Definition of great

"great" in the noun sense

1. great

a person who has achieved distinction and honor in some field

"he is one of the greats of American music"

"great" in the adjective sense

1. great

relatively large in size or number or extent larger than others of its kind

"a great juicy steak"

"a great multitude"

"the great auk"

"a great old oak"

"a great ocean liner"

"a great delay"

2. great, outstanding

of major significance or importance

"a great work of art"

"Einstein was one of the outstanding figures of the 20th centurey"

3. great

remarkable or out of the ordinary in degree or magnitude or effect

"a great crisis"

"had a great stake in the outcome"

4. bang-up, bully, corking, cracking, dandy, great, groovy, keen, neat, nifty, not bad, peachy, slap-up, swell, smashing, old

very good

"he did a bully job"

"a neat sports car"

"had a great time at the party"

"you look simply smashing"

"we had a grand old time"

5. capital, great, majuscule

uppercase

"capital A"

"great A"

"many medieval manuscripts are in majuscule script"

6. big, enceinte, expectant, gravid, great, large, heavy, with child

in an advanced stage of pregnancy

"was big with child"

"was great with child"

Source: WordNet® (An amazing lexical database of English)

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Quotations for great

Great and good. [ Motto ]

Great men are sincere. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]

Health is great riches. [ Proverb ]

Love's great artillery. [ Crashaw ]

Great talker, great liar. [ French Proverb ]

Great boast, small roast. [ Proverb ]

Great wits draw together. [ French Proverb ]

Great wealth, great care. [ Dutch Proverb ]

Great profits, great risks. [ Chinese Proverb ]

Great sorrows cannot speak. [ John Donne ]

Economy is a great revenue. [ Cicero ]

Great hopes make great men. [ Proverb ]

Dreams are rudiments
Of the great state to come.
We dream what is
About to happen. [ Bailey ]

A great crowd accompanying. [ Virgil ]

Great gain makes work easy. [ Proverb ]

Great guts and small hopes. [ Proverb ]

Great souls are harmonious. [ Joseph Roux ]

Rank is a great beautifier. [ Bulwer-Lytton ]

Great boaster, little doer. [ French Proverb ]

Simple means, great results. [ French Proverb ]

A great cry and little wool. [ Proverb ]

Steam, that great civilizer. [ Freeman Hunt ]

The force of habit is great. [ Cicero ]

The unknown is always great. [ Proverb ]

A great mark is soonest hit. [ Proverb ]

Great marks are soonest hit. [ Proverb ]

Great ships ask deep waters. [ Proverb ]

The table is a great robber. [ Proverb ]

Sorrow, the great idealizer. [ Lowell ]

Every great man is a unique. [ Emerson ]

Great pleasures are serious. [ Voltaire ]

Great braggers, little doers. [ Proverb ]

Small rain lays a great dust. [ Proverb ]

Great fools have great bells. [ Dutch Proverb ]

A wise man is a great wonder. [ Proverb ]

Petty laws breed great crimes. [ Ouida ]

Great haste makes great waste. [ Ben. Franklin ]

Great gifts are for great men. [ Proverb ]

Opportunity is the great bawd. [ Franklin ]

Great men are not always wise. [ Bible ]

Great pains quickly find ease. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]

Genius is only great patience. [ Buffon ]

Great souls endure in silence. [ Friedrich Schiller ]

A great city a great solitude. [ Proverb ]

A great ship asks deep waters. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]

An open knave is a great fool. [ Proverb ]

Great thieves hang little ones. [ German ]

Great spenders are bad lenders. [ Proverb ]

Little pigs eat great potatoes. [ Proverb ]

Little strokes fell great oaks. [ Proverb ]

Great griefs medicine the less. [ William Shakespeare ]

Little bodies have great souls. [ Proverb ]

Great talkers are little doers. [ Proverb ]

Great men have their parasites. [ Sydney Smith ]

The first great law is to obey. [ Johann C. F. Von Schiller ]

A great tree hath a great fall. [ Proverb ]

A great passion has no partner. [ Lavater ]

The command of custom is great. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]

A great city is a great desert. [ Gr. and Law Proverb ]

Little chips light great fires. [ Proverb ]

Whom great men wrong, they hate. [ Proverb ]

Little losses amaze, great tame. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]

And so upon this wise I prayed -
Great Spirit, give to me
A heaven not so large as yours
But large enough for me. [ Emily Dickinson ]

He prayeth best, who loveth best
All things both great and small;
For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all. [ Coleridge ]

The curse of the great is ennui. [ Edward Bulwer-Lytton ]

Great authorities are arguments. [ Daniel Webster ]

Good language cures great sores. [ Proverb ]

Thou whom avenging powers obey.
Cancel my debt (too great to pay)
Before the sad accounting day. [ Wentworth Dillon ]

Jack in an office is a great man. [ Proverb ]

Great is song used to great ends. [ Alfred Tennyson ]

Lives of great men all remind us,
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of Time. [ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ]

In every rank, or great or small,
It is industry supports us all. [ Gay ]

Great for good, or great for evil. [ Burns ]

A good library is a great kingdom. [ Magliabecchi ]

Great is not great to the greater. [ Sir P. Sidney ]

To a great light a great lanthorn. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]

A great ship must have deep water. [ Proverb ]

A high station hath great hazards. [ Proverb ]

A great man is made so for others. [ Thomas Wilson ]

O opportunity, thy guilt is great! [ William Shakespeare ]

His great offence is dead,
And deeper than oblivion do we bury
The incensing relics of it. [ William Shakespeare ]

A knave discovered is a great fool. [ Proverb ]

Great faith must have great trials. [ Spurgeon ]

To be great is to be misunderstood. [ Emerson ]

Great is the advantage of patience. [ Tillotson ]

Sail on, O Ship of State!
Sail on, O Union, strong and great. [ Longfellow ]

A great fortune is a great slavery. [ Proverb ]

Speak truly, and each word of thine
Shall be a fruitful seed;
Live truly, and thy life shall be
A great and noble creed. [ Horatius Bonar ]

A great ceremony for a small saint. [ Proverb ]

None but great men can do mischief. [ Proverb ]

Great men never require experience. [ Beaconsfield ]

Sluggards are never great scholars. [ Proverb ]

Great fleas have little fleas
Upon their backs to bite 'em;
And little fleas have lesser fleas,
And so ad infinitum. [ Lowell ]

No evil is great if it is the last. [ Nepos ]

Great strokes make not sweet music. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]

A golden shield is of great defense. [ Proverb ]

A great bustle and no business done. [ Proverb ]

Little bantams are great at crowing. [ Proverb ]

In a great soul everything is great. [ Pascal ]

Great solitude is a sort of madness. [ Proverb ]

At a great pennyworth pause a while. [ Benjamin Franklin ]

Humanity is great but men are small. [ Börne ]

Great souls love, weak souls desire. [ Mme. de Krudener ]

It is a great journey to Life's-end. [ Proverb ]

We must be young to do great things. [ Goethe ]

The great shadow and profile of day. [ Richter ]

No age is shut against great genius. [ Seneca ]

A great mind becomes a great fortune. [ Seneca ]

The present is great with the future. [ Leibnitz ]

A small rain may allay a great storm. [ Proverb ]

The great soul of this world is just. [ Carlyle ]

A great fortune is a great servitude. [ Seneca ]

The great put the little on the hook. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]

Great fear is concealed under daring. [ Lucan ]

A great reputation is a great charge. [ Proverb ]

By daring, great fears are concealed. [ Lucan ]

All great men are partially inspired. [ Cicero ]

Great weight may hang on small wires. [ Proverb ]

The envied have a brilliant fate;
Pity is given where griefs are great. [ Palladas ]

Great thoughts spring from the heart. [ Vauvenargues ]

Temporizing is sometimes great wisdom. [ Proverb ]

Base souls have no faith in great men. [ Rousseau ]

A great dowry is a bedful of brambles. [ Proverb ]

The great world's altar-stairs
That slope through darkness up to God. [ Tennyson ]

No joy so great but runneth to an end;
No hap so hard but may in time amend. [ Robert Southwell ]

A small unkindness is a great offence. [ Hannah More ]

Great businesses turn on a little pin. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]

Great thoughts proceed from the heart. [ Vauvenargues ]

A poor man's debt makes a great noise. [ Proverb ]

Rightly to be great
Is not to stir without great argument,
But greatly to find quarrel in a straw
When honour's at the stake. [ William Shakespeare, Hamlet ]

Great passions are incurable diseases. [ Goethe ]

Fortitude is a great help in distress. [ Plautus ]

It is a great sin to swear unto a sin.
But greater sin to keep a sinful oath. [ William Shakespeare ]

Without great men nothing can be done. [ Renan ]

By great efforts obtain great trifles. [ Terence ]

Mystery has great charms for womanhood. [ Sir Walter Scott ]

Great men should not have great faults. [ La Rochefoucauld ]

Joy is the mainspring in the whole
Of endless Nature's calm rotation.
Joy moves the dazzling wheels that roll
In the great Time-piece of Creation. [ Schiller ]

Dear son of memory, great heir of fame. [ Milton on Shakespeare ]

A small hurt in the eye is a great one. [ Proverb ]

States are great engines moving slowly. [ Bacon ]

Too great refinement is false delicacy. [ Rochefoucauld ]

Beneath the rule of men entirely great,
The pen is mightier than the sword. [ Edward Bulwer Lytton ]

Great trees keep under the little ones. [ Proverb ]

Great sorrow makes sacred the sufferer. [ Owen Meredith ]

Brevity is a great praise of eloquence. [ Cicero ]

Great and good are seldom the same man. [ Proverb ]

Nurture your minds with great thoughts. [ Earl Of Beaconsfield ]

Great men's vices are accounted sacred. [ Proverb ]

He was exhaled; his great Creator drew
His spirit, as the sun the morning dew. [ John Dryden ]

But to the world no bugbear is so great,
As want of figure and a small estate. [ Pope ]

Speech is great, but silence is greater. [ Carlyle ]

No crime is so great as daring to excel. [ Churchill ]

We're lost, but we're making great time! [ Yogi Berra ]

All, that in this world is great or gay.
Doth, as a vapor, vanish and decay. [ Spenser ]

A great dowry is a bed full of brambles. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]

Man is one, and he hath one great heart. [ Bailey ]

For he that once is good, is ever great. [ Ben Jonson ]

Great souls care only for what is great. [ Amiel ]

Little pigeons can carry great messages. [ Proverb ]

In solitude all great thoughts are born. [ Moses Harvey ]

Are not great men the models of nations? [ Owen Meredith ]

A small sore wants not a great plaister. [ Proverb ]

Novelty is the great parent of pleasure. [ South ]

Not much talk, - a great, sweet silence. [ Henry James, Jr ]

Mean men admire wealth, great men glory. [ Proverb ]

Great wits to madness nearly are allied;
Both serve to make our poverty our pride. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]

Thou Great First Cause, least understood. [ Pope ]

From the great,
Illustrious actions are a debt to Fame.
No middle path remains for them to tread,
Whom she hath once ennobled. [ Glover ]

The great thieves punish the little ones. [ Proverb ]

Secrecy is the soul of all great designs. [ Quoted by Colton ]

It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew. [ Tennyson ]

Great men have more adorers than friends. [ Proverb ]

The heights by great men reached and kept
Were not attained by sudden flight.
But they, while their companions slept,
Were toiling upward in the night. [ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ]

One wrong step may give you a great fall. [ Proverb ]

Her angel's face,
As the great eye of heaven shined bright,
And made a sunshine in the shady place. [ Spenser ]

The grave where even the great find rest. [ Pope ]

Features, the great soul's apparent seat. [ Bryant ]

Silence is one great art of conversation. [ Hazlitt ]

The prince, who kept the world in awe.
The judge, whose dictate fix'd the law.
The rich, the poor, the great, the small,
Are levelled: death confounds them all. [ Gay ]

Great thoughts ensure musical expression. [ Emerson ]

No man ever yet became great by imitation. [ Johnson ]

Intemperance is a great decayer of beauty. [ Junius ]

Truly great men are always simple-hearted. [ Klinger ]

The rising winds
And falling springs,
Birds, beasts, all things
Adore him in their kinds.
Thus all is hurled
In sacred hymns and order, the great chime
And symphony of nature. [ Henry Vaughan ]

He enjoys much who is thankful for little.
A grateful mind is a great mind. [ Seeker ]

It is great folly to wish only to be wise. [ La Rochefoucauld ]

