Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle, Scottish historian, critic, and sociological writer. was born in the village of Ecclefechan, Dumfriesshire, eldest child of James Carlyle, stonemason, and Margaret (Aitken) Carlyle. The father was stern, irascible, a puritan of the puritans, but withal a man of rigid probity and strength of character. The mother, too, was of the Scottish earth, and Thomas' education was begun at home by both the parents. From the age of five to nine he was at the village school; from nine to fourteen at Annan Grammar School. where he showed proficiency in mathematics and was well grounded in French and Latin. In November 1809 he walked to Edinburgh, and attended courses at the University till 1814, with the ultimate aim of becoming a minister. He left without a degree, became a mathematical tutor at Annan Academy in 1814, and three years later abandoned all thoughts of entering the Kirk, having reached a theological position incompatible with its teachings. He had begun to learn German in Edinburgh, and had done much independent reading outside the regular curriculum. Late in 1816 he moved to a school in Kirkcaldy, where he became the intimate associate of Edward Irving, an old boy of Annan School, and now also a schoolmaster. This contact was Carlyle's first experience of true intellectual companionship, and the two men became lifelong friends. He remained there two years, was attracted by Margaret Gordon, a lady of good family (whose friends vetoed an engagement), and in October 1818 gave up schoolmastering and went to Edinburgh, where he took mathematical pupils and made some show of reading law.
During this period in the Scottish capital he began to suffer agonies from a gastric complaint which continued to torment him all his life, and may well have played a large part in shaping the rugged, rude fabric of his philosophy. In literature he had at first little success, a series of articles for the Edinburgh Encyclopaedia bringing in little money and no special credit. In 1820 and 1821 he visited Irving in Glasgow and made long stays at his father's new farm, Mainhill; and in June 1821, in Leith Walk, Edinburgh, he experienced a striking spiritual rebirth which is related in Sartor Resartus. Put briefly and prosaically, it consisted in a sudden clearing away of doubts as to the beneficent organization of the universe; a semi-mystical conviction that he was free to think and work, and that honest effort and striving would not be thwarted by what he called the "Everlasting No."
For about a year, from the spring of 1823, Carlyle was tutor to Charles and Arthur Buller, young men of substance, first in Edinburgh and later at Dunkeld. Now likewise appeared the first fruits of his deep studies in German, the Life of Schiller, which was published serially in the London Magazine in 1823-24 and issued as a separate volume in 1825. A second garner from the same field was his version of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister which earned the praise of Blackwood's and was at once recognized as a very masterly rendering.
In 1821 Irving had gone to London, and in June 1821 Carlyle followed, in the train of his employers, the Bullers. But he soon resigned his tutorship, and, after a few weeks at Birmingham, trying a dyspepsia cure, he lived with Irving at Pentonville, London, and paid a short visit to Paris. March 1825 saw him back; in Scotland, on his brother's farm, Hoddam Hill, near the Solway. Here for a year he worked hard at German translations, perhaps more serenely than before or after and free from that noise which was always a curse to his sensitive ear and which later caused him to build a sound-proof room in his Chelsea home.
Before leaving for London Irving had introduced Carlyle to Jane Baillie Welsh daughter of the surgeon, John Welsh, and descended from John Knox. She was beautiful, precociously learned, talented, and a brilliant mistress of cynical satire. Among her numerous suitors, the rough, uncouth
“OH, Heaven,it is mysterious,it is awful to considerthat we not only carry a future Ghost within us. butare,in very deed, GHOSTS !”
“Thirty million, mostly fools.[When asked the population of England]”
“I've got a great ambition to die of exhaustion rather than boredom.”
“One life - a little gleam of Time between two Eternities.”
“In every object there is inexhaustible meaning.”
