“The conformation of his mind was such that whatever was little seemed to him great, and whatever was great seemed to him little.”
On Horace Walpole (1833)
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Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay 101
British historian and Whig politician 1800–1859Related quotes
The Hour of the Dragon (1935-1936)
“Nothing is little to him that feels it with great sensibility.”
July 20, 1762
Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), Vol I
Sixth Talk in New Delhi (31 October 1956) http://www.jkrishnamurti.org/krishnamurti-teachings/view-text.php?tid=570&chid=4889&w=%22It+seems+to+me+that+the+real+problem+is+the+mind+itself%22, J.Krishnamurti Online, JKO Serial No. 561031, Vol. X, p. 155
1950s
Context: It seems to me that the real problem is the mind itself, and not the problem which the mind has created and tries to solve. If the mind is petty, small, narrow, limited, however great and complex the problem may be, the mind approaches that problem in terms of its own pettiness. If I have a little mind and I think of God, the God of my thinking will be a little God, though I may clothe him with grandeur, beauty, wisdom, and all the rest of it. It is the same with the problem of existence, the problem of bread, the problem of love, the problem of sex, the problem of relationship, the problem of death. These are all enormous problems, and we approach them with a small mind; we try to resolve them with a mind that is very limited. Though it has extraordinary capacities and is capable of invention, of subtle, cunning thought, the mind is still petty. It may be able to quote Marx, or the Gita, or some other religious book, but it is still a small mind, and a small mind confronted with a complex problem can only translate that problem in terms of itself, and therefore the problem, the misery increases. So the question is: Can the mind that is small, petty, be transformed into something which is not bound by its own limitations?
Freeman (1948), p. 170
Variant: By desiring little, a poor man makes himself rich.
Part I, Ch. 9
O Pioneers! (1913)
Context: The great fact was the land itself, which seemed to overwhelm the little beginnings of human society that struggled in its sombre wastes. It was from facing this vast hardness that the boy's mouth had become so bitter; because he felt that men were too weak to make any mark here, that the land wanted to be let alone, to preserve its own fierce strength, its peculiar, savage kind of beauty, its uninterrupted mournfulness.
Source: The Friends of Voltaire (1906), Ch. 2 : Diderot : The Talker, p. 61
Source: Letter to Thomas Wentworth, 1st Earl of Strafford (8 October 1638), quoted in The Works of the Most Reverend Father in God, William Laud, sometime Lord Archbishop of Canterbury. Volume VII—Letters (1860), p. 489