Noble by birth, yet nobler by great deeds. [ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ]

Firmness is great; persistency is greater. [ Ninon de Lenclos ]

All great men are in some degree inspired. [ Cicero ]

He is truly great who is great in charity. [ Thomas à Kempis ]

O majestic night! nature's great ancestor! [ Young ]

Justice is the great end of civil society. [ David Dudley Field ]

Venture a small fish to catch a great one. [ Proverb ]

As great a store
Have we of books as bees of herbs or more. [ Henry Vaughan ]

Great honours and avarice fly one another. [ Proverb ]

Great wits and valours, like great states,
Do sometimes sink with their own weights. [ Butler ]

Great souls are not cast down by adversity. [ Proverb ]

Distance is a great promoter of admiration! [ Diderot ]

Great souls by instinct to each other turn,
Demand alliance, and in friendship burn. [ Addison ]

Poetry is the morning dream of great minds. [ Lamartine ]

The great artist is the slave of his ideal. [ Bovee ]

I have wrought great use out of evil tools. [ Edward Bulwer-Lytton ]

The great theatre for virtue is conscience. [ Cicero ]

He is truly great who hath a great charity. [ Thomas a Kempis ]

None think the great unhappy but the great. [ Young ]

Great joy is only earned by great exertion. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]

A little gall spoils a great deal of honey. [ French Proverb ]

Honor is the moral conscience of the great. [ Sir W. Davenant ]

Great is the glory, for the strife is hard! [ Wordsworth ]

When great spirits clash, sparks fly about. [ French Proverb ]

Great wits are sure to madness near allied,
And thin partitions do their bounds divide. [ John Dryden ]

Great designs require great considerations. [ Proverb ]

A single word often betrays a great design. [ Racine ]

Little troubles are great to little people. [ Proverb ]

Great trees are good for nothing but shade. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]

Little pains
In a due hour employ'd great profit yields. [ John Philips ]

It is a great act of life to sell air well. [ Proverb ]

Great deservers grow intolerable presumers. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]

Man is made great or little by his own will. [ Friedrich Schiller ]

The ground of all great thoughts is sadness. [ Bailey ]

Every great passion is but a prolonged hope. [ Feucheres ]

So often do the spirits
Of great events stride on before the events,
And in today already walks tomorrow. [ Coleridge ]

Great is truth, and mighty above all things. [ Apocrypha ]

Beneath the rule of men entirely great,
The pen is mightier than the sword. Behold
The arch enchanter's wand! itself a nothing!
But taking sorcery from the master hand.
To paralyze the Caesars, and to strike
The loud earth breathless! [ Edward Bulwer-Lytton ]

The public? The public is just a great baby. [ Dr. Chalmers ]

There's no great banquet but some fares ill. [ George Herbert ]

The lovely town was white with apple blooms.
And the great elms o'erhead
Dark shadows wove on their serial looms.
Shot through with golden thread. [ Longfellow ]

Wise and good is better than rich and great. [ Proverb ]

No really great man ever thought himself so. [ Hazlitt ]

Little folks like to talk about great folks. [ Proverb ]

Great thoughts, great feelings come to them,
Like instincts, unawares. [ M. Milnes ]

Creation is great, and cannot be understood. [ Carlyle ]

Darkness, thou first great parent of us all.
Thou art our great original! [ Yalden ]

It is as great to be a woman as to be a man. [ Walt Whitman ]

When any great design thou dost intend,
Think on the means, the manner, and the end. [ Sir J. Denham ]

The fault is as great as he that is faulty.. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]

Rising to great place is by a winding stair. [ Bacon ]

Great floods have flown From simple sources. [ William Shakespeare ]

All the great ages have been ages of belief. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]

All things that great men do, are well done. [ Proverb ]

He gains a great deal who loses a vain hope. [ Italian Proverb ]

Speak, speak, let terror strike slaves mute.
Much danger makes great hearts most resolute. [ Marston ]

There is no great banquet but some fares ill. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]

Love lent me wings; my path was like a stair;
A lamp unto my feet, that sun was given;
And death was safety and great joy to find;
But dying now, I shall not climb to Heaven. [ Michael Angelo ]

For thoughts are so great - aren't they, sir?
They seem to lie upon us like a deep flood. [ George Eliot ]

Gone is the goose that the great egg did lay. [ Proverb ]

Be great in act, as you have been in thought. [ Shakespeare ]

When the pirate prays, there is great danger. [ Proverb ]

God oft hath a great share in a little house. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]

Where the offence is, let the great axe fall. [ William Shakespeare ]

False praise is always confined to the great. [ Lord Kames ]

What a great deal of good great men might do! [ Proverb ]

Opinion, that great fool, makes fools of all. [ Field ]

Fancy, like the finger of a clock,
Runs the great circuit, and is still at home. [ Cowper ]

Much danger makes great hearts most resolute. [ Marston ]

Yes - the same sin that overthrew the angels,
And of all sins most easily besets
Mortals the nearest to the angelic nature:
The vile are only vain; the great are proud. [ Byron ]

He that requites a benefit pays a great debt. [ Proverb ]

Moderation in prosperity argues a great mind. [ Proverb ]

All great men come out of the middle classes. [ Emerson ]

Great deeds cannot die;
They with the sun and moon renew their light,
For ever blessing those that look on them. [ Alfred Tennyson ]

Perhaps he hath great projects in his mind,
To build a college, or to found a race,
An hospital, a church - and leave behind
Some dome surmounted by his meagre face,
Perhaps he fain would liberate mankind
Even with the very ore which makes them base;
Perhaps he would be wealthiest of his nation,
Or revel in the joys of calculation. [ Byron ]

Trust not a great weight to a slender thread. [ Proverb ]

To dwell alone is the fate of all great souls. [ Arthur Schopenhauer ]

Yes, know thyself: in great concerns or small,
Be this thy care, for this, my friend, is all. [ Juvenal ]

The little wimble will let in the great auger. [ Proverb ]

I believe absence is a great element of charm. [ Beaconsfield ]

What millions died that Caesar might be great! [ Campbell ]

Great God, I had rather be
A Pagan suckled in some creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn. [ Wordsworth ]

Time is a great physician: he brings us death.

Heroes as great have died, and yet shall fall. [ Homer ]

Little dogs start the hare, the great get her. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]

Great fortune brings with it great misfortune. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]

When great leaves fall, the winter is at hand. [ William Shakespeare ]

Great wealth and content seldom live together. [ Proverb ]

At every trifle scorn to take offence;
That always shows great pride or little sense. [ Pope ]

Thy spirit within thee hath been so at war.
And thus hath so bestirr'd thee in thy sleep
That beads of sweat have stood upon thy brow
Like bubbles in a late-disturbed stream:
And in thy face strange motions have appear'd,
Such as we see when men restrain their breath
On some great sudden haste. [ William Shakespeare ]

No great man was ever other than a genuine man. [ Carlyle ]

Experience is the great baffler of speculation. [ Proverb ]

The immortal mind, superior to his fate.
Amid the outrage of external things,
Firm as the solid base of this great world.
Rests on his own foundation. Blow, ye winds!
Ye waves! ye thunders! roll your tempests on!
Shake, ye old pillars of the marble sky!
Till at its orbs and all its worlds of fire
Be loosen'd from their seats; yet still serene,
The unconquer'd mind looks down upon the wreck;
And ever stronger as the storms advance,
Firm through the closing ruin holds his way,
When nature calls him to the destined goal. [ Akenside ]

It is a great victory that comes without blood. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]

Great men will always pay deference to greater. [ Landor ]

A little given seasonably excuses a great gift. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]

Men are we, and must grieve when even the shade
Of that which once was great is passed away. [ Wordsworth ]

Great honours are great burdens; but on whom
They're cast with envy, he doth bear two loads. [ Ben Jonson ]

Sometimes it costs a great deal to do mischief. [ Proverb ]

Scarce can I speak, my choler is so great.
Oh! I could hew up rocks, and fight with flint. [ William Shakespeare ]

Not that the heavens the little can make great,
But many a man has lived an age too late. [ R. H. Stoddard ]

I heard the great echo flap
And buffet round the hills from bluff to bluff. [ Tennyson ]

Their various cares in one great point combine
The business of their lives, that is - to dine. [ Young ]

There is great force hidden in a sweet command. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]

Great dejection often follows great enthusiasm. [ Joseph Roux ]

That evil can never be great which is the last. [ Cornelius Nepos ]

Great floods have flown
From simple sources, and great seas have dried
When miracles have by the greatest been denied. [ William Shakespeare ]

To serve thy generation, this thy fate:
Written in- water, swiftly fades thy name;
But he who loves his kind does, first and late,
A work too great for fame. [ Mary Clemmer ]

Ambition and love are the wings to great deeds. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]

Great families of yesterday we show,
And lords whose parents were the Lord knows who. [ Daniel De Foe ]

Little things blame not: Grace may on them wait.
Cupid is little; but his godhead's great. [ Anon ]

That net that holds no great, takes little fish. [ R. Southwell ]

Brutus and Caesar: what should be in Caesar?
Why should that name be sounded more than yours?
Write them together, yours is as fair a name;
Sound them, it doth become the mouth as well;
Weigh them, it is as heavy; conjure with them,
Brutus will start a spirit as soon as Caesar.
Now in the names of all the gods at once,
Upon what meat doth this our Caesar feed,
That he is grown so great? [ William Shakespeare ]

No great man is ordained to die a natural death. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]

A great acacia, with its slender trunk
And overpoise of multitudinous leaves,
(In which a hundred fields might spill their dew
And intense verdure, yet find room enough)
Stood reconciling all the place with green. [ E. B. Browning ]

Literature is a great staff, but a sorry crutch. [ Sir Walter Scott ]

Great riches are of no real and substantial use. [ Proverb ]

I like that ancient Saxon phrase which calls
The burial ground, God's Acre! It is just;
It consecrates each grave within its walls.
And breathes a benison over the sleeping dust.
* * * * *
Into its furrows shall we all be cast.
In the sure faith, that we shall rise again
At the great harvest, when the archangel's blast
Shall winnow, like a fan, the chaff and grain. [ Longfellow ]

Despair is a great incentive to honorable death. [ Quintus Curtius Rufus ]

A great mans foolish sayings pass for sentences. [ Proverb ]

A good book may be as great a thing as a battle. [ Benjamin Disraeli ]

What rage for fame attends both great and small!
Better be damned than mentioned not at all. [ John Wolcott ]

Silence is one of the great arts of conversation. [ Cicero ]

That life is long which answers life's great end;
The tree that bears no fruit deserves no name;
The man of wisdom is the man of years. [ Edward Young ]

Great actions crown themselves with lasting bays;
Who well deserves needs not another's praise. [ Heath ]

The passions are the orators of great assemblies. [ Rivarol ]

In great things it is enough even to have willed. [ Propertius ]

In Faith and Hope the world will disagree.
But all mankind's concerned in Charity;
All must be false that thwart this one great end.
And all of God, that bless mankind, or mend. [ Alexander Pope ]

A daring pilot in extremity;
Pleased with the danger, when the waves went high
He sought the storms; but, for a calm unfit,
Would steer too nigh the sands to boast his wit.
Great wits are sure to madness near allied,
And thin partitions do their bounds divide; [ Dryden, Absalom and Achitophel ]

The grave unites; where even the great find rest,
And blended lie the oppressor and the opprest. [ Pope ]

Behold how great a matter a little fire kindleth. [ St. James ]

Where there is great height there is great depth. [ Friedrich Schiller ]

Great cowardice is hidden by a bluster of daring. [ Lucan ]

Great deeds immortal are - they cannot die,
Unscathed by envious blight or withering frost,
They live, and bud, and bloom; and men partake
Still of their freshness, and are strong thereby. [ Aytoun ]

Great men may jest with saints; 'tis wit in them,
But in the less, foul profanation. [ William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure ]

That life is long which answers life's great end. [ Young ]

No man was ever great without divine inspiration. [ Cicero ]

It is in great dangers that we see great courage. [ Regnard ]

Great interests are apt to clash with each other. [ Lucan ]

Little griefs are loud, great sorrows are silent. [ Proverb ]

Here lies Dame Dorothy Peg,
Who never had issue except in her leg,
So great was her art, so deep was her cunning,
That while one leg stood, the other kept running. [ Epitaph ]

He has but one great fear that fears to do wrong. [ Bovee ]

