Quotes about greatness

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“I'm putting up a great front, then because I feel like I'm breaking apart inside.”

“A great deal of the chaos in the world occurs because people don't appreciate themselves.”

“The great motherhood friendships are the ones in which two women can admit [how difficult mothering is] quietly to each other, over cups of tea at a table sticky with spilled apple juice and littered with markers without tops.”

“It really seems to me that in the midst of great tragedy, there is always the horrible possibility that something terribly funny will happen.”

“Great, they give blind kids guns," I said, trying to lessen his horror. "I don't even let Iggy have a gun. Usually.”

“One thing about great art: it made you love people more, forgive them their petty transgressions. It worked in the way that religion was supposed to, if you thought about it.”

“To see the madness and yet walk a perfect silver line…. That's what the true story-teller should be: a great guide, a clear mind, who can walk a silver line in hell or madness.”

“A great photograph is one that fully expresses what one feels, in the deepest sense, about what is being photographed.”

“All great spirituality is about what we do with our pain.”

“Still, it would have been great, just once, to have a man stare at her with total adoration. To have him be… enthralled. Yes, that was the word. She would have loved for a man to be enthralled by her.”

“We’re conditioned to think that our lives revolve around great moments. But great moments often catch us unaware – beautifully wrapped in what others may consider a small one.”

“Their position seems to be that their God is so great he doesn't even have to exist.”

“Great. Now I have to go back and tell Haymitch I want an eighty-year-old and Nuts and Volts for my allies. He'll love that.”

“Until you have done something for humanity,” wrote the great American educator Horace Mann, “you should be ashamed to die.”

“Have faith in the Yankees my son. Think of the great DiMaggio.”

“Lunatics have no age. If we were crazy, you and I, we might be a great deal younger.”

“Damn you, Sassenach!" his voice said, from a very great distance. His voice was choked with passion. "Dam you! I swear if ye die on me, I'll kill you!”

“Music is the great uniter. An incredible force. Something that people who differ on everything and anything else can have in common.”

“I'm Switzerland; neutral as can be, and also with great chocolate.”

“An animal's eyes have the power to speak a great language.”

“The fossil record implies trial and error, an inability to anticipate the future, features inconsistent with an efficient Great Designer.”

“You'll be on your way up!
You'll be seeing great sights!
You'll join the high fliers
who soar to high heights.”

“Don't you long for something different to happen, something so exciting and new it carries you along with it like a great tide, something that lets your life blaze and burn so the whole world can see it?”

“The United States and Great Britain are two countries separated by a common language.”

“I really had a lot of dreams when I was a kid, and I think a great deal of that grew out of the fact that I had a chance to read a lot.”

“What a great thing, to be loved! What a greater thing still, to love! The heart becomes heroic though passion…if no one loved, the sun would go out.”

“Learning to ignore things is one of the great paths to inner peace.”

“It takes great courage to back truth unacceptable to our times. There's a punishment for it and it's usually crucifixion.”

“She would bring you some great book because she was a book matchmaker, because she loved books the way other girls loved clothes.”

“Our Ford himself did a great deal to shift the emphasise from truth and beauty to comfort and hapiness. Mass production demanded the shift. Universal happiness keeps the wheels steadily turning; truth and beauty can't.”

“The happiness consists in realizing that it is all a great strange dream.”

“My idea of good company, Mr. Eliot, is the company of clever, well-informed people who have a great deal of conversation; that is what I call good company.”

“She still cared for me, and the best way I could make amends to her was to be happy.

I do have a knack for finding great women.”

“There was one great tomb more lordly than all the rest; huge it was, and nobly proportioned. On it was but one word, DRACULA.”

“As regards intellectual work it remains a fact, indeed, that great decisions in the realm of thought and momentous discoveries and solutions of problems are only possible to an individual, working in solitude.”

“Religion is the great balm of existence because it takes us outside ourselves, connects us to something larger”

“Great beauty is often perceived by human senses as pain.”

“This is a great idea,” said Trey. “You kids should totaly go see that play. Make a whole day of it. Grab some dinner and hang out at the library or whatever it is you do for fun.”

“We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality" says Iris Murdoch.
But given the state of the world, is it wise?”

“When God wants to make a mushroom, he does it overnight, but when He wants to make a giant oak, He takes a hundred years. Great souls are grown through struggles and storms and seasons of suffering. Be patient with the process.”

“[Knowing how to suffer without complaining is the only practical thing, it's the great science, the lesson to learn, the solution to the problem of life. ]”

“Like all Herondales, his ability to love without measure, without end, was both his great gift and his great curse.”

“There is a loneliness in this world so great that you can see it in the slow movement of the hands of a clock. People so tired, mutilated either by love or no love.”

“The less people speak of their greatness, the more we think of it.”

“Truly great people emit a light that warms the hearts of those around them. When that light has been put out, a heavy shadow of despair descends.”

“In ordinary life we hardly realize that we receive a great deal more than we give, and that it is only with gratitude that life becomes rich.”

“My first kiss and I'm comatose. Great.”

“Dogs are great. Bad dogs, if you can really call them that, are perhaps the greatest of them all.”

“We can get you a throne with snakes. I’ll stand next to you and roar at anybody who fails to grovel. Fear Kate Daniels. She is a mighty and terrible ruler. Grendel can anoint the petitioners with his vomit. It’ll be great…”

“To make great art, you had to expose your soul, and some things should be left safely in the dark.”

“Geometry has two great treasures: one is the Theorem of Phythagoras, the other the division of a line in extreme and mean ratio. The first we can compare to a mass of gold; the other we may call a precious jewel.”

