What doth gravity out of his bed at midnight? Shakespeare: King Henry IV. Pt. i. Act ii. Sc. 4. The very essence of gravity was design, and, consequently, deceit; it was a taught trick to gain credit of the world for more sense and knowledge than a man was worth; and that with all its pretensions it was no better, but often worse, than what a French wit had long ago defined it - a mysterious carriage of the body to cover the defects of the mind. 2203 Laurence Sterne: Tristram Shandy. Ch. 11. GREAT BRITAIN. The greatest blunder of her history was committed when George III., by trying to curb the growing liberties of the American colonies, forfeited forever the brightest jewel in the British Crown. 2204 GREATNESS Courtney Kenny: Lecture, St. John's, Newfoundland, Sept. 16, 1886. Home Rule. see Conversation, Failure, Fame, Justice, Poverty, Royalty, Self-Sacrifice, Virtue. Great men are the true men, the men in whom nature has succeeded. They are not extraordinary, they are in the true order. It is the other species of men who are not what they ought to be. 2205 Amiel: Journal, Aug. 13, 1865. (Mrs. Humphrey Ward, Translator.) Great souls care only for what is great, and to the spirit which hovers in the sight of the Infinite any sort of artifice seems a disgraceful puerility. 2206 Amiel: Journal, March 17, 1868. (Mrs. Humphrey Ward, Translator.) Greatness is a spiritual condition worthy to excite love, interest, and admiration; and the outward proof of possessing greatness is, that we excite love, interest, and admiration. 2207 Matthew Arnold: Culture and Anarchy. Sweetness and Light. Greatness, after all, in spite of its name, appears to be not so much a certain size as a certain quality in human lives. It may be present in lives whose range is very small. Phillips Brooks: Sermons. I. The Purpose and Use of Comfort. 2208 No man has come to true greatness who has not felt in some degree that his life belongs to his race, and that what God gives him he gives him for mankind. 2209 Phillips Brooks: Sermons. I. The Purpose and Use of Comfort. Be substantially great in thyself, and more than thou appearest unto others; and let the world be deceived in thee, as they are in the lights of heaven. Hang early plummets upon the heels of pride, and let ambition have but an epicycle and narrow circuit in thee. Measure not thyself by thy morning shadow, but by the extent of thy grave; and reckon thyself above the earth by the line thou must be contented with under it. 2211 2210 Sir Thomas Browne: Christian Morals. Pt. i. Ch. 19. Great men are never sufficiently shown but in struggles. Burke: Hints for an Essay on the Drama. Great men are the inspired (speaking and acting) texts of that divine Book of Revelation whereof a chapter is completed from epoch to epoch, and by some named history. Carlyle: Sartor Resartus. Bk. ii. Ch. 8. Great souls are always loyally submissive, reverent to what is over them: only small, mean souls are otherwise. 2212 2213 Carlyle: Heroes and Hero Worship. The Hero as Man of Letters. The difference between Socrates and Jesus Christ? The great Conscious; the immeasurably great Unconscious. 2214 Carlyle: Thomas Carlyle, First Forty Years, by Froude. Vol. ii. Ch. 16. Journal, Oct. 28, 1833. We have not the love of greatness, but the love of the love of greatness. 2215 Carlyle Essays. Characteristics. (Edinburgh Review, No. cviii. 1831.) The greatest man is he who chooses the right with invincible resolution, who resists the sorest temptations from within and without, who bears the heaviest burdens cheerfully, who is calmest in storms and most fearless under menace and frowns, whose reliance on truth, on virtue, on God, is most unfaltering; and is this a greatness which is apt to make a show, or which is most likely to abound in conspicuous station? 2216 William Ellery Channing: Works. Self-Culture. (Address, Boston, September, 1838.) This is the part of a great man, after he has maturely weighed all circumstances, to punish the guilty, to spare the many, and in every state of fortune not to depart from an upright, virtuous conduct. 2217 Cicero: Offices. Bk. i. (Edmonds, Translator.) A great man is one who affects the mind of his generation. 2218 Disraeli (Earl of Beaconsfield): Coningsby. Bk. iii. Ch. 2. The great man who thinks greatly of himself, is not diminishing that greatness in heaping fuel on his fire. 2219 Isaac Disraeli: Literary Character. Ch. 15. A man in pursuit of greatness feels no little wants. Emerson: Conduct of Life. Culture. 2220 Every great man is a unique. 2221 Emerson Essays. Self-Reliance. Great men are more distinguished by range and extent, than by originality. Great men are they who see that spiritual is stronger than any material force, that thoughts rule the world. 2224 Emerson: Letters and Social Aims. Culture. Progress of Great men do not content us. It is their solitude, not their force, that makes them conspicuous. 2225 Emerson: Miscellanies. Address, Divinity College, Cambridge, Mass., July 15, 1838. Great men, great nations, have not been boasters and buffoons, but perceivers of the terror of life, and have manned themselves to face it. 2226 Emerson: Conduct of Life. Fate. He is great who is what he is from nature, and who never reminds us of others. 2227 Emerson: Representative Men. Uses of Great Men. Nothing is great but the inexhaustible wealth of nature. 