How guilt, once harbored in the conscious breast,
Intimidates the brave, degrades the great! [ Dr. Johnson ]

All great poets have been men of great knowledge. [ Bryant ]

And as great seamen, using all their wealth
And skills in Neptune's deep invisible paths.
In tall ships richly built and ribbed with brass,
To put a girdle round about the world. [ Geo. Chapman ]

Great countries are those that produce great men. [ Benjamin Disraeli ]

Your great admirers are mostly but silly fellows. [ Proverb ]

From great folks great favours are to be expected. [ Cervantes ]

The little cannot be great, unless he devour many. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]

Great souls attract sorrow as mountains do storms. [ Richter ]

Great talents have some admirers, but few friends. [ Niebuhr ]

Great thoughts, like great deeds, need no trumpet. [ Bailey ]

Small cheer and great welcome makes a merry feast. [ William Shakespeare ]

Great things are done when men and mountains meet;
These are not done by jostling in the street. [ Wm. Blake ]

It is praiseworthy even to attempt a great action. [ La Rochefoucauld ]

Turn, Fortune, turn thy wheel with smile or frown;
With that wild wheel we go not up or down;
Our hoard is little, but our hearts are great. [ Alfred Tennyson ]

The civilities of the great are never thrown away. [ Johnson ]

Therefore, if at great things thou wouldst arrive,
Get riches first, get wealth. [ Milton ]

The guilt being great, the fear doth still exceed. [ William Shakespeare ]

A smoking chimney in a great house is a good sign. [ Proverb ]

Offenses generally outweigh merits with great men. [ Proverb ]

Secrecy in suits goes a great way towards success. [ Bacon ]

He has great need of a fool who makes himself one. [ French Proverb ]

The great hope of society is individual character. [ Channing ]

The great and the little have need of one another. [ Proverb ]

One trick needs a great many more to make it good. [ Proverb ]

Let thy great deeds force fate to change her mind;
He that courts fortune boldly, makes her kind. [ John Dryden ]

One destined period men in common have,
The great, the base, the coward, and the brave.
All food alike for worms, companions in the grave. [ Lansdowne ]

Great things through greatest hazards are achiev'd,
And then they shine. [ Beaumont ]

Great expectations are better than poor possession. [ Cervantes ]

National enthusiasm is the great nursery of genius. [ Tuckermann ]

Riches well got and well used are a great blessing. [ Proverb ]

Still all great souls still make their own content;
We to ourselves may all our wishes grant;
For, nothing coveting, we nothing want. [ Dryden ]

His life is paralleled
Even with the stroke and line of his great justice;
He doth with holy abstinence subdue
That in himself which he spurs on his power
To qualify in others. [ William Shakespeare ]

No errors are so mischievous as those of great men. [ Proverb ]

To know how to wait is the great secret of success. [ De Maistre ]

The world is a great poem, and the world's
The words it is writ in, and we souls the thoughts. [ Bailey ]

The times are bad, yet there are still great souls. [ Körner ]

Great industry and little conscience make one rich. [ German Proverb ]

The common ingredients of health and long life are:
Great temperance, open air,
Easy labor, little care. [ Sir P. Sidney ]

Or thus, great alms-giving lessens no man's living. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]

A great mind is a good sailor, as a great heart is. [ Emerson ]

Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]

Great persons seldom see their face in a true glass. [ Proverb ]

The way to avoid great faults, is to beware of less. [ Proverb ]

Great geniuses have always the shortest biographies. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]

The great would have none great, and the little all. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]

He that takes too great a leap falls into the ditch. [ Proverb ]

Our ancestors grew not great by hawking and hunting. [ Proverb ]

Great women belong to history and to self-sacrifice. [ Leigh Hunt ]

The dainties of the great are the tears of the poor. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]

The infinitely little have a pride infinitely great. [ Voltaire ]

Great minds, like Heaven, are pleased in doing good,
Though the ungrateful subjects of their favours
Are barren in return. [ Rowe ]

Great things cannot have escaped former observation. [ Dr. Johnson ]

Great minds, like heaven, are pleased in doing good. [ Rowe ]

A well-governed appetite is a great part of liberty. [ Seneca ]

Building and marrying of children are great wasters. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]

Prosperity tries the fortunate, adversity the great. [ Pliny the Younger ]

God is as great in minuteness as He is in magnitude. [ Colton ]

Little dogs start the hare, but great ones catch it. [ Proverb ]

Genius is nothing but a great capacity for patience. [ Buffon ]

Twas a public feast and public day -
Quite full, right dull, guests hot, and dishes cold,
Great plenty, much formality, small cheer.
And everybody out of their own sphere. [ Byron ]

God alone is true; God alone is great; alone is God. [ Laboulaye ]

There is a great affinity between designing and art. [ Addison ]

A great pilot can sail even when his canvas is rent.

Light griefs are plaintive, but great ones are dumb. [ Seneca ]

Serve a great lord, and you will know what sorrow is. [ Spanish Proverb ]

A good name is rather to be chosen than great riches. [ Bible ]

The great fault in women is to desire to be like men. [ De Maistre ]

In great pedigrees there are governors and chandlers. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]

These little things are great to little men.(Trifles) [ Goldsmith ]

Books - lighthouses erected in the great sea of time. [ Whipple ]

The truly great man
Is as apt to forgive as his power is able to revenge. [ Sir P. Sidney ]

The great consulting-room of a wise man is a library. [ George Dawson ]

A great library contains the diary of the human race. [ Dawson, Address on Opening the Birmingham Free Library ]

Little sticks kindle the fire, great ones put it out. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]

Great thoughts reduced to practice become great acts. [ Hazlitt ]

I have heard they are the most lewd impostors,
Made of all terms and shreds, no less beliers
Of great men's favours than their own vile medicines,
Which they will utter upon monstrous oaths;
Selling that drug for two pence ere they part.
Which they have valued at twelve crowns before. [ Ben Jonson ]

Genius begins great works; labor alone finishes them. [ Joseph Joubert ]

The great aureole encircles only the brow of the dead. [ Charles ]

Good nature is a great misfortune if it want prudence. [ Proverb ]

A little loss alarms one, a great loss tames one down. [ Spanish Proverb ]

Great is the victory that is gained without bloodshed. [ Spanish Proverb ]

Where love is great the littlest doubts are fear;
Where little fears grow great, great love grows there. [ William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Sc. 2 ]

There is a woman at the beginning of all great things. [ Lamartine ]

Great poets are no sudden prodigies, but slow results. [ Lowell ]

Before man made us citizens, great Nature made us men. [ Lowell ]

One could make a great book of what has not been said. [ Rivarol ]

Love and desire are the spirit's wings to great deeds. [ Goethe ]

In love, great pleasures come very near great sorrows. [ Mlle. de Lespinasse ]

Ill can he rule the great that cannot reach the small. [ Edmund Spenser ]

Instinct is a great matter; I was a coward on instinct. [ William Shakespeare ]

Great events have sent before them their announcements. [ Calderon ]

A little debt makes a debtor, but a great one an enemy. [ Proverb ]

Little sticks kindle a fire, but great ones put it out. [ Proverb ]

Every one has a fair turn to be as great as he pleases. [ Jeremy Collier ]

A great man and a great river are often ill neighbours. [ Proverb ]

Great vices, as well as great virtues, make men famous. [ Proverb ]

It is a great obstacle to happiness to expect too much. [ Fontanelle ]

Great men are always of a nature originally melancholy. [ Aristotle ]

Our great social and political advantage is opportunity. [ George William Curtis ]

Pardons and pleasantness are great revenges of slanders. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]

Nothing is great but the inexhaustible wealth of nature. [ Emerson ]

Unexpected kindnesses or injuries make great impression. [ Proverb ]

Love is a religion of which the great pontiff is Nature.

Great eloquence we cannot get, except from human genius. [ Thomas Starr King ]

Neither great poverty nor great riches will hear reason. [ Fielding ]

Great men stand like solitary towers in the city of God. [ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ]

Great men are never sufficiently shown but in struggles. [ Burke ]

Great pleasures are much less frequent than great pains. [ Hume ]

Great minds and great fortunes do not always go together. [ Proverb ]

What is a great estate good for, if it brings melancholy? [ Proverb ]

He hath great need of a fool that plays the fool himself. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]

He has great need of a wife that marries mamma's darling. [ Proverb ]

The best teachers of humanity are the lives of great men. [ Charles H. Fowler ]

In general, pride is at the bottom of all great mistakes. [ Ruskin ]

Wert thou all that I wish thee, great, glorious and free,
First flower of the earth, and first gem of the sea. [ Moore ]

Great wealth makes us neither more wise nor more healthy. [ Proverb ]

Idleness is both a great sin, and the cause of many more. [ South ]

The smallest act of charity shall stand us in great stead. [ Atterbury ]

A great career is a dream of youth realized in mature age. [ De Vigny ]

Through love the earth becomes free; through deeds, great. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]

They never saw great dainties that think a haggis a feast. [ Proverb ]

There would be no great ones if there were no little ones. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]

A great name without merit is like an epitaph on a coffin. [ Mme. de Puisieux ]

Great errors seldom originate but with men of great minds. [ Petrarch ]

It is a great point of wisdom to find out one's own folly. [ Proverb ]

The end of labor is to gain leisure. It is a great saying. [ Aristotle ]

A great man is one who affects the mind of his generation. [ Beaconsfield ]

If you pity rogues, you are no great friend of honest men. [ Proverb ]

Great vices, and great virtues, are exceptions in mankind. [ Napoleon I ]

Home, in one form or another, is the great object of life. [ J. G. Holland ]

He goes a great voyage that goes to the bottom of the sea. [ Proverb ]

Great genial power consists in being altogether receptive. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]

Rightly to be great is not to stir without great argument. [ William Shakespeare ]

No great intellectual thing was ever done by great effort. [ John Ruskin ]

The life of great geniuses is nothing but a sublime storm. [ George Sand ]

There is not a fiercer hell than failure in a great object. [ Keats ]

Children, when little, make parents fools, when great, mad. [ Proverb ]

Worth begets in base minds envy; in great souls, emulation. [ Fielding ]

Great edifices, like great mountains, are the work of ages. [ Victor Hugo ]

Abstinence is the great strengthener and clearer of reason. [ South ]

Solitude cherishes great virtues, and destroys little ones. [ Sydney Smith ]

Nothing is so great an instance of ill-manners as flattery. [ Swift ]

They have great need of a blessing that kneel to a thistle. [ Proverb ]

A little stream may quench thirst as well as a great river. [ Proverb ]

Be silent before a great man, or speak what may please him. [ Proverb ]

No great talker ever did any great thing yet in this world. [ Ouida ]

Obedience is much more seen in little things than in great. [ Proverb ]

He is in great danger, who being sick, thinks himself well. [ Proverb ]

Every one is as God made him, and often a great deal worse. [ Cervantes ]

The great indestructible miracle is man's faith in miracle. [ Jean Paul ]

The entreaty of a great man, is putting of a force upon us. [ Proverb ]

You make a great purchase, when you relieve the necessitous. [ Proverb ]

To be rich be diligent; move on
Like heavens great movers that enrich the earth;
Whose moment's sloth would show the world undone;
And make the spring straight bury all her birth.
Rich are the diligent who can command Time - nature's stock. [ Davenant ]

He is no great heir that inherits not his ancestor's virtue. [ Proverb ]

Little thieves have iron chains and great thieves gold ones. [ Dutch Proverb ]

God is the one great employer, thinker, planner, supervisor. [ Henry Ward Beecher ]

Great spirits are easy in prosperity and quiet in adversity. [ Proverb ]

It is better living on a little than outliving a great deal.

