Great Men Quotes
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Great men are meteors designed to burn so that earth may be lighted.
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Great men always pay deference to greater.
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I have talked with great men, and I do not see how they differ from others.
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The defects of great men are the consolation of the dunces.
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Great men are always of a nature originally melancholy.
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I looked for great men, but all I found were the apes of their ideals.
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Formerly we used to canonize our heroes. The modern method is to vulgarize them. Cheap editions of great books may be delightful, but cheap editions of great men are absolutely detestable.
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Why do people speak of great men in terms of nationality? Great Germans, great Englishmen? Goethe always protested against being called a German poet. Great men are simply men and are not to be considered from the point of view of nationality, nor should the environment in which they were brought up be taken into account.
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Great men never make bad use of their superiority. They see it and feel it and are not less modest. The more they have, the more they know their own deficiencies.
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Great men are ordinary men with extra ordinary determination.
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All great men are play actors of their own ideal.
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Depend upon it, the first universal characteristic of all great art is Tenderness, as the second is Truth. I find this more and more every day: an infinitude of tenderness is the chief gift and inheritance of all the truly great men. It is sure to involve a relative intensity of disdain towards base things, and an appearance of sternness and arrogance in the eyes of all hard, stupid, and vulgar people.
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Great men are seldom over-scrupulous in the arrangement of their attire.
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In a narrow sphere great men are blunderers.
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Vulgar people take huge delight in the faults and follies of great men.
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A great many people do not have the right to their own opinion because they don't know what they are talking about.
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As a rule, one must write a great many words before one learns to write well.
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I fear uniformity. You cannot manufacture great men any more than you can manufacture gold.
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Great men are the modelers, patterns, and in a wide sense creators, of whatsoever the general mass of men contrived to do and attain.
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Among the great men who have philosophized about [the action of the tides], the one who surprised me most is Kepler. He was a person of independent genius, [but he] became interested in the action of the moon on the water, and in other occult phenomena, and similar childishness.
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A wise man ought always to follow the paths beaten by great men, and to imitate those who have been supreme, so that if his ability does not equal theirs, at least it will savor of it. Let him act like the clever archers who, designing to hit the mark which yet appears too far distant, and knowing the limits to which the strength of their bow attains, take aim much higher than the mark, not to reach by their strength or arrow to so great a height, but to be able with the aid of so high an aim to hit the mark they wish to reach.
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Truly great men must, I think, experience great sorrow on the earth.
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Beware the Lure of a handsome Face, the all too ready Assumption that the lovely Façade must needs have lovely Chambers within; for as 'tis with Great Houses, so, too, with Great Men.
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Universal history, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here.
