Il n'appartient qu'aux grands hommes d'avoir de grands défauts.
Maxim 190.
Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims (1665–1678)
Il n'appartient qu'aux grands hommes d'avoir de grands défauts.
“We confess to little faults only to persuade ourselves we have no great ones.”
Nous n'avouons de petits défauts que pour persuader que nous n'en avons pas de grands.
Maxim 327.
Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims (1665–1678)
“He has great tranquility of heart who cares neither for the praises nor the fault-finding of men.”
Magnam habet cordis tranquillitatem, qui nec laudes curat, nec vituperia. — Thomas à Kempis, Imitation of Christ (ca. 1418), book II, ch. VI, paragraph 2.
Misattributed
Source: Doctor Zhivago
“The world's great men have not commonly been great scholars, nor its great scholars great men.”
The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1858)
“It is only great men who take up a great space by not being there.”
Lecture at the University of Notre Dame (13 October 1930), as quoted in notes taken by Professor Richard Baker, of the University of Dayton, and published in The Chesterton Review (Winter/Spring 1977)
“Men are only as great as they are kind.”
“It has been the great fault of our politicians that they have all wanted to do something.”
Source: Phineas Finn (1869), Ch. 13
Quoted in the Congressional Record, 11 December 1971 http://books.google.com/books?id=ltuwtwQcKHwC&q=%22There+are+no+great+men+there+are%22+%22only+great+challenges+which+ordinary+men+like+you+and+me+are++forced+by+circumstances+to+meet%22&pg=PA46480#v=onepage.
