Themes

"Les grands ne sont grands que parceque nous, les portons sur nos épaules; nous n'avons qu' à les secouer pour en joncher la terre."

"That man is great, and he alone, Who serves a greatness not his own, For neither praise nor pelf: Content to know and be unknown: Whole in himself."

"The great man is he who does not lose his child's heart."

"If any man seeks for greatness, let him forget greatness and ask for truth, and he will find both."

"A great man is made up of qualities that meet or make great occasions."

"Great men stand like solitary towers in the city of God."

"The great man is the man who can get himself made and who will get himself made out of anything he finds at hand."

"Il n'appartient qu'aux grands hommes d'avoir de grands défauts."

"Great is advertisement! 'tis almost fate; But, little mushroom-men, of puff-ball fame. Ah, do you dream to be mistaken great And to be really great are just the same?"

"Greatnesse on goodnesse loves to slide, not stand, And leaves, for fortune's ice, vertue's firme land."

"Urit enim fulgore suo qui prægravat artes Intra se positas; extinctus amabitur idem."

"For he that once is good, is ever great."

"Ajax the great * * * Himself a host."

"No really great man ever thought himself so."

"He who comes up to his own idea of greatness, must always have had a very low standard of it in his mind."

"Nature never sends a great man into the planet, without confiding the secret to another soul."

"He is great who is what he is from Nature, and who never reminds us of others."

"So let his name through Europe ring! A man of mean estate, Who died as firm as Sparta's king, Because his soul was great."

"The great man who thinks greatly of himself, is not diminishing that greatness in heaping fuel on his fire."

"Nemo vir magnus aliquo afflatu divino unquam fuit."

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

"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."

"Nothing can cover his high fame but heaven; No pyramids set off his memories, But the eternal substance of his greatness,— To which I leave him."

"High stations, tumult, but not bliss, create; None think the great unhappy, but the great."

"There was never a nation great until it came to the knowledge that it had nowhere in the world to go for help."

"This is the bare chronology of as great an American as ever lived. Ten thousand pages would be required to fill in the full story of his talents, his genius and his impact upon the foundation of America. He was ever the subject of white-heat controversy—in death even as in life. But for myself, summing it all up, I say that five words might be his epitaph: THE REPUBLIC IS HIS MONUMENT."

"I sought for the greatness and genius of America in her commodious harbors and her ample rivers—and it was not there … in her fertile fields and boundless forests—and it was not there … in her rich mines and her vast world commerce—and it was not there … in her democratic Congress and her matchless Constitution—and it was not there. Not until I went into the churches of America and heard her pulpits flame with righteousness did I understand the secret of her genius and power. America is great because she is good, and if America ever ceases to be good, America will cease to be great."

"The weak shows his strength and hides his weaknesses; the magnificent exhibits his weaknesses like ornaments."

"There is but one method, and that is hard labour;[…] there is but one mode of being intellectually great."

"There are two alternatives, and only two, before us. First, which is unlikely, is that we unscramble our modern interdependent culture, returning to separate and isolationist lives … Such a world would not demand greatness. The other alternative is to so expand our spiritual powers that we vastly increase the range of our understanding and sympathy. There is no middle way. It is greatness — universalism — or perish."

"In my stars I am above thee, but be not afraid of greatness. Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon 'em."

"Be not afraid of greatness: some men are born great, some achieve greatness and some have greatness thrust upon them."

"They that stand high have many blasts to shake them; And if they fall, they dash themselves to pieces."

"Your name is great In mouths of wisest censure."

"But thou art fair, and at thy birth, dear boy, Nature and Fortune join'd to make thee great."

"Are yet two Romans living such as these? The last of all the Romans, fare thee well!"

"Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world Like a Colossus, and we petty men Walk under his huge legs and peep about To find ourselves dishonorable graves."

"Farewell! a long farewell, to all my greatness! This is the state of man: to-day he puts forth The tender leaves of hope; to-morrow blossoms, And bears his blushing honours thick upon him: The third day comes a frost, a killing frost, And, when he thinks, good easy man, full surely His greatness is a-ripening, nips his root, And then he falls, as I do."

"I have touched the highest point of all my greatness: And, from that full meridian of my glory, I haste now to my setting."

"Greatness knows itself."

"Great men, great events, great epochs, it has been said, grow as we recede from them; and the rate at which they grow in the estimate of men is in some sort a measure of their greatness."

"As if Misfortune made the throne her seat, And none could be unhappy but the great."

"If we are to be a really great people, we must strive in good faith to play a great part in the world. We cannot avoid meeting great issues. All that we can determine for ourselves is whether we shall meet them well or ill."

"Satan unavoidably reminds us of Prometheus, and although there are essential differences, we are not made to feel them essential. His very situation as the fearless antagonist of Omnipotence makes him either a fool or a hero, and Milton is far indeed from permitting us to think him a fool. The nobility and greatness of his bearing are brought home to us in some half-dozen of the finest poetic passages in the world."

"I do not admire a virtue like valour when it is pushed to excess, if I do not see at the same time the excess of the opposite virtue, as one does in Epaminondas, who displayed extreme valour and extreme benevolence. For otherwise it is not an ascent, but a fall. We do not display our greatness by placing ourselves at one extremity, but rather by being at both at the same time, and filling up the whole of the space between them."

"Of what is great one must either be silent or speak with greatness. With greatness — that means cynically and with innocence."

"Are not great Men the models of nations?"

"No one should be astonished if in the following discussion of completely new princedoms and of the prince and of government, I bring up the noblest examples. Because, since men almost always walk in the paths beaten by others and carry on their affairs by imitating—even though it is not possible to keep wholly in the paths of others or to attain the ability of those you imitate—a prudent man will always choose to take paths beaten by great men and to imitate those who have been especially admirable, in order that if his ability does not reach theirs, at least it may offer some suggestion of it; and he will act like prudent archers, who, seeing that the mark they plan to hit is too far away and knowing what space can be covered by the power of their bows, take an aim much higher than their mark, not in order to reach with their arrows so great a height, but to be able, with the aid of so high an aim, to attain their purpose."

"We spend our lives fighting to get people very slightly more stupid than ourselves to accept truths that the great men have always known. They have known for thousands of years that to lock a sick person into solitary confinement makes him worse. They have known for thousands of years that a poor man who is frightened of his landlord and of the police is a slave. They have known it. We know it. But do the great enlightened mass of the British people know it? No. It is our task, Ella, yours and mine, to tell them. Because the great men are too great to be bothered. They are already discovering how to colonise Venus and to irrigate the moon. That is what is important for our time. You and I are the boulder-pushers. All our lives, you and I, we’ll put all our energies, all our talents into pushing a great boulder up a mountain. The boulder is the truth that the great men know by instinct, and the mountain is the stupidity of mankind."

"Four things greater than all things are,— Women and Horses and Power and War."