2228 Emerson: Letters and Social Aims. Resources. Nothing is more simple than greatness; indeed, to be simple is to be great. 2229 Emerson: Miscellanies. Literary Ethics. The great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude. Emerson Essays. Self-Reliance. 2230 We balance one man with his opposite, and the health of the State depends on the see-saw. 2231 Emerson: Representative Men. Uses of Great Men. There was never yet a truly great man that was not at the same time truly virtuous. 2232 Benjamin Franklin: The Busy-Body. No. III. Great names stand not alone for great deeds; they stand also for great virtues, and, doing them worship, we elevate ourselves. 2233 Henry Giles: Lectures and Essays. Patriotism. The greatest truths are the simplest; and so are the greatest men. 2234 J. C. and A. W. Hare: Guesses at Truth. Great men are not the mere products of the times in which they live, the epitome of their age, the creations of those formative currents of thought that are traversing the masses. Great men are the gifts of kind Heaven to our poor world; instruments by which the Highest One works out his designs; light-radiators to give guidance and blessing to the travellers of time. Though far above us, they are felt to be our brothers; and their elevation shows us what vast possibilities are wrapped up in our common humanity. They beckon us up the gleaming heights to whose summits they have climbed. Their deeds are the woof of this world's history. 2235 Moses Harvey: Columbus. (Stewart's Literary Quarterly Magazine, January, 1869.) Great men need to be lifted upon the shoulders of the whole world, in order to conceive their great ideas or perform their great deeds. That is, there must be an atmosphere of greatness round about them. A hero cannot be a hero unless in in heroic world. 2236 Hawthorne: American Note-Books, May 7, 1850. No really great man ever thought himself so. 2237 Hazlitt: Table Talk. Whether Genius is Conscious of its Own Power. Those people who are always improving never become great. Greatness is an eminence, the ascent to which is steep and lofty, and which a man must seize on at once by natural boidness and vigor, and not by patient, wary steps. 2238 As the stars are the glory of the sky, so great men are the glory of their country, yea, of the whole earth. The hearts of great men are the stars of earth; and doubtless when one looks down from above upon our planet, these hearts are seen to send forth a silvery light just like the stars of heaven. 2239 Heine: Wit, Wisdom, and Pathos. The Citizen. Monarchy. Great men are rarely isolated mountain-peaks; they are the summits of ranges. 2240 T. W. Higginson: Atlantic Essays. A Plea for Culture (1867). A great man is a gift, in some measure a revelation of God. A great man, living for high ends, is the divinest thing that can be seen on earth. The value and interest of history are derived chiefly from the lives and services of the eminent men whom it commemorates. Indeed, without these, there would be no such thing as history, and the progress of a nation would be little worth recording, as the march of a trading caravan across a desert. 2241 George S. Hillard: Eulogy, Faneuil Hall, Boston, Great men are among the best gifts which God bestows upon a people. 2242 George S. Hillard: Memorial Meeting to Daniel Webster in Faneuil Hall, Boston, Oct. 25, 1852. He only is great of heart who floods the world with a great affection. He only is great of mind who stirs the world with great thoughts. He only is great of will who does something to shape the world to a great career. And he is greatest who does the most of all these things, and does them best. 2243 Roswell D. Hitchcock: Eternal Atonement. True greatness, first of all, is a thing of the heart. It is all alive with robust and generous sympathies. It is neither behind its age, nor too far before it. It is up with its age, and ahead of it only just so far as to be able to lead its march. It cannot slumber, for activity is a necessity of its existence. It is no reservoir, but a fountain. 2244 Roswell D. Hitchcock: Eternal Atonement. Every great man, of whatever kind be his greatness, has among his friends those who officiously or insidiously quicken his attention to offences, heighten his disgust, and stimulate his resentment. 2245 Johnson: Works. VIII. 266. (Oxford edition, 1825.) No man ever yet became great by imitation. 2246 Johnson: The Rambler. No. 154. The civilities of the great are never thrown away. 2247 Johnson: Works. VI. 446. (Oxford edition, 1825.) The first step to greatness is to be honest. 2248 Johnson: Works. VI. 311. (Oxford edition, 1825.) True greatness is sovereign wisdom. We are never deceived by our virtues. 2249 Lamartine: History of the Restoration of Monarchy in France. Bk. xxviii. Ch. 31. (Capt. Rafter, Translator.) A great man knows the value of greatness; he dares not hazard it, he will not squander it. 2250 Landor: Pericles and Aspasia. XIII. Aspasia to Cleone. Dignity without pride was formerly the characteristic of greatness; the revolution in morals is completed, and it is now pride without dignity. 2251 Landor: Imaginary Conversations. Lopez Baños and Romero Alpuente. Greatness, as we daily see it, is unsociable. 2252 Landor: Imaginary Conversations. Demosthenes and Eubulides. |