Great books, like large skulls, have often the least brains. [ W. B. Clulow ]

A man without ceremony has need of great merit in its place. [ Proverb ]

A small sorrow distracts us, a great one makes us collected. [ Jean Paul ]

For science is, like virtue, its own exceeding great reward. [ Chas. Kingsley ]

There is no great genius free from some tincture of madness. [ Seneca ]

There can no great smoke arise, but there must be some fire. [ Lyly ]

He who is wanting but to one friend loses a great many by it. [ Proverb ]

A great fortune in the hands of a fool is a great misfortune. [ Proverb ]

The applause of a single human being is of great consequence. [ Dr. Johnson ]

A little wind kindles a great fire, a great one blows it out. [ Proverb ]

How great, my friends, is the virtue of living upon a little! [ Horace ]

Great talents are rare, and they rarely recognise themselves. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]

It is not great, but little good-haps that make up happiness. [ J. Paul F. Richter ]

Unmannerly a little, is better than troublesome a great deal. [ Proverb ]

Distressed valor challenges great respect, even from enemies. [ Plutarch ]

Better a little fire to warm us, than a great one to burn us. [ Proverb ]

The great man is the man who does a thing for the first time. [ Alexander Smith ]

Suspicion may be no fault, but shewing it may be a great one. [ Proverb ]

He that has a great nose thinks every body is speaking of it. [ Proverb ]

Such is the love of praise, so great the anxiety for victory. [ Virgil ]

Little children, little sorrows; big children, great sorrows. [ Proverb ]

A little time may be enough to catch a great deal of mischief. [ Proverb ]

It is the prerogative of great men only to have great defects. [ Rochefoucauld ]

I believe the first test of a truly great man is his humility. [ John Ruskin ]

Great lords have great hands, but they do not reach to heaven. [ Danish Proverb ]

We can do not great things, only small things with great love. [ Mother Teresa ]

Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]

The great man is to be the servant of mankind, not they of him. [ Theodore Parker ]

He's in great want of a bird that will give a groat for an owl. [ Proverb ]

Beware of little expenses; a small leak will sink a great ship. [ Benjamin Franklin ]

Mouth civility is no great pains, but may turn to good account. [ Proverb ]

A great blockhead hath not stuff enough to make a man of sense. [ Proverb ]

Suspicion is as great an enemy to wisdom as too much credulity. [ Thomas Fuller ]

Great works are performed, not by strength, but by perseverance. [ Johnson ]

Every great book is an action, and every great action is a book. [ Luther ]

Little wrongs done to others are great wrongs done to ourselves. [ Proverb ]

In every rank, or great or small, 'Tis industry supports us all. [ Gay ]

As great pity to see a woman cry, as to see a goose go barefoot. [ Proverb ]

The great rule of moral conduct is, next to God, to respect time. [ Lavater ]

Friendship is the gift of heaven, and the delight of great souls. [ Voltaire ]

A constant fidelity in small things is a great and heroic virtue. [ Bonaventura ]

To be great one must be positive, and gain strength through foes. [ Donn Piatt ]

Great people's servants think themselves of no small consequence. [ German Proverb ]

The great world spins forever down the ringing grooves of change. [ Tennyson ]

The architect built his great heart into those sculptured stones. [ Longfellow ]

Great men get more by obliging inferiors than by disdaining them. [ South ]

Great men are the true men, the men in whom Nature has succeeded. [ Amiel ]

The great are great only because we are on our knees. Let us rise! [ Prud'homme ]

If great men would have care of little ones, both would last long. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]

Persecution is a tribute the great must ever pay for pre-eminence. [ Goldsmith ]

It is seldom that beautiful persons are otherwise of great virtue. [ Bacon ]

Distinction is the consequence, never the object, of a great mind. [ W. Allston ]

Interest is the spur of the people, but glory that of great souls. [ Rousseau ]

Men never think their fortune too great, nor their wit too little. [ Proverb ]

Everything great is not always good, but all good things are great. [ Demosthenes ]

Poverty treads close upon the heels of great and unexpected wealth. [ Rivarol ]

I am a great eater of beef, and I believe that does harm to my wit. [ Shakespeare ]

Great grief makes sacred those upon whom its hand is laid.
Joy may elevate, ambition glorify, but sorrow alone can consecrate. [ Horace Greeley ]

Great men are among the best gifts which God bestows upon a people. [ G. S. Hillard ]

They have been at a great feast of language, and stolen the scraps.
They have lived long in the alms-basket of words! [ William Shakespeare ]

They left a great deal for the industry and sagacity of after ages. [ Locke ]

The great end of all human industry is the attainment of happiness. [ Hume ]

He has a great fancy to marriage that goes to the devil for a wife. [ Proverb ]

Great talkers are like leaky pitchers, everything runs out of them. [ Proverb ]

To be conscious that you are ignorant is a great step to knowledge. [ Benj. Disraeli ]

A great fondness for animals often results from a knowledge of men.

A great man will not trample upon, a worm, nor sneak to an emperor. [ Proverb ]

He's at a great loss for jests that is forced to rake hell for them. [ Proverb ]

Live only in a great Today, whose happy thoughts weave golden hours. [ Josephine Rollett Wright ]

Let the great world spin forever down the ringing grooves of change. [ Tennyson ]

Great hearts alone understand how much glory there is in being good. [ Michelet ]

It has been a great misfortune to many a one that he lived too long. [ Proverb ]

Those fair ideas to my aid I'll call, and emulate my great original. [ Dryden ]

To gain a crown by fighting for it is great; to reject it is divine. [ Friedrich Schiller ]

Men possessing small souls are generally the authors of great evils. [ Goethe ]

They have been at a great feast of languages, and stolen the scraps. [ Shakespeare ]

One may show himself great in good fortune, but exalted only in bad. [ Friedrich Schiller ]

Alas! by what slight means are great affairs brought to destruction. [ Claudianus ]

The proof of obedience is found in small matters more than in great. [ Proverb ]

A great load of gold is more burdensome than a light load of gravel. [ Proverb ]

Lofty mountains are full of springs; great hearts are full of tears. [ Joseph Roux ]

Works of the intellect are great only by comparison with each other. [ Emerson ]

Absurdities are great or small in proportion to custom or insuetude. [ Landor ]

Often has a small spark through neglect raised a great conflagration. [ Rufus ]

Events of great consequence often spring from trifling circumstances. [ Livy ]

Every fool can find faults, that a great many wise men cannot remedy. [ Proverb ]

It is to be lamented that great characters are seldom without a blot. [ George Washington ]

Dress is the great business of all women, and the fixed idea of some. [ Alphonse Karr ]

Nothing, says Longinus, can be great, the contempt of which is great. [ Addison ]

Great men rejoice in adversity just as brave soldiers triumph in war. [ Seneca ]

A flute lay side by side with Frederick the Great's baton of command. [ Jean Paul ]

Only concord makes us strong and great; discord overthrows everything. [ Gellert ]

I never hear of a great man, that I do not inquire who was his mother. [ J. Adams ]

A great man is made up of qualities that meet or make great occasions. [ Lowell ]

Time, patience, and industry are the three great masters of the world. [ Proverb ]

Truly great men are ever most heroic to those most intimate with them. [ John Ruskin ]

The secret pleasure of a generous act is the great mind's great bribe. [ Dryden ]

Great writers and orators are commonly economists in the use of words. [ Whipple ]

Great cry but little wool, as the devil said when he shear'd his hogs. [ Proverb ]

Great spirits and great business do keep out this weak passion (love). [ Bacon ]

Little kingdom is great household, and great household little kingdom. [ Bacon ]

The nearer we approach great men, the clearer we see that they are men. [ Bruyere ]

It is as great a mischief to spare all, as it is cruelty to spare none. [ Proverb ]

Common distress is a great promoter both of friendship and speculation. [ Swift ]

Great men are like eagles, and build their nest on some lofty solitude. [ Arthur Schopenhauer ]

The age does not believe in great men, because it does not possess any. [ Beaconsfield ]

Pain is the great teacher of mankind. Beneath its breath souls develop. [ Marie Ebner-Eschenbach ]

It is only great souls that know how much glory there is in being good. [ Sophocles ]

Great effort from great motives is the best definition of a happy life. [ William Ellery Channing ]

Opinions should be formed with great caution, and changed with greater. [ H. W. Shaw ]

To be a great man it is necessary to turn to account all opportunities. [ Rochefoucauld ]

No affections and a great brain; these are the men to command the world. [ Benjamin Disraeli ]

It is a great art to be superior to others without letting them know it. [ H. W. Shaw ]

He who waits to do a great deal of good at once, will never do anything. [ Samuel Johnson ]

He is a great necromancer, for he asks counsel of the dead (i.e. books). [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]

It is a hard thing to have a great estate, and not fall in love with it. [ Proverb ]

Had all his hairs been lives, my great revenge had stomach for them all. [ William Shakespeare ]

That man is great who can use the brains of others to carry on his work. [ Donn Piatt ]

Men of great intellect live in the world without really belonging to it. [ Friedrich Schiller ]

Oblivion is a second death, which great minds dread more than the first. [ De Boufflers ]

It is some compensation for great evils that they enforce great lessons. [ Bovee ]

Flatter not the rich; neither do thou appear willingly before the great. [ Thomas à Kempis ]

It is a great happiness to be praised of them that are most praiseworthy. [ Sir P. Sidney ]

Great passions are incurable diseases; the very remedies make them worse. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]

He that goes a great way for a wife is either cheated, or means to cheat. [ Proverb ]

He that cheats in small things is a fool, but in great things is a rogue. [ Proverb ]

Too great and sudden changes, though for the better, are not easily born. [ Proverb ]

Fear of hypocrites and fools is the great plague of thinking and writing. [ J. Janin ]

I am a great friend to public amusements; for they keep people from vice. [ Samuel Johnson ]

We confess small faults in order to insinuate that we have no great ones. [ La Rochefoucauld ]

Great minds erect their never-failing trophies on the firm base of mercy. [ Massinger ]

Great men are more distinguished by range and extent than by originality. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]

Experience teaches fools, and he is a great one that will not learn by it. [ Proverb ]

Great men too often have greater faults than little men can find room for. [ Landor ]

There never was so great a thought labouring in the breasts of men as now. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]

To feel and respect a great personality, one must be something one's self. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]

The great secret of a good style is to have proper words in proper places. [ Edwin P. Whipple ]

In a great river great fish are found ; but take heed lest you be drowned. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]

Great affectation and great absence of it are at first sight very similar. [ Whately ]

Printer's ink is the great apostle of progress, whose pulpit is the press. [ Horace Greeley ]

The great chastisement of a knave is not to be known, but to know himself. [ J. Petit-Senn ]

Love and death are the two great hinges on which all human sympathies turn. [ B. R. Haydon ]

Great evils one triumphs over bravely, but the little eat away one's heart. [ Mrs. Carlyle ]

The real heroes of this war are the great, brave, patient, nameless people. [ Whitelaw Reid ]

Nothing is more simple than greatness; indeed, to be simple is to be great. [ Emerson ]

What your heart thinks great is great. The soul's emphasis is always right. [ Emerson ]

In order to do great things, we should live as though we were never to die. [ Vauvenargues ]

The great art of superiority is getting hold of people by their right side. [ Mirabeau ]

One adversary may do us more harm than a great many friends can do us good. [ Proverb ]

A man who is proud of small things shows that small things are great to him. [ Madame de Girardin ]

Talent forms itself in secret; character, in the great current of the world. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]

True poets, like great artists, have scarcely any childhood, and no old age. [ Mme. Swetchine ]

Be substantially great in thyself, and more than thou appearest unto others. [ Sir Thomas Browne ]

We consecrate a great deal of nonsense, because it was allowed by great men. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]

Noble blood is an accident of fortune; noble actions characterize the great. [ Goldoni ]

It is besides necessary that whoever is brave should be a man of great soul. [ Cicero ]

The great objection to new books is, that they prevent our reading old ones. [ Joseph Joubert ]

Poetry is the music of the soul, and, above all, of great and feeling souls. [ Voltaire ]

All great men find eternity affirmed in the very promise of their faculties. [ Emerson ]

I never was on the dull, tame shore, but I loved the great sea more and more. [ Barry Cornwall ]

Heaven, on occasion, half opens its arms to us; and that is the great moment. [ Victor Hugo ]

Too great a display of delicacy can and does sometimes infringe upon decency. [ Balzac ]

Great abundance of riches cannot be gathered and kept by any man without sin. [ Erasmus ]

Emblems of our own great resurrection, emblems of the bright and better land. [ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ]

To praise great actions with sincerity may be said to be taking part in them. [ Rochefoucauld ]

All things are admired either because they are new or because they are great. [ Bacon ]

Great folks have five hundred friends because they have no occasion for them. [ Goldsmith ]

Great men are rarely isolated mountain-peaks; they are the summits of ranges. [ T. W. Higginson ]

Great eaters and great sleepers are incapable of anything else that is great. [ Henry IV. of France ]

It is very seldom that a great talker hath either discretion or good manners. [ Proverb ]

The great source of a loose style is the injudicious use of synonymous terms. [ Blair ]

Great events are the hour-hands of time, while small events mark the minutes. [ Ramsay ]

Great things astonish us, and small dishearten us. Custom makes both familiar. [ De La Bruyere ]

Time is a great ocean which, like the other ocean, overflows with our remains. [ Lamartine ]

In great straits and when hope is small, the boldest counsels are the safest. [ Livy ]

The God of merely traditional believers is the great Absentee of the universe. [ W. R. Alger ]

The fox knows many shifts, the cat only one great one, viz., to run up a tree. [ Proverb ]

He also that is slothful in his work is brother to him that is a great waster. [ Bible ]

Fishes live in the sea, as men do land; the great ones eat up the little ones. [ William Shakespeare ]

By persisting in your path, though you forfeit the little, you gain the great. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]

The poverty which oppresses a great people is a grievous and intolerable evil.

