"The Beggars" in The William Saroyan Reader (1958)
Context: Every man alive in the world is a beggar of one sort or another, every last one of them, great and small. The priest begs God for grace, and the king begs something for something. Sometimes he begs the people for loyalty, sometimes he begs God to forgive him. No man in the world can have endured ten years without having begged God to forgive him.
“Great and little cannot understand one another. But in every child born of man, Father Redwood, lurks some seed of greatness — waiting for the Food.”
The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth (1904) - Online PDF and Epub http://books.google.com/books?id=VOyeAAAAIAAJ
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H. G. Wells 142
English writer 1866–1946Related quotes
“Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon 'em.”
Malvolio, Act II, scene v.
Variant: Some are born great, others achieve greatness.
Source: Twelfth Night (1601)
Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 123.
“Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some hire public relations officers.”
As quoted in Book of Humorous Quotations (1998), by Connie Robertson, p. 29.
“The great man is the one who does not lose his child's heart.”
Book 4, pt. 2, v. 12
Variant translations by Lin Yutang:
A great man is one who has not lost the child's heart.
A great man is he who has not lost the heart of a child.
The Mencius
“The great man is not the child of his age but its step-child.”
[paraphrasing Nietzsche] p. 11
An Essay on Aristocratic Radicalism (1889)
“I know you understand the little child inside of your man.”
"Woman"
Lyrics, Double Fantasy (1980)