"As a madman is apt to think himself grown suddenly great, so he that grows suddenly great is apt to borrow a little from the madman."
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Greatness quotes
Greatness
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Greatness quotes (page 36 of 94)
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"We cannot do great deeds unless we're willing to do the small things that make up the sum of greatness."
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"It is by no means necessary that a great nation should always stand at the heroic level. But no nation has the root of greatness in it unless in time of need it can rise to the heroic mood."
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"When great nations fear to expand, shrink from expansion, it is because their greatness is coming to an end. Are we, still in the prime of our lusty youth, still at the beginning of our glorious manhood, to sit down among the outworn people, to take our place with the weak and the craven? A thousand times no!"
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"If we are to be 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."
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"The stream will not permanently rise higher than the main source; and the main source of national power and national greatness is found in the average citizenship of the nation. Therefore it behooves us to do our best to see that the standard of the average citizen is kept high; and the average cannot be kept high unless the standard of the leaders is very much higher."
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"Much has been given us, and much will rightfully be expected from us. We have duties to others and duties to ourselves; and we can shirk neither. We have become a great nation, forced by the fact of its greatness into relations with other nations of the earth, and we must behave as beseems a people with such responsibilities."
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"And it is through strife and the readiness for strife that a man or a nation must win greatness. So, let the world know that we are here and willing to pour out our blood, our treasure, our tears. And that America is ready and if need be desirous of battle"
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"For a thousand years no king in Christendom has shown such greatness or given so high a type of manly virtue."
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"To restore man, who had been laid low by sin, to the heights of divine glory, the Word of the eternal Father, though containing all things within His immensity, willed to become small. This He did not by putting aside His greatness but by taking to Himself our littleness."
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"It is great, and there is no other greatness-to make one nook of God's Creation more fruitful, better, more worthy of God; to make some human heart a little wiser, manlier, happier-more blessed."
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"We are to remember what an umpire Nature is; what a greatness, composure of depth and tolerance there is in her. You take wheat to cast into the Earth's bosom; your wheat may be mixed with chaff, chopped straw, barn-sweepings, dust and all imaginable rubbish; no matter: you cast it into the kind just Earth; she grows the wheat, - the whole rubbish she silently absorbs, shrouds it in, says nothing of the rubbish."
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"Man's Unhappiness, as I construe, comes of his Greatness; it is because there is an Infinite in him, with which all his cunning he cannot quite bury under the Finite... Try him with half of a Universe, of an Omnipotence, he sets to quarreling with the proprietor of the other half, and declares himself the most maltreated of men. Always there is a black spot in our sunshine: It is even, as I said, the Shadow of Ourselves."
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"Men worship the shows of great men; the most disbelieve that there is any reality of great men to worship."
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"Whose best and most fruitful gift was the power of admiration, which made it possible for me to learn. Now, as in my youth, I am looking up to the truly great creations of the past, which I see high above my own and which alone deserve the name of greatness."
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"There are some men who are counted great because they represent the actuality of their own age, and mirror it as it is. Such an one was Voltaire, of whom it was epigrammatically said: "he expressed everybody's thoughts better than anyone." But there are other men who attain greatness because they embody the potentiality of their own day and magically reflect the future. They express the thoughts which will be everybody's two or three centuries after them. Such as one was Descartes."
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"To fear the Lord is to be overwhelmed with wonder before the greatness of God and his love."
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"Prayer is a recognition of the greatness of our God."
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"In a musically imperfect world, there is still perfection in the voice of Barbara Cook. For anyone eulogizing the historic scores of a long-lost era of Broadway greatness, not to worry. Somebody is still singing them with purity and passion. She is Barbara Cook, and she sings them for the angels to applaud."
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"There is as much greatness of mind in the owning of a good turn as in the doing of it; and we must no more force a requital out of season than be wanting in it."
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