Thomas Carlyle
Scottish essayist and historianWikipedia
615
MENTIONS
103
EPISODES
89
PODCASTS
Search complete. 615 mentions across 103 episodes found for "Thomas Carlyle".
Sep 11, 2026
Megan McArdleHOST
So I wanna test out the great man theory of history on you, uh, which you've written about-
Dan JonesGUEST
Oh, gosh, Thomas Carlyle [laughs]
Megan McArdleHOST
... and which [laughs] I find, I find I've, y- it's an eternal debate.
Megan McArdleHOST
It'll probably never be, uh, resolved, but-
speaker_6NARRATOR
Of contemporary literature, philosophy, and politics, he appeared to know next to nothing.
speaker_6NARRATOR
Upon my quoting Thomas Carlyle, he inquired in the naivest way who he might be and what he had done.
speaker_6NARRATOR
My surprise reached a climax, however, when I found incidentally that he was ignorant of the Copernican theory and of the composition of the solar system.
speaker_6NARRATOR
That any civilized human being in his nineteenth century should not be aware that the earth travelled around the sun appeared to be to me such an extraordinary fact that I could hardly realize it.
Jill PrestonNARRATOR
Without it, the richest girl is poor.
Jill PrestonNARRATOR
In the main, the power of winning friends and love depends upon two things, behavior and manners.
Jill PrestonNARRATOR
Between these there is an important distinction, but one is the outgrowth of the other.
Jill PrestonNARRATOR
The root of good manners is good behavior.
Jill PrestonNARRATOR
Consider with me for a little what each implies.
Jill PrestonNARRATOR
Behavior is a revealer of real character.
Jill PrestonNARRATOR
One of the greatest blemishes in the character of any young person, especially of any young girl or woman,
Beverly ScottNARRATOR
is forwardness, boldness, pertness.
speaker_0HOST
So if you're sensible, you set out to follow a trail blazed by someone who is truly great, someone really worth imitating, so that even if you're not on the same level yourself, at least you'll reflect a little of his brilliance.
speaker_0HOST
Thomas Carlyle thought the same, and his theory of history, the great man theory, posited that history was shaped by the few, not the many.
speaker_0HOST
World history was but the biography of great men.
speaker_0HOST
But he believed all of us can benefit from their study.
Laurie Ann WaldenNARRATOR
The autograph MS, preserved in the Bibliothèque Nationale at Paris, is made up of scraps of paper of all shapes and sizes, written often on both sides, and dealing with all sorts of subjects.
Laurie Ann WaldenNARRATOR
One is reminded of the mythical scraps of manuscript from which the genius of Carlyle distilled the philosophy of the sagacious Teufelstrache.
Laurie Ann WaldenNARRATOR
but it is in these detached fragments that pascal has expressed his spiritual and intellectual struggles they contain his philosophy of life and however unsystematic in arrangement they do reveal a fairly definite temper and attitude of mind pascal's philosophy in the first place the thoughts voice a reaction against the cartesian intellectualism which was then the prevalent tendency in scientific and philosophical circles the last attainment of reason is to recognize that there is an infinity of things beyond it might perhaps have been published by pascal's predecessors To laugh at philosophy is to be a true philosopher would have seemed like blasphemy or nonsense to most of his contemporaries, but it was neither of these.
Laurie Ann WaldenNARRATOR
Behind sayings of this description lay the strong conviction that mere logic was incapable of probing the depths of existence.
1 HR 49 MINS LATER
Laurie Ann WaldenNARRATOR
And he may be said, by so doing, to have written Phineas at the foot of a chapter in the history of philosophy.
Laurie Ann WaldenNARRATOR
Reactions in Philosophy Vicissitudes of Idealism At the beginning of the last chapter we noticed the early collapse of idealism in Germany, but the prophets of Romanticism, when they were no longer honored at home, found a hospitable reception elsewhere, and especially in England.
Laurie Ann WaldenNARRATOR
Indeed, even before the prestige of idealism had begun to decline in Germany, Englishmen had been introduced to it by the writings and translations of S. T. Coleridge, 1772-1834, and Thomas Carlyle, 1795-1881.
speaker_4ADVERTISER
You know what? It sucks to be bored.
speaker_1NARRATOR
For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 1, by Elbert Hubbard.
speaker_1NARRATOR
Thomas Carlyle, Part 1.
speaker_1NARRATOR
One comfort is that great men taken up in any way are profitable company.
speaker_1NARRATOR
We cannot look, however imperfectly, upon a great man without gaining something by it.
6 MINS LATER
speaker_1NARRATOR
This worthy man looked with small favor on the literary pretensions of his brother, Thomas, and twice wrote him long letters expostulating with him on his religious vagaries.
speaker_1NARRATOR
"I knew no good could come of it," sorrowfully said he, "and so I left him.
speaker_1NARRATOR
But I inquired of several of the neighbors what they thought of Thomas Carlyle, and I found that they did not think of him at all, and I mounted my beast and rode away." Thomas Carlyle was educated for the Kirk, and it was a cause of much sorrow to his parents that he could not accept its beliefs.
speaker_1NARRATOR
He has been spoken of as England's chief philosopher, and yet he subscribed to no creed, nor did he formulate one.
Phil ChenevertNARRATOR
Of contemporary literature, philosophy, and politics he appeared to know next to nothing.
Phil ChenevertNARRATOR
Upon my quoting Thomas Carlyle he inquired in the naivest way who he might be and what he had done.
Phil ChenevertNARRATOR
My surprise reached a climax, however, when I found incidentally that he was ignorant of the Copernican theory and of the composition of the solar system.
Phil ChenevertNARRATOR
That any civilised human being in this nineteenth century should not be aware that the earth travelled round the sun appeared to be to me such an extraordinary fact that I could hardly realise it.
Peter RobinsonHOST
Just give me a moment to set it up.
Peter RobinsonHOST
We have Thomas Carlyle in 1841 famously saying, the history of the world is but the biography of great men.
Peter RobinsonHOST
And then we have, by the mid-20th century, a kind of counterreaction to the great man theory.
Peter RobinsonHOST
The historian who comes to my mind is Ferdinand Braudel, the French historian.
Peter RobinsonHOST
Uh, just give me a moment to set it up.
Peter RobinsonHOST
We have Thomas Carlyle in 1841 famously saying, "The history of the world is but the biography of great men." And then we have in, by the mid-20th century, a kind of counterreaction to the great man theory.
Peter RobinsonHOST
The historian who comes to my mind is Fernand Braudel, the French historian.
Peter RobinsonHOST
He writes a 1949 classic, The Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, in which Philip II barely appears.
Martin GeesonNARRATOR
And although we have some experience of living, there is not a man on earth who has flown so high into abstraction as to have any practical guess at the meaning of the word life.
Martin GeesonNARRATOR
All literature, from Job and Omar Khayyam to Thomas Carlyle or Walt Whitman, is but an attempt to look upon the human state with such largeness of view as shall enable us to rise from the consideration of living to the definition of life.
Martin GeesonNARRATOR
And our sages give us about the best satisfaction in their power when they say that it is a vapor, or a show, or made out of the same stuff with dreams.
Martin GeesonNARRATOR
Philosophy, in its more rigid sense, has been at the same work for ages, and after a myriad bald heads have wagged over the problem, and piles of words have been heaped one upon another into dry and cloudy volumes without end, philosophy has the honor of laying before us, with modest pride, her contribution towards the subject, that life is a permanent possibility of sensation.
93 more episodes mention Thomas Carlyle.
Create an account to see the whole feed, search across every transcript, and follow the entities you care about.