Quote#Poetry
There is no heroic poem in the world but is at bottom a biography,…
Quote byThomas Carlyle · 1795–1881
Commonly attributed — not confirmed in an authoritative edition. Cited on Wikiquote to: Sir Walter Scott (1838).
English (original)
There is no heroic poem in the world but is at bottom a biography, the life of a man; also, it may be said, there is no life of a man, faithfully recorded, but is a heroic poem of its sort, rhymed or unrhymed.
— Thomas Carlyle
More from Thomas Carlyle
The weakest living creature, by concentrating his powers on a single object, can accomplish something. The strongest, by dispensing his over many, may fail to accomplish anything. The drop, by continually falling, bores its passage through …
Speech is human, silence is divine, yet also brutish and dead: therefore we must learn both arts.
Again, and again, we say, the great, the creative and enduring is ever a secret to itself; only the small, the barren and transient is otherwise.
[I am] fast becoming a patriot of the most decided stamp. Scornfully as I used to speak and think of Scotland in my hours of bitterness and irritation, I never fail to stand up manfully in defence of it thro' thick and thin, whenever a …
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.
A man's honest, earnest opinion is the most precious of all he possesses: let him communicate this, if he is to communicate anything.