2, ch. 9

We observe with confidence that the truly strong mind, view it as intellect or morality, or under any other aspect, is nowise the mind acquainted with its strength; that here the sign of health is unconsciousness.

Thomas Carlyle

Strong, Greatness, Views

Thomas Carlyle (1881). “Critical and Miscellaneous Essays: Collected and Republished”, p.4