He is great who is what he is from nature, and who never reminds us of others. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]

Blest is he whose heart is the home of the great dead and their great thoughts. [ Bailey ]

God gives strength to bear a great deal, if we only strive ourselves to endure. [ Hans Andersen ]

Love of glory can only create a great hero; contempt of it creates a great man. [ Talleyrand ]

He's so great a thief, that he stole even a piece of a halter from the gallows. [ Proverb ]

The favour of great men, and praise of the world, are not much to be relied on. [ Proverb ]

A great thing is a great book, but greater than all is the talk of a great man. [ Earl of Beaconsfield ]

Great things are not accomplished by idle dreams, but by years of patient study. [ Aughey ]

In the great inconstancy and crowd of events nothing is certain except the past. [ Seneca ]

A fop takes great pains to hang out a sign, by his dress, of what he has within. [ Richardson ]

Great names degrade instead of elevating those who know not how to sustain them. [ La Rochefoucauld ]

The time never comes when a reconstruction does not imperil some great interest. [ Heber Newton ]

Little minds are tamed and subdued by misfortune, but great minds rise above it. [ Washington Irving ]

Great is self-denial! Life goes all to ravels and tatters where that enters not. [ Carlyle ]

Great men or men of great gifts you will easily find, but symmetrical men never. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]

Not he who has many ideas, but he who has one conviction may become a great man. [ Cötvös ]

In order to do great things, it is necessary to live as if one was never to die. [ Vauvenargues ]

The hall is the ornament of a house, (i.e. first impressions have great weight). [ Proverb ]

There is no religion without mystery. God Himself is the great secret of nature. [ Chateaubriand ]

No man can be good, or great, or happy, except through inward efforts of his own. [ F. W. Robertson ]

And the wind plays on those great sonorous harps, the shrouds and masts of ships. [ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ]

The guilty mind debases the great image that it wears, and levels us with brutes. [ Havard ]

How many minds - almost all the great ones - were formed in secrecy and solitude! [ Matthew Arnold ]

A truly great genius will be the first to prescribe limits for its own exertions. [ Brougham ]

Great minds lower, instead of elevate, those who do not know how to support them. [ Rochefoucauld ]

Not only is the world informed of everything about you, but of a great deal more. [ Thackeray ]

There is very great necessity indeed of getting a little more silent than we are. [ Carlyle ]

The great would not think themselves demigods if the little did not worship them. [ Boiste ]

Mind is the great lever. Thought is the process by which human ends are answered. [ Webster ]

Great men often rejoice at crosses of fortune, just as brave soldiers do at wars. [ Seneca ]

Great men are like meteors: they glitter and are consumed to enlighten the world. [ Napoleon I ]

Triumph not, O Time! strong towers decay, but a great name shall never pass away. [ Park Benjamin ]

Great captains do never use long orations when it comes to the point of execution. [ Sir P. Sidney ]

Temperance, employment, and a cheerful spirit, are the great preservers of health. [ Proverb ]

It is not by his faults, but by his excellences, that we must measure a great man. [ George Henry Lewes ]

Necessity, that great refuge and excuse for human frailty, breaks through all law. [ Pascal ]

Great lies are as great as great truths, and prevail constantly and day after day. [ Thackeray ]

It is better to have one friend of great value, than many friends of little value. [ Anaxarchus ]

What does a man think of when he thinks of nothing? Answer: A great man's promise. [ Proverb ]

Philosophers call God the great unknown. The great misknown would be more correct. [ Joseph Roux ]

Great knowledge, if it be without vanity, is the most severe bridle of the tongue. [ Jeremy Taylor ]

Balm of hurt minds, great nature's second course, chief nourisher in life's feast. [ William Shakespeare ]

The two great movers of the human mind are the desire of good and the fear of evil. [ Johnson ]

Little minds are tamed and subdued by misfortunes; but great minds rise above them. [ Washington Irving ]

There was never yet a truly great man that was not at the same time truly virtuous. [ Benjamin Franklin ]

The fame of great men ought always to be estimated by the means used to acquire it. [ La Rochefoucauld ]

There is no great achievement that is not the result of patient working and waiting. [ J. G. Holland ]

Great men lose somewhat of their greatness by being near us; ordinary men gain much. [ Landor ]

The good are joyful in the midst of poverty; but the wicked are sad in great riches. [ Proverb ]

Great thoughts and a pure heart are the things we should beg for ourselves from God. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]

Nature does not make all great men, more than all other men, in the self-same mould. [ Carlyle ]

In the great majority of things habit is a greater plague than ever afflicted Egypt. [ John Foster ]

No great thought, no great object, satisfies the mind at first view, nor at the last. [ Abel Stevens ]

An infinitude of tenderness is the chief gift and inheritance of all truly great men. [ John Ruskin ]

Emulation admires and strives to imitate great actions; envy is only moved to malice. [ Balzac ]

Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them. [ William Shakespeare ]

This is the great fault in wine; it first trips up the feet, it is a cunning wrestler. [ Plautus ]

No sadder proof can be given by man of his own littleness than disbelief in great men. [ Carlyle ]

Contentment, as it is a short road and pleasant, has great delight and little trouble. [ Epictetus ]

Revenge, the attribute of gods! they stamped it with their great image on our natures. [ Otway ]

The uncertainty of death is, in effect, the great support of the whole system of life. [ Johnson ]

No man can produce great things who is not thoroughly sincere in dealing with himself. [ Lowell ]

The difficulty is not so great to die for a friend as to find a friend worth dying for. [ Kames ]

Great truths are portions of the soul of man; Great souls are the portions of eternity. [ Lowell ]

A fact is a great thing: a sentence printed, if not by God, then at least by the Devil. [ Carlyle ]

The world is a great ocean, upon which we encounter more tempestuous storms than calms. [ Edgar A. Poe ]

Superiority to circumstances is one of the most prominent characteristics of great men. [ Horace Mann ]

The world cannot do without great men, but great men are very troublesome to the world. [ Goethe ]

We do nothing, but in the presence of two great witnesses; God, and our own conscience. [ Proverb ]

A lawyer's dealings should be just and fair; Honesty shines with great advantage there. [ Cowper ]

True fortitude is seen in great exploits, that justice warrants and that wisdom guides. [ Addison ]

Earnestness in life, even when carried to an extreme, is something very noble and great. [ W. V. Humboldt ]

No sadder proof can be given by a man of his own littleness than disbelief in great men. [ Carlyle ]

Ceremony and great professing renders friendships as much suspected as it does religion. [ Wycherley ]

A little philosophy leads men to despise learning; a great deal leads them to esteem it. [ Chamfort ]

Nothing can make a man truly great but being truly good and partaking of God's holiness. [ Matthew Henry ]

Great is the power, great the authority, of a senate which is unanimous in its opinions. [ Cicero ]

Most people would succeed in small things if they were not troubled with great ambitions. [ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ]

Childien when they are little make parents fools, when they are great they make them mad. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]

The first springs of great events, like those of great rivers, are often mean and little. [ Swift ]

Raphael would have been a great painter even if he had come into the world without hands. [ Lessing ]

Resolution is independent of great age, but without it one lives a hundred years in vain. [ Chinese Proverb ]

God is the poet; men are but the actors. The great dramas of earth were written in heaven. [ Balzac ]

To give and to lose is nothing; but to lose and to give still is the part of a great mind. [ Seneca ]

The possession of great powers no doubt carries with it a contempt for mere external show. [ James A. Garfield ]

A great man knows the value of greatness: he dares not hazard it, he will not squander it. [ Landor ]

Great is he who has bravely vanquished his enemies, but greater is he who has gained them. [ Seume ]

The legacy of heroes - the memory of a great name, and the inheritance of a great example. [ Beaconsfield ]

A man of a great memory, without learning, hath a rock and a spindle, and no staff to spin. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]

A little learning is not a dangerous thing to one who does not mistake it for a great deal. [ Blanco White ]

Nature never sends a great man into the planet without confiding the secret to another soul. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]

'Tis great - 'tis manly to disdain disguise. It shows our spirit, or it proves out strength. [ Young ]

Live and learn; and indeed it takes a great deal of living to get a little deal of learning. [ John Ruskin ]

Every great and commanding movement in the annals of the world is the triumph of enthusiasm. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]

The great lever by which to raise and save the world is the unbounded love and mercy of God. [ Beecher ]

The sweetness of glory is so great that, join it to what we will, even to death, we love it. [ Pascal ]

Thou art a God ready to pardon, gracious aild merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness. [ Bible ]

Silence is a solvent that destroys personality, and gives us leave to be great and universal. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]

We need the friendship of a man in great trials; of a woman in the affairs of every-day life. [ A. L. Thomas ]

Nature will sometimes lie buried a great while, and yet revive upon occasion of a temptation. [ Proverb ]

The true, strong, and sound mind is the mind that can embrace equally great things and small. [ Johnson ]

The truth is, we pamper little griefs into great ones, and bear great ones as well as we can. [ Hazlitt ]

It is the mark of a great man to treat trifles as trifles, and important matters as important. [ Lessing ]

The hearts of men are their books, events are their tutors, great actions are their eloquence. [ Macaulay ]

Fraud and deceit are ever in a hurry. Take time for all things. Great haste makes great waste. [ Franklin ]

Nothing is so great an adversary to those who make it their business to please as expectation. [ Cicero ]

There never was any heart truly great and generous that was not also tender and compassionate. [ South ]

A great name is like an eternal epitaph engraved by the admiration of men on the road of time. [ E. Souvestre ]

We never know a great character until something congenial to it has grown up within ourselves. [ William Ellery Channing ]

Those that eat cherries with great persons, shall have their eyes squirted out with the stones. [ Proverb ]

The great thing in the world is not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving. [ Holmes ]

Great endowments often announce themselves in youth in the form of singularity and awkwardness. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]

His heart was as great as the world, but there was no room in it to hold the memory of a wrong. [ Emerson ]

Little minds are too much wounded by little things; great minds see all, and are not even hurt. [ La Roche ]

Modesty in women has great advantages: it enhances beauty, and serves as a veil to uncomeliness. [ Fontanelle ]

Teach a man to read and write, and you have put into his hands the great keys of the wisdom-box. [ Huxley ]

Light gains make heavy purses, because they come thick, whereas the great come but now and then. [ Bacon ]

Great men undertake great things because they are great, and fools because they think them easy. [ Vauvenargues ]

I believe, indeed, that it is more laudable to suffer great misfortunes than to do great things. [ Stanislaus ]

The greatest genius is never so great as when it is chastised and subdued by the highest reason. [ Colton ]

He is truly great that is little in himself, and that maketh no account of any height of honors. [ Thomas a Kempis ]

Of great riches there is no real use, except it be in the distribution; the rest is but conceit. [ Bacon ]

Great men do not content us. It is their solitude, not their force, that makes them conspicuous. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]

Great towns are but a large sort of prison to the soul, like cages to birds or pounds to beasts. [ Charron ]

Society is like a large piece of frozen water; and skating well is the great art of social life. [ L. E. Landon ]

Trust men, and they will be true to you; treat them greatly, and they will show themselves great. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]

Nevertheless, even envy, however unwilling, will have to admit that I have lived among great men. [ Horace ]

Great men do not play stage tricks with the doctrines of life and death; only little men do that. [ John Ruskin ]

However brilliant an action, it should not be esteemed great unless the result of a great motive. [ La Rochefoucauld ]

Great patriots must be men of great excellence; this alone can secure to them lasting admiration. [ H. Giles ]

Love is the passion of great souls: it makes them merit glory, when it does not turn their heads. [ Mme. de Pompadour ]

A weak mind is like a microscope, which magnifies trifling things, but cannot receive great ones. [ Chesterfield ]

