Quotes
Quotes to inspire and reflect
Manhood and sagacity ripen of themselves; it suffices not to repress or distort them.
3
No single event can awaken within us a stranger totally unknown to us. To live is to be slowly born.
7
Life is cut to allow for growth ... one may vigorously put on weight before one fills it out entirely.
8
One must be thrust out of a finished cycle in life, and that leap [is] the most difficult to make—to part with one’s faith, one’s love, when one would prefer to renew the faith and recreate the passion.
8
Whatever is formed for long duration arrives slowly to its maturity.
5
Every one should keep a mental wastepaper basket and the older he grows the more things he will consign to it—torn up to irrecoverable tatters.
4
Men hate the individual whom they call avaricious only because nothing can be gained from him.
4
The child is not a prisoner of its inheritance; it holds its inheritance as a new creation which its future actions will unfold.
11
Though statisticians in our time have never kept the score, Man wants a great deal here below and Woman even more.
9
Greed’s worst point is its ingratitude.
6
For greed all nature is too little.
7
The covetous man fares worse with his passion than the poor, and the jealous man than the cuckold.
5
Avarice is a cursed vice: offer a man enough gold, and he will part with his own small hoard of food, however great his hunger.
11
Care clings to wealth: the thirst for more / Grows as our fortunes grow.
12
Nothing in the world is so incontinent as a man’s accursed appetite.
15
Riches have made more covetous men than covetousness hath made rich men.
5
If your desires be endless, your cares and fears will be so too.
6
He is not poor that hath not much, but he that craves much.
5
It is not greedy to enjoy a good dinner, any more than it is greedy to enjoy a good concert. But 1 do think there is something greedy about trying to enjoy the dinner and the concert at the same time.
5
We [Greeks] are lovers of the beautiful, yet simple in our tastes, and we cultivate the mind without loss of manliness.
8
Masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.
7
None think the great unhappy but the great.
8
There are only two sorts of greatness: true greatness, which is of a spiritual order, and the old, old lie of world conquest. Conquest is an ersatz greatness.
7
Great men have all been formed either before academies or independent of them.
4
They that stand high have many blasts to shake them.
6
The loftiest edifices need the deepest foundations.
3
A great man need not be virtuous, nor his opinions right, but he must have a firm mind, a distinctive luminous character.
3
All great books contain boring portions, and all great lives have contained uninteresting stretches.
10
Men are like the stars: some generate their own light while others reflect the brilliance they receive.
10
Because a man can write great works he is none the less a man.
6
Great men too make mistakes, and many among them do it so often that one is almost tempted to call them little men.
9
Every great man inevitably resents a partner in greatness.
9
No man was ever great by imitation.
4
To know the great men dead is compensation for having to live with the mediocre.
8
Great men have to be lifted upon the shoulders of the whole world, in order to conceive their great ideas, or perform their great deeds.
8
He who comes up to his own idea of greatness must always have had a very low standard of it in his mind.
6
No great thing is created suddenly.
7
Greatness brings no profit to people. / God indeed, when in anger, brings / greater ruin to great men’s houses.
6
The measure of a master is his success in bringing all men round to his opinion twenty years later.
5
When nature removes a great man, people explore the horizon for a successor; but none comes, and none will. His class is extinguished with him. In some other and quite different field, the next man will appear.
4
Let him be great, and love shall follow him.
6
Desire of greatness is a godlike sin.
8
Great offices will have great talents.
13
Greatness and goodness are not means, but ends.
9
He is greatest who is most often in men’s good thoughts.
3
Men worship the shows of great men; thd most disbelieve that there is any reality of great men to worship.
5
Men in great places are thrice servants: servants of the sovereign or state, servants of fame, and servants of business.
11
Great men are but life-sized. Most of them, indeed, are rather short.
4