“Living well is an art that can be developed: a love of life and ability to take great pleasure from small offerings and assurance that the world owes you nothing and that every gift is exactly that, a gift.”

“When we recall Christmas past, we usually find that the simplest things - not the great occasions - give off the greatest glow of happiness.”

“So, great. This is Camp…what do you call it? Camp Fish-Blood?”
Aphros frowned. “I hope that was a joke. This is Camp __________.” He made a sound that was a series of sonar pings and hisses.”

“If a man has any greatness in him, it comes to light, not in one flamboyant hour, but in the ledger of his daily work.”

“Let's be off before he gets his great horsey teeth into my poor lines of verse!”

“You got guts taking that tone with me. (Nykyrian)
What you gonna do, oh great wounded one? I’m the one with the injector. (Syn)”

“In my great melancholy, I loved life, for I love my melancholy.”

“To see someone you love, in a bad setting, is one of the great barometers of gratitude.”

“Time was a face on the water, and like the great river before them, it did nothing but flow.”

“Did I hurt you in the parking lot?"
"No, m'lady. I fell, so I could put a tracker on your car."
Great.”

“They say - "they" being the great philosophers, or possibly the cast of Seinfeld - that breaking up is like pushing over a Coke machine. You can't just do it, you have to set the thing in motion, rock it back and forth a few times.”

“Great tragedies have great consequences. They ripple through the fabric of this world and the next. When the loss is too great for either world to bear, Everlost absorbs the shock, like a cushion between the two.”

“Yet there be certain times in a young man’s life, when, through great sorrow or sin, all the boy in him is burnt and seared away so that he passes at one step to the more sorrowful state of manhood”

“Great. She shook her head. Not only am I having conversations with myself, but now I'm refusing to talk to me. This has got to be the first sign of madness.”

“I came to America because of the great, great freedom which I heard existed in this country. I made a mistake in selecting America as a land of freedom, a mistake I cannot repair in the balance of my lifetime.”

“Nor did I make any distinctions between great literature and any other kind. I just liked reading.”

“I hopehaven't given up on the S. Q.'s of the world, Reynie. As you see, there are a great many sheep in wolves' clothing. If not for S. Q.'s good nature, we'd never have escaped.”

“[On writing:] "There's a great quote by Julius Irving that went, 'Being a professional is doing the things you love to do, on the days you don't feel like doing them.'"

(, interview with Budd Mishkin;, March 25, 2007.)”

“Being sixteen forever sounded good until you really thought about it. Then it didn't seem like such a great prospect.”

“It is the experiences, the memories, the great triumphant joy of living to the fullest extent in which real meaning is found. God it's great to be alive! Thank you. Thank you.”

“Great restaurants are, of course, nothing but mouth-brothels. There is no point in going to them if one intends to keep one's belt buckled.”

“There are things of such darkness and horror—just, I suppose, as there are things of such great beauty—that they will not fit through the puny human doors of perception.”

“A people that has remained convinced of its greatness and invulnerability, that has chosen to believe such a myth in the face of all the evidence, is a people in the grip of a kind of sleep, or madness.”

“Knowing a great deal is not the same as being smart; intelligence is not information alone but also judgement, the manner in which information is coordinated and used.”

“No one in this world, so far as I know—and I have researched the records for years, and employed agents to help me—has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.”

“I am tempted to think that to be despised by her sex is a very great compliment to a woman.”

“I understand once again that the greatness of God always reveals itself in the simple things.”

“The world, like a great iris of an even more gigantic eye, which has also just opened and stretched out to encompass everything, stared back at him.”

“He sang his last song. And the words of that have never been written down. But it was sweet and of great beauty, and those that heard it were changed utterly.
Some say it was the song that moves the stars.”

“The great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do.”

“Only people who are capable of loving strongly can also suffer great sorrow, but this same necessity of loving serves to counteract their grief and heals them.”

“Ah,' the innkeeper said. 'So you were getting ready to drink then?'
'Tiny Gods, yes,' Bast said. 'To great excess. What the hell else is there to do?”

“He was one of the most supremely stupid men I have ever met. He taught me a great deal.”

“While none of the work we do is very important, it is important that we do a great deal of it.”

“Great vision without great people is irrelevant.”

“Doing what needs to be done may not make you happy, but it will make you great.”

“Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you.”

“Ask people for help. You’ll be all right. Don’t worry. It’s a great adventure, your life, and it has only just begun…”

“What people regard as vanity—leaving great works, having children, acting in such a way as to prevent one's name from being forgotten—I regard as the highest expression of human dignity.”

“That's what was great about him. He tried. Not many do.”

“I guess humans like to watch a little destruction. Sand castles, houses of cards, that's where they begin. Their great skills is their capacity to escalate.”

“The truth is, our civilization is not Christian; it is a tragic compound of great ideal and fearful practice, of loving charity and fearful clutching of possessions.”

“All great achievements require time.”

“The great strength of the totalitarian state is that it forces those who fear it to imitate it.”

“Unnecessary possessions are unnecessary burdens. If you have them, you have to take care of them! There is great freedom in simplicity of living. It is those who have enough but not too much who are the happiest.”

“Planning is for the world's great cities, for Paris, London, and Rome, for cities dedicated, at some level, to culture. Detroit, on the other hand, was an American city and therefore dedicated to money, and so design had given way to expediency.”

“Besides," he said breezily, "were it not for misunderstandings, we would be sadly lacking in great literature."
She looked at him questioningly.
"Where would Romeo and Juliet be?"
"Alive.”

“I hope it is true that a man can die and yet not only live in others but give them life, and not only life but that great consciousness of life.”