Great was the respect paid of old to the hoary head, and great the honour to the wrinkles of age. [ Ovid ]

Pretences go a great way with men that take fair words and magisterial looks for current payment. [ L'Estrange ]

Great men essay enterprises because they think them great, and fools because they think them easy. [ Vauvenargues ]

Those who bestow too much application on trifling things become generally incapable of great ones. [ Rochefoucauld ]

Great ideas travel slowly, and for a time noiselessly, as the gods whose feet were shod with wool. [ James A. Garfield ]

Great is the soul, and plain. It is no flatterer, it is no follower; it never appeals from itself. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]

Every great poem is in itself limited by necessity, but in its suggestions unlimited and infinite. [ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ]

The truly great rest in the knowledge of their own deserts, nor seek the conformation of the world. [ Alexander Smith ]

Great is the power of habit: teaching us as it does to bear fatigue and to despise wounds and pain. [ Cicero ]

Those who have few affairs to attend to are great speakers. The less men think, the more they talk. [ Montesquieu ]

You will as often find a great man above, as below, his reputation, when once you come to know him. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]

To attain their ends most people are more capable of a great effort than of continued perseverance. [ La Bruyère ]

Great warriors, like great earthquakes, are principally remembered for the mischief they have done. [ Bovee ]

Gold, like the sun, which melts wax and hardens clay, expands great souls and contracts bad hearts. [ Rivarol ]

People call eloquence the facility that some have in speaking alone and for a great length of time. [ Pascal ]

Affliction is the school in which great virtues are acquired, in which great characters are formed. [ Hannah More ]

The greatest of all sins is the sin of love: it is so great that it takes two persons to commit it. [ Cardinal Le Camus ]

That man is great who rises to the emergencies of the occasion, and becomes master of the situation. [ Donn Piatt ]

All joys do not cause laughter; great pleasures are serious: pleasures of love do not make us laugh. [ Voltaire ]

Character is higher than intellect. A great soul will be strong to live, as well as strong to think. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]

In exalting the faculties of the soul, we annihilate, in a great degree, the delusion of the senses. [ Aime-Martin ]

When a man has no design but to speak plain truth, he may say a great deal in a very narrow compass. [ Steele ]

Nothing so effectively baffles the schemes of evil men so much as the calm composure of great souls. [ Mirabeau ]

To great evils one must oppose great virtues; and also to small, which is the harder task of the two. [ Carlyle ]

Nothing so effectively disconcerts the schemes of sinister people as the tranquillity of great souls. [ Mirabeau ]

If a man can play the true logician, and have judgment as well as invention, he may do great matters. [ Lord Bacon ]

Great part of human suffering has its root in the nature of man, and not in that of his institutions. [ Lowell ]

Nature and religion are the bands of friendship, excellence and usefulness are its great endearments. [ Jeremy Taylor ]

Noble art is nothing less than the expression of a great soul; and great souls are not common things. [ John Ruskin ]

It is a great misfortune not to have enough wit to speak well, or not enough judgment to keep silent. [ La Bruyere ]

Ideas are the great warriors of the world, and a war that has no ideas behind it is simply brutality. [ James A. Garfield ]

The tomb is the pedestal of greatness. I make a distinction between God's great and the king's great. [ Landor ]

Imagination has more charm in writing than in speaking: great wings must fold before entering a salon. [ Prince de Ligne ]

Sincerity, a deep, great, genuine sincerity, is the first characteristic of all men in any way heroic. [ Carlyle ]

Those who have few things to attend to are great babblers; for the less men think, the more they talk. [ Montesquieu ]

Men who have great riches and little culture rush into business, because they are weary of themselves. [ Horace Greeley ]

Every gift which is given, even though it be small, is in reality great if it be given with affection. [ Pindar ]

There is nothing keeps longer than a middling fortune, and nothing melts away sooner than a great one. [ Bruyere ]

I find the great thing in this world is not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving. [ Oliver Wendell Holmes ]

Great God, have pity on the wicked, for thou didst everything for the good, when thou madest them good! [ Saadi ]

Mere family never made a man great. Thought and deed, not pedigree, are the passports to enduring fame. [ Skobeleff ]

Some books are drenched sands, on which a great soul's wealth lies all in heaps, like a wrecked argosy. [ Adam Smith ]

Wealth cannot purchase any great private solace or convenience. Riches are only the means of sociality. [ Henry D. Thoreau ]

Life, like some cities, is full of blind alleys, leading nowhere; the great art is to keep out of them. [ Bovee ]

The dower of great beauty has always been misfortune, since happiness and beauty do not agree together. [ Calderon ]

Great men should think of opportunity and not of time. Time is the excuse of feeble and puzzled spirits. [ Benjamin Disraeli (Earl of Beaconsfield) ]

Knowledge, in truth, is the great sun in the firmament. Life and power are scattered with all its beams. [ Daniel Webster ]

It is the fate of the great ones of the earth to begin to be appreciated by us only after they are gone. [ Old Ger. saying ]

The great soul that sits on the throne of the universe is not, never was, and never will be, in a hurry. [ J. G. Holland ]

Greatness is not a teachable nor gainable thing, but the expression of the mind of a God-made great man. [ Ruskin ]

When a great man strikes out into a sudden irregularity, he needs not question the respect of a retinue. [ Collier ]

We hold that the most wonderful and splendid proof of genius is a great poem produced in a civilized age. [ Macaulay ]

Mark what and how great blessings flow from a frugal diet; in the first place, thou enjoyest good health. [ Horace ]

The modern craze for bargains has often inflicted great hardships upon a certain class of humble toilers. [ Douglas ]

The difference between Socrates and Jesus Christ? The great Conscious; the immeasurably great Unconscious. [ Carlyle ]

Although strength should fail, the effort will deserve praise. In great enterprises the attempt is enough. [ Propertius ]

He presents me with what is always an acceptable gift who brings me news of a great thought before unknown. [ Bovee ]

A little plot of ground thick sown is better than a great field which, for the most part of it, lies fallow. [ Bishop Norris ]

There is a great difference in the delivery of the mathematics, which are the most abstracted of knowledges. [ Lord Bacon ]

Who can speak broader than he that has no house to put his head in? - Such may rail against great buildings. [ William Shakespeare ]

The great happiness of life, I find, after all, to consist in the regular discharge of some mechanical duty. [ Schiller ]

I know not any crime so great that a man could contrive to commit as poisoning the sources of eternal truth. [ Samuel Johnson ]

Great passions are incurable diseases; what might heal them is precisely that which makes them so dangerous. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]

Great men are they who see that spiritual is stronger than any material force, that thoughts rule the world. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]

Goodness consists not in the outward things we do, but in the inward thing we are. To be is the great thing. [ E. H. Chapin ]

The extension and perfection of friendship will constitute a great part of the future happiness of the blest. [ R. Whately ]

Music is the fourth great material want of our natures, - first food, then raiment, then shelter, then music. [ Bovee ]

The universe is but one great city, full of beloved ones, divine and human, by nature endeared to each other. [ Epictetus ]

It is not a great Xerxes army of words, but a compact Greek ten thousand that march safely down to posterity. [ Lowell ]

He who, in an enlightened and literary society, aspires to be a great poet, must first become a little child. [ Macaulay ]

In the best books great men talk to us, give us their most precious thoughts, and pour their souls into ours. [ Channing ]

Now learn what and how great benefits a moderate diet brings with it. Before all, you will enjoy good health. [ Horace ]

The proverb is true, that light gains make heavy purses; for light gains come often, great gains now and then. [ Bacon ]

There was never a nation great until it came to the knowledge that it had nowhere in the world to go for help. [ Charles Dudley Warner ]

A great man quotes bravely, and will not draw on his invention when his memory serves him with a word as good. [ Emerson ]

Great souls are always loyally submissive, reverent to what is over them: only small mean souls are otherwise. [ Carlyle ]

There is that maketh himself rich, yet hath nothing: there is that maketh himself poor, yet hath great riches. [ Bible ]

Every lie, great or small, is the brink of a precipice, the depth of which nothing but omniscience can fathom. [ Reade ]

How many languish in obscurity, who would become great if emulation and encouragement incited them to exertion! [ Fenelon ]

Trifling precautions will often prevent great mischiefs; as a slight turn of the wrist parries a mortal thrust. [ R. Sharp ]

'Tis the fulness of man that runs over into objects, and makes his Bibles and Shakespeares and Homers so great. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]

Everything is heaving and great events are pending, and it is hard to study Genesis when all is now Revelation. [ Dr. M. W. Jacobus ]

Literary history is the great morgue where all seek the dead ones whom they love, and to whom they are related. [ Heine ]

Great results cannot be achieved at once; and we must be satisfied to advance in life as we walk, step by step. [ S. Smiles ]

Great minds had rather deserve contemporaneous applause without obtaining it, than obtain without deserving it. [ Colton ]

Marriage has its unknown great men, as war has its Napoleons, poetry its Cheniers, and philosophy its Descartes. [ Balzac ]

Astronomy has revealed the great truth that the whole universe is bound together by one all-pervading influence. [ Leitch ]

The glory of a people and of an age is always the work of a small number of great men, and disappears with them. [ Baron de Grimm ]

It is with books as with men: a very small number play a great part; the rest are confounded with the multitude. [ Voltaire ]

In matters of great concern, and which must be done, there is no surer argument of a weak mind than irresolution. [ Tillotson ]

Mind is the great lever of all things: human thought is the process by which human ends are alternately answered. [ Daniel Webster ]

Great effects come of industry and perseverance; for audacity doth almost bind and mate the weaker sort of minds. [ Bacon ]

Great is wisdom; infinite is the value of wisdom. It cannot be exaggerated; it is the highest achievement of man. [ Carlyle ]

It is not necessary for all men to be great in action. The greatest and sublimest power is often simple patience. [ Horace Bushnell ]

No great composition was ever produced but with the same heavenly involuntariness in which a bird builds her nest. [ John Ruskin ]

Open your mouth and purse cautiously, and your stock of wealth and reputation shall, at least in repute, be great. [ Zimmermann ]

Man is only truly great when he acts from his passions; never irresistible but when he appeals to the imagination. [ Benjamin Disraeli ]

Prussia is great because her people are intelligent. They know the alphabet. The alphabet is conquering the world. [ G. W. Curtis ]

All nations that grew great out of little or nothing did so merely by the public-mindedness of particular persons. [ South ]

He who is always inquiring what people will say, will never give them opportunity to say anything great about him. [ Blanco White ]

The great are only great because we carry them on our shoulders; when we throw them off they sprawl on the ground. [ Montandre ]

It is a law of the gods which is never broken, to sell somewhat dearly the great benefits which they confer on us. [ Corneille ]

All great designs are formed in solitude; in the world, no object is pursued long enough to produce an impression. [ J. J. Rousseau ]

If a book really wants the patronage of a great name, it is a bad book; and if it be a good book, it wants it not. [ Colton ]

To improve the golden moment of opportunity, and catch the good that is within our reach, is the great art of life. [ Johnson ]

Die two months ago, and not forgotten yet? Then there's hope a great man's memory may outlive his life half a year. [ William Shakespeare ]

It is no great advantage to possess a quick wit, if it is not correct; the perfection is not speed, but uniformity. [ Vauvenargues ]

Wherever is love and loyalty, great purposes and lofty souls, even though in a hovel or a mine, there is fairyland. [ Kingsley ]

Out of the smallest a great is at length composed, and none of all can fail, unless the whole is fated to break up. [ Rückert ]

The man who will live above his present circumstances is in great danger of living, in a little, much beneath them. [ Addison ]

The great men of the earth are but the markingstones on the road of humanity; they are the priests of its religion. [ Mazzini ]

A great book that comes from a great thinker, - it is a ship of thought, deep-freighted with truth and with beauty. [ Theodore Parker ]

I should say sincerity, a deep, great, genuine sincerity, is the first characteristic of all men in any way heroic. [ Carlyle ]

Why aren't more gems from our great authors scattered over the country? Great books aren't within everybody's reach. [ S. T. Coleridge ]

It is strange that all great men should have some little grain of madness mingled with whatever genius they possess. [ Moliere ]

The great basis of the Christian faith is compassion; do not dismiss that from your hearts, neither will your Maker. [ Theodore Parker ]

Mind is the great leveller of all things; human thought is the process by which human ends are alternately answered. [ Daniel Webster ]

The careful reader of a few good newspapers can learn more in a year than most scholars do in their great libraries. [ F. B. Sanborn ]

