Sartor Resartus, and on Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History
Sartor Resartus, and on Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History
Sartor Resartus is the strangest great book ever written. Thomas Carlyle invents a fictitious German professor, Diogenes Teufelsdröckh, to deliver a radical proposition: all human institutions, religions, governments, and social forms are 'clothes' we have invented to cover our spiritual nakedness. What begins as a bizarre meditation on actual garments becomes a ferocious attack on the hollow sham of modern industrial society. Carlyle's prose detonates in every direction - furious, satirical, tender, and messianic by turns. The book is part fiction, part autobiography, part philosophical explosion, and it influenced everything from Victorian literature to modern critical theory. It demands a reader willing to struggle with its difficulty, its humor, and its earnest anguish over what remains meaningful when old certainties have rotted away. The companion lectures on hero-worship extend this argument: Carlyle believed humanity is saved not by institutions but by great individuals who embody truth. Read it if you want to understand how the Victorians saw themselves, or if you want a book that refuses to let you comfortable.
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“What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books.””
— Thomas Carlyle
“Make yourself an honest man, and then you may be sure that there is one less scoundrel in the world.””
— Thomas Carlyle
“The lies (Western slander) which well-meaning zeal has heaped round this man (Muhammad) are disgraceful to ourselves only.””
— Thomas Carlyle
“The true University of these days is a Collection of Books.””
— Thomas Carlyle
“It is a great shame for anyone to listen to the accusation that Islam is a lie and that Muhammad was a fabricator and a deceiver. We saw that he remained steadfast upon his principles, with firm determination; kind and generous, compassionate, pious, virtuous, with real manhood, hardworking and sincere. Besides all these qualities, he was lenient with others, tolerant, kind, cheerful and praiseworthy and perhaps he would joke and tease his companions. He was just, truthful, smart, pure, magnanimous and present-minded; his face was radiant as if he had lights within him to illuminate the darkest of nights; he was a great man by nature who was not educated in a school nor nurtured by a teacher as he was not in need of any of this.””
— Thomas Carlyle
“In books lies the soul fo the whole past time.””
— Thomas Carlyle
“There needs not a great soul to make a hero; there needs a god-created soul which will be true to its origin; that will be a great soul!””
— Thomas Carlyle
“You may take my purse; but I cannot have my moral Self annihilated. The purse is any Highwayman's who might meet me with a loaded pistol: but the Self is mine and God my Maker's; it is not yours; and I will resist you to the death, and revolt against you ...””
— Thomas Carlyle
“Intellect is not speaking and logicising; it is seeing and ascertaining.””
— Thomas Carlyle