“Fool! The Ideal is in thyself, the impediment too is in thyself: thy Condition is but the stuff thou art to shape that same Ideal out of: what matters whether such stuff be of this sort or that, so the Form thou give it be heroic, be poetic? O thou that pinest in the imprisonment of the Actual, and criest bitterly to the gods for a kingdom wherein to rule and create, know this of a truth: the thing thou seekest is already with thee, ‘here or nowhere,’ couldst thou only see!”
“Look around you. Your world-hosts are all in mutiny, in confusion, destitution; on the eve of fiery wreck and madness! They will not march farther for you, on the sixpence a day and supply-demand principle; they will not; nor ought they, nor can they. Ye shall reduce them to order, begin reducing them. to order, to just subordination; noble loyalty in return for noble guidance. Their souls are driven nigh mad; let yours be sane and ever saner.”
“If you are ever in doubt as to whether or not you should kiss a pretty girl, always give her the benefit of the doubt.”
“Fame is no sure test of merit.”
“Man is a tool using animal. Without tools he is nothing, with tools he is all.”
“Of all the acts of man, repentance is the most divine. The greatest of all faults . . . is to be conscious of none." (Thomas Carlyle)”
“Have a purpose in life, and having it, throw into your work such strength of mind and muscle as God has given you.”
“A Dandy is a clothes-wearing Man, a Man whose trade, office and existence consists in the wearing of clothes.”
“Every noble work is at first impossible.”
“Wonder is the basis of worship.”
“My books are friends that never fail me."(Letter to his mother, Margaret A. Carlyle; 17 March 1817)”
“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.”
“Surely of all ‘rights of man’, this right of the ignorant man to be guided by the wiser, to be, gently or forcibly, held in the true course by him, is the indisputablest.”
“History is the essence of innumerable biographies.”
“Our main business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand. ”
“Tell a man he is brave, and you help him to become so.”
“Show me the man you honor, and I will know what kind of man you are”
“Of all the paths a man could strike into, there is, at any given moment, a best path .. A thing which, here and now, it were of all things wisest for him to do .. To find this path, and walk in it, is the one thing needful for him.”
“If Jesus Christ were to come today, people would not even crucify him. They would ask him to dinner, and hear what he had to say, and make fun of it.”
“No man lives without jostling and being jostled; in all ways he has to elbow himself through the world, giving and receiving offense.”
“Wondrous indeed is the virtue of a true Book.”
“Literature, so far as it is Literature, is an ‘apocalypse of Nature,’ a revealing of the ‘open secret.”
“A loving heart is the beginning of all knowledge.”
“Wondrous is the strength of cheerfulness, and its power of endurance - the cheerful man will do more in the same time, will do it better, will preserve it longer, than the sad or sullen.”
“Popular opinion is the greatest lie in the world. ”
“The greatest of faults is to be conscious of none.”
“In a controversy, the instant we feel anger we have already ceased striving for the truth, and have begun striving for ourselves.”
“Music is well said to be the speech of angels.”
“Men do less than they ought, unless they do all they can.”
“Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together.”
“All that mankind has done, thought, gained, or been; it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books.”
“History of the world is the biography of the great man. And I said: The great man always act like a thunder. He storms the skies, while others are waiting to be stormed.”
“In books lies the soul fo the whole past time.”
“Look to be treated by others as you have treated others.”
“The true University of these days is a Collection of Books.”
“A good book is the purest essence of a human soul.”
“May blessings be upon the head of Cadmus, the Phoenicians, or whoever it was that invented books.”
“When the oak is felled the whole forest echoes with its fall, but a hundred acorns are sown in silence by an unnoticed breeze.”
“Make yourself an honest man, and then you may be sure that there is one less scoundrel in the world.”
“The tragedy of life is not so much whatmen suffer, but rather what they miss.”
“The merit of originality is not novelty; it is sincerity.”
“Una vez despertado el pensamiento no vuelve a dormitar.”
“Adversity is the diamond dust Heaven polishes its jewels with”
“The best effect of any book is that it excites the reader to self activity.”
“Conviction is worthless unless it is converted into conduct.”