In all the world there is nothing so remarkable as a great man. nothing so rare, nothing which so well repays study. [ Theodore Parker ]

Earnestness is the best gift of mental power, and deficiency of heart is the cause of many men never becoming great. [ Bulwer ]

General observations drawn from particulars are the jewels of knowledge, comprehending great store in a little room. [ Locke ]

Great is the strength of an individual soul true to its high trust; mighty is it, even to the redemption of a world. [ Mrs. Child ]

The pen is a formidable weapon; but a man can kill himself with it a great deal more easily than he can other people. [ G. D. Prentice ]

Very great benefactors to the rich, or those whom they call people at their ease, are your persons of no consequence. [ Steele ]

Great revolutions, whatever may be their causes, are not lightly commenced, and are not concluded with precipitation. [ Benjamin Disraeli ]

A woman is seldom roused to great and courageous exertion but when something most dear to her is in immediate danger. [ Joanna Baillie ]

There is no sorrow I have thought more about than that, - to love what is great, and try to reach it, and yet to fail. [ George Eliot ]

The cancer of jealousy on the breast can never wholly be cut out, if I am to believe great masters of the healing art. [ Jean Paul ]

But wealth is a great means of refinement; and it is a security for gentleness, since it removes disturbing anxieties. [ Ik Marvel ]

The cultivation of friendship with the great is pleasant to the inexperienced, but he who has experienced it dreads it. [ Horace ]

Between the great things that we cannot do and the small things we will not do, the danger is that we shall do nothing. [ Adolph Monod ]

Ambition is an idol, on whose wings great minds are carried only to extreme, - to be sublimely great, or to be nothing. [ Southern ]

Never write anything that does not give you great pleasure; emotion is easily propagated from the writer to the reader. [ Joubert ]

If we did not take great pains, and were not at great expense to corrupt our nature, our nature would never corrupt us. [ Clarendon ]

If we did but know how little some enjoy the great things that they possess, there would not be much envy in the world. [ Young ]

Prosperity is a great teacher; adversity is a greater. Possession pampers the mind; privation trains and strengthens it. [ Hazlitt ]

Absence diminishes weak passions and augments great ones; as the wind extinguishes tapers,but increases a conflagration. [ La Rochefoucauld ]

As it is the characteristic of great wits to say much in few words, so it is of small wits to talk much and say nothing. [ Rochefoucauld ]

Like the air-invested heron, great persons should conduct themselves; and the higher they be, the less they should show. [ Sir P. Sidney ]

Confidence is that feeling by which the mind embarks in great and honorable courses with a sure hope and trust in itself. [ Cicero ]

Of all the possessions of this life fame is the noblest; when the body has sunk into the dust the great name still lives. [ Schiller ]

The great uses of study to a woman are to enable her to regulate her own mind, and be instrumental to the good of others. [ Hannah More ]

It was wisely said, by a man of great observation, that there are as many miseries beyond riches as on this side of them. [ Izaak Walton ]

In life, we shall find many men that are great, and some men that are good, but very few men that are both great and good. [ Colton ]

Old age, especially an honored old age, has so great authority that this is of more value than all the pleasures of youth. [ Cicero ]

Our Grub-street biographers watch for the death of a great man like so many undertakers on purpose to make a penny of him. [ Addison ]

In modern England the ordinary habits of life and modes of education produce great plainness of mind in middle-aged women. [ John Ruskin ]

Although men flatter themselves with their great actions, they are not so often the result of a great design as of chance. [ La Rochefoucauld ]

Adversity is a great schoolmistress, as many a poor fellow knows that has whimpered over his lesson before her awful chair. [ Thackeray ]

Order in a house ought to be like the machinery in opera, whose effect produces great pleasure, but whose ends must be hid. [ Mme. Necker ]

A great soul is proof against injustice, pain, and mockery; and it would be invulnerable if it were not open to compassion.

Great souls are not those who have fewer passions and more virtues than the common, but those only who have greater designs. [ La Rochefoucauld ]

A really great man is known by three signs - generosity in the design, humanity in the execution, and moderation in success. [ Bismarck ]

Philosophy consists not in airy schemes or idle speculations; the rule and conduct of all social life is her great province. [ Thomson ]

No great truth is allowed by Nature to be demonstrable to any person who, foreseeing its consequences, desires to refuse it. [ John Ruskin ]

Many have genius, but, wanting art, are forever dumb. The two must go together to form the great poet, painter, or sculptor. [ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ]

Great poets try to describe what all men see and to express what all men feel; if they cannot describe it, they let it alone. [ John Ruskin ]

Have the courage to be ignorant of a great number of things, in order to avoid the calamity of being ignorant of every thing. [ Sydney Smith ]

Who can blame me if I cherish the belief that the world is still young, - that there are great possibilities in store for it? [ Tyndall ]

Great names stand not alone for great deeds; they stand also for great virtues, and, doing them worship, we elevate ourselves. [ H. Giles ]

Great warmth at first is the certain ruin of every great achievement. Doth not water, although ever so cool, moisten the earth? [ Hitopadesa ]

Science does not know its debt to imagination. Goethe did not believe that a great naturalist could exist without this faculty. [ Emerson ]

Love is everything; love is the great fact. What matters the lover? What matters the flagon, provided one has the intoxication? [ A. de Musset ]

Great souls are not those which have less passion and more virtue than common souls, but only those which have greater designs. [ La Roche ]

Every man has some peculiar train of thought which he falls back upon when he is alone. This, to a great degree, moulds the man. [ Dugald Stewart ]

He is an eloquent man who can speak of low things acutely, and of great things with dignity, and of moderate things with temper. [ Cicero ]

Some are brave men one day and cowards another, as great captains have often told me, from their own experience and observation. [ Sir W. Temple ]

All the great captains have performed vast achievements by conforming with the rules of art - by adjusting efforts to obstacles. [ Napoleon I ]

Those who are unacquainted with the world take pleasure in the intimacy of great men; those who are wiser dread the consequences. [ Horace ]

Great souls forgive not injuries till time has put their enemies within their power, that they may show forgiveness is their own. [ John Dryden ]

A library is a precious catacomb, wherein are embalmed and preserved imperishably the great minds of the dead who will never die. [ Chatfield ]

Nothing but the right can ever be expedient, since that can never be true expediency which would sacrifice a great good to a less. [ Whately ]

Others proclaim the infirmities of a great man with satisfaction and complacence, if they discover none of the like in themselves. [ Addison ]

The little and short sayings of nice and excellent men are of great value, like the dust of gold, or the least sparks of diamonds. [ Tillotson ]

The lives of great men cannot be writ with any tolerable degree of elegance or exactness within a short time after their decease. [ Addison ]

Like a great poet, Nature produces the greatest results with the simplest means. There are simply a sun, flowers, water, and love. [ Heine ]

Great abilities, when employed as God directs, do but make the owners of them greater and more painful servants to their neighbors. [ Swift ]

We instinctively abhor calumny as we do a snake, for fear of its venom; but, is our aversion to it so great when it attacks others? [ De Finod ]

Society is composed of two great classes: those who have more dinners than appetite, and those who have more appetite than dinners. [ Chamfort ]

No person who is not a great sculptor or painter can be an architect. If he is not a painter or sculptor, he can only be a builder. [ Ruskin ]

Words are good, But they are not the best. The best is not to be explained by words; the spirit in which we act is the great matter. [ Goethe ]

As it is the mark of great minds to say many things in a few words, so it is that of little minds to use many words to say, nothing. [ La Rochefoucauld ]

If it is a pleasure to be envied and shot at, to be maligned standing and to be despised falling, then it is a pleasure to be great. [ South ]

People are not aware of the very great force which pleasantry in company has upon all those with whom a man of that talent converses. [ Steele ]

At the gates of the forest the surprised man of the world is forced to leave his city estimates of great and small, wise and foolish. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]

Too great carelessness, equally with excess in dress, multiplies the wrinkles of old age, and makes its decay still more conspicuous. [ Bruyere ]

Beauty is a great gift of heaven; not for the purpose of female vanity, but a great gift for one who loves, and wishes to be beloved. [ Miss Edgeworth ]

Great minds do indeed react on the society which has made them what they are; but they only pay with interest what they have received. [ Macaulay ]

Only if the spirit of man were not free, would the thought be a great one that there is a monarch of thought who rules over our souls. [ Platen ]

Great men are the modellers, patterns, and in a wide sense creators, of whatsoever the general mass of men contrived to do and attain. [ Carlyle ]

The power of duly appreciating little things belongs to a great mind; a narrow-minded man has it not, for to him they are great things. [ Whately ]

Wherever I find a great deal of gratitude in a poor man, I take it for granted there would be as much generosity if he were a rich man. [ Pope ]

Every great and original writer, in proportion as he is great or original, must himself create the taste by which he is to be relished. [ Wordsworth ]

Genius is always a surprise, but it is born with great advantages when the stock from which it springs has been long under cultivation. [ Oliver Wendell Holmes ]

No great intellectual thing was ever done by great effort; a great thing can only be done by a great man, and be does it without effort. [ Ruskin ]

A worthless man will always remain worthless, and a little mind will not, by daily intercourse with great minds, become an inch greater. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]

It would take long to enumerate how great an amount of crime was everywhere perpetrated; even the report itself came short of the truth. [ Ovid ]

The use of great men is to serve the little men, to take care of the human race, and act as practical interpreters of justice and truth. [ Theodore Parker ]

A great writer possesses, so to speak, an individual and unchangeable style, which does not permit him easily to preserve the anonymous. [ Voltaire ]

It is safer to believe evil of everyone until people are found out to be good, but that requires a great deal of investigation nowadays. [ Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance ]

Intellectually the difficulties of unbelief are as great as those of belief, while morally the argument is wholly on the side of belief. [ Dr. T. Arnold ]

The art of conversation is to be prompt without being stubborn, to refute without argument, and to clothe great matters in a motley garb. [ Beaconsfield ]

The covetous man is like a camel with a great hunch on his back; heaven's gate must be made higher and broader, or he will hardly get in. [ Thomas Adams ]

The art of flatterers is to take advantage of the foibles of the great, to foster their errors, and never to give advice which may annoy. [ Moliere ]

Come forward, some great marshal, and organize equality in society, and your rod shall swallow up all the juggling old court gold-sticks. [ Thackeray ]

Great is he who enjoys his earthenware as if it were plate, and not less great the man to whom all his plate is no more than earthenware. [ Seneca ]

When one seeks the cause of the successes of great generals, one is astonished to find that they did everything necessary to insure them. [ Napoleon I ]

Those writers who lie on the watch for novelty can have little hope of greatness; for great things cannot have escaped former observation. [ Johnson ]

Little joys refresh us constantly, like house-bread, and never bring disgust; and great ones, like sugar-bread, briefly, and then satiety. [ Richter ]

Homeliness is almost as great a merit in a book as in a house, if the reader would abide there. It is next to beauty, and a very high art. [ Thoreau ]

No man can make a speech alone. It is the great human power that strikes up from a thousand minds that acts upon him, and makes the speech. [ James A. Garfield ]

Repose without stagnation is the state most favorable to happiness. The great felicity of life, says Seneca, is to be without perturbations. [ Bovee ]

By a certain fate, great acts, and great eloquence have most commonly gone hand in hand, equalling and honoring each other in the same ages. [ Milton ]

That great chain of causes, which, linking one to another, even to the throne of God Himself, can never be unraveled by any industry of ours. [ Burke ]

O, be sick, great greatness, and bid thy ceremony give thee cure! Thinkest thou the fiery fever will go out with titles blown from adulation? [ William Shakespeare ]

There is a better thing than the great man who is always speaking, and that is the great man who only speaks when he has a great word to say. [ William Winter ]

We have the command, to a great extent, over our own lot. At all events, our mind is our own possession; we can cherish happy thoughts there. [ Samuel Smiles ]

The birds, great Nature's happy commoners, that haunt in woods, in meads, and flowery gardens, rifle the sweets and taste the choicest fruits. [ Rowe ]

There has never been a great or beautiful character which has not become so by filling well the ordinary and smaller offices appointed by God. [ Horace Bushnell ]

Misery and ignorance are always the cause of great evils. Misery is easily excited to anger, and ignorance soon yields to perfidious counsels. [ Addison ]

When you see a man with a great deal of religion displayed in his shop-window, you may depend upon it he keeps a very small stock of it within. [ Spurgeon ]

Wit, like hunger, will be with great difficulty restrained from falling on vice and ignorance, where there is great plenty and variety of food. [ Fielding ]

Without great men, great crowds of people in a nation are disgusting; like moving cheese, like hills of ants or of fleas - the more, the worse. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]

He will steal himself into a man's favor and for a week escape a great deal of discoveries; but when you find him out, you have him ever after. [ William Shakespeare ]

The heart is a small thing, but desireth great matters; it is not sufficient for a kite's dinner, yet the whole world is not sufficient for it. [ V. Hugo ]

Great souls attract sorrows as mountains do storms. But the thunder-clouds break upon them, and they thus form a shelter for the plains around. [ Jean Paul ]

Formerly when great fortunes were only made in war, war was a business; but now, when great fortunes are only made by business, business is war. [ Bovee ]

Do we not hear voices, gentle and great, and some of them like the voices of departed friends - do we not hear them saying to us, Come up hither? [ Wm. Mountford ]

Custom is the great leveller. It corrects the inequality of fortune by lessening equally the pleasures of the prince and the pains of the peasant. [ Henry Home ]

The great lesson of biography is to show what man can be and do at his best. A noble life put fairly on record acts like an inspiration to others. [ Samuel Smiles ]

When a mother, as fond mothers will, vows that she knows every thought in her daughter's heart, I think she pretends to know a great deal too much. [ Thackeray ]

Garments will fall to pieces, jewels and gold will lose something of their lustre, but the fame that great poems acquire will last through all time. [ Ovid ]

Much complaining I often hear raised against the proud bearing of the great. The pride of the great will disappear as soon as we cease our cringing. [ Körner ]

Great joy, especially after a sudden change and revolution of circumstances, is apt to be silent, and dwells rather in the heart than on the tongue. [ Fielding ]

It is often better to have a great deal of harm happen to one; a great deal may arouse you to remove what a little will only accustom you to endure. [ Lord Greville ]

I make little account of genealogical trees. Mere family never made a man great. Thought and deed, not pedigree, are the passports to enduring fate. [ General Skobeleff ]

Great acts grow out of great occasions, and great occasions spring from great principles, working changes in society and tearing it up by the roots. [ Hazlitt ]

Speaking generally, no man appears great to his contemporaries, for the same reason that no man is great to his servants - both know too much of him. [ Colton ]

Great minds comprehend more in a word, a look, a pressure of the hand, than ordinary men in long conversations, or the most elaborate correspondence. [ Lavater ]

Great minds seek to labour for eternity. All other men are captivated by immediate advantages; great minds are excited by the prospect of distant good. [ Friedrich Schiller ]

Great attention to what is said and sweetness of speech, a great degree of kindness and the appearance of awe, are always tokens of a man's attachment. [ Hitopadesa ]

That state of life is alone suitable to a man in which and for which he was born, and he who is not led abroad by great objects is far happier at home. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]

Critics must excuse me if I compare them to certain animals called asses, who, by gnawing vines, originally taught the great advantage of pruning them. [ Shenstone ]

They consume a considerable quantity of our paper manufacture, employ our artisans in printing, and find business for great numbers of indigent persons. [ Addison ]

The road to glory would cease to be arduous if it were trite and trodden; and great minds must be ready not only to take opportunities but to make them. [ Colton ]

Perseverance and tact are the two great qualities most valuable for all men who would mount, but especially for those who have to step out of the crowd. [ Benjamin Disraeli ]

Ah, how wonderful is the advent of the spring, - the great annual miracle of the blossoming of Aaron's rod, repeated on myriads and myriads of branches! [ Longfellow ]

Be substantially great in thyself, and more than thou appearest unto others; and let the world be deceived in thee, as they are in the lights of heaven. [ Sir Thomas Browne ]

The great atheists are, indeed, the hypocrites, which are ever handling holy things, but without feeling; so as they must need be cauterized in the end. [ Bacon ]

Every great example of punishment has in it some tincture of injustice, but the wrong to individuals is compensated by the promotion of the public good. [ Tac ]

Fear is an instructor of great sagacity, and the herald of all revolutions. It has boded, and mowed, and gibbered for ages over government and property. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]

Many have been ruined by their fortunes; many have escaped ruin by the want of fortune. To obtain it, the great have become little, and the little great. [ Zimmermann ]

There is a great difference between nationality and race. Nationality is the miracle of political independence. Race is the principle of physical analogy. [ Earl of Beaconsfield ]

When the dust of death has choked a great man's voice, the common words he said turn oracles, the common thoughts he yoked like horses draw like griffins. [ Mrs. Browning ]

A contemplation of God's works, a generous concern for the good of mankind, and the unfeigned exercise of humility only, denominate men great and glorious. [ Addison ]

You are never going to be driven anywhere worthwhile, but you sure as hell drive yourself to a lot of great places. It is up to you to drive yourself there. [ Bobby Knight ]

Every great mind seeks to labor for eternity. All men are captivated by immediate advantages; great minds alone are excited by the prospect of distant good. [ Schiller ]

As music has been the tardiest of arts to make its way through the great world, so it is peculiarly the tardiest of arts to make its way into a new country. [ T. Tilton ]

It is the great error of reformers and philanthropists in our time to nibble at the consequences of unjust power, instead of redressing the injustice itself. [ J. S. Mill ]

The intellectual faculty is a goodly field, capable of great improvement; and it is the worst husbandry in the world to sow it with trifles and impertinences. [ Sir M. Hale ]

A man would live in Italy (a place of pleasure), but he would choose to die in Spain (where they say the Catholic religion is professed with great strictness). [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]

Mountains never shake hands.
Their roots may touch; they may keep together some way up; but at length they part company, and rise into individual, insulated peaks. So is it with great men. [ J. C. and A. W. Hare ]

Is thy friend angry with thee? Then provide him an opportunity of showing thee a great favor. Over that his heart must needs melt, and he will love thee again. [ Richter ]

Simple as it seems, it was a great discovery that the key of knowledge could turn both ways, that it could open, as well as lock, the door of power to the many. [ Lowell ]

The essence of true nobility is neglect of self. Let the thought of self pass in, and the beauty of a great action is gone, like the bloom from a soiled flower. [ Froude ]

Great libraries of books are subject to certain accidents besides the damp, the worms, and the rats - that of the borrowers, not to say a word of the purloiners! [ Isaac Disraeli ]

As whole caravans may light their lamps from one candle without exhausting it, so myriads of tribes may gain wisdom from the great Book without impoverishing it. [ Rabbi Ben Azai ]

Great, ever fruitful; profitable for reproof, for encouragement, for building up in manful purposes and works, are the words of those that in their day were men. [ Carlyle ]

Poetry has been to me its own exceeding great reward; it has given me the habit of wishing to discover the good and beautiful in all that meets and surrounds me. [ S. T. Coleridge ]

It requires a great deal of boldness and a great deal of caution to make a great fortune, and when you have got it, it requires ten times as much wit to keep it. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]

What chiefly distinguishes great artists from feeble artists is first their sensibility and tenderness; secondly, their imagination; and thirdly, their industry. [ John Ruskin ]

Exploding many things under the name of trifles is a very false proof either of wisdom or magnanimity, and a great check to virtuous actions with regard to fame. [ Swift ]

There never was a great truth but it was reverenced: never a great institution, nor a great man, that did not, sooner or later, receive the reverence of mankind. [ Theodore Parker ]

That is, in a great degree, true of all men, which was said of the Athenians, that they were like sheep, of which a flock is more easily driven than a single one. [ Whately ]

It is, in a great measure, by raising up and endowing great minds that God secures the advance of human affairs, and the accomplishment of His own plans on earth. [ Albert Barnes ]

I like Wagner's music better than any other music. It is so loud that one can talk the whole time without people hearing what one says. That is a great advantage. [ Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Grey ]

The eternity, before the world and after, is without our reach; but that little spot of ground which lies betwixt those two great oceans, this we are to cultivate. [ Burnet ]

We are too fond of our own will; we want to be doing what we fancy mighty things: but the great point is to do small things, when called to them, in a right spirit. [ Cecil ]

The truly strong and sound mind is the mind that can embrace equally great things and small. I would have a man great in great things, and elegant in little things. [ Johnson ]

We are members of one great body. Nature planted in us a mutual love, and fitted us for a social life. We must consider that we were born for the good of the whole. [ Seneca ]

Wise sayings are the guiding oracles which man has found out for himself in that great business of ours, of learning how to be, to do, to do without, and to depart. [ John Morley ]

There are errors which no wise man will treat with rudeness while there is a probability that they may be the refraction of some great truth still below the horizon. [ Coleridge ]

Pride is handsome, economical; pride eradicates so many vices, letting none subsist but itself, that it seems as if it were a great gain to exchange vanity for pride. [ Emerson ]

Life is a sea; the soul the threatened ship; sin, Satan, and hell the dangers to be met; and Christ the great pilot, who will bring the soul into the heavenly harbor. [ J. Foster ]

Like dogs in a wheel, birds in a cage, or squirrels in a chain, ambitious men still climb and climb, with great labour and incessant anxiety, but never reach the top. [ Burton ]

Those great actions whose luster dazzles us are represented by politicians as the effects of deep design; whereas they are commonly the effects of caprice and passion. [ Rochefoucauld ]

Men of great parts are often unfortunate in the management of public business, because they are apt to go out of the common road by the quickness of their imagination. [ Swift ]

Genius does not seem to derive any great support from syllogisms. Its carriage is free; its manner has a touch of inspiration. We see it come, but we never see it walk. [ Count de Maistre ]

The great business of a man is to improve his mind and govern his manners; all other projects and pursuits, whether in our power to compass or not, are only amusements. [ Pliny ]

There is no man so great as not to have some littleness more predominant than all his greatness. Our virtues are the dupes, and often only the plaything of our follies. [ Bulwer-Lytton ]

Mannerism is always longing to have done, and has no true enjoyment in work. A genuine, really great talent, on the other hand, has its greatest happiness in execution. [ Goethe ]

Great Men are the inspired (speaking and acting) Texts of that Divine Book of Revelations, whereof a Chapter is completed from epoch to epoch, and by some named History. [ Carlyle ]

The News-writer lies down at Night in great Tranquillity, upon a piece of News which corrupts before Morning, and which he is obliged to throw away as soon as he awakes. [ De La Bruyere ]

There is a patience that cackles. There are a great many virtues that are hen-like. They are virtues to be sure; but everybody in the neighborhood has to know about them. [ Beecher ]

Great ambition is the passion of a great character. He who is endowed with it may perform very good or very bad actions; all depends upon the principles which direct him. [ Napoleon ]

There is no employment in the world so laborious as that of making to one's self a great name; life ends before one has scarcely made the first rough draught of his work. [ Bruyere ]

The truly great are to be found everywhere; nor is it easy to say in what condition they spring up most plentifully. Real greatness has nothing to do with a man's sphere. [ William Ellery Channing ]

The little mind who loves itself will write and think with the vulgar; but the great mind will be bravely eccentric, and scorn the beaten road, from universal benevolence. [ Goldsmith ]

To elevate and surprise is the great art of quackery and puffing; to raise a lively and exaggerated image in the mind, and take it by surprise before it can recover breath. [ Hazlitt ]

Thou hast seen a farmer's dog bark at a beggar? Ay Sir! And the creature run from the cur? There thou might'st behold the great image of authority: a dog's obeyed in office. [ William Shakespeare ]

Necessity, that great refuge and excuse for human frailty, breaks through all law; and he is not to be accounted in fault whose crime is not the effect of choice, but force. [ Pascal ]

Great causes are never tried on their merits; but the cause is reduced to particulars to suit the size of the partisans, and the contention is ever hottest on minor matters. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]

Once for all, beauty remains undemonstrable; it appears to us as in a dream, when we behold the works of the great poets and painters, and, in short, of all feeling artists. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]

As what we call genius arises out of the disproportionate power and size of a certain faculty, so the great difficulty lies in harmonizing with it the rest of the character. [ Mrs. Jameson ]

When the painter wishes to represent an event, he cannot place before us too great a number of personages; but he cannot employ too few when he wishes to portray an emotion. [ Joubert ]

I think you might dispense with half your doctors, if you would only consult Doctor Sun more, and be more under the treatment of these great hydropathic doctors, the clouds! [ Beecher ]

The ugliest of trades have their moments of pleasure. Now, if I were a grave-digger, or even a hangman, there are some people I could work for with a great deal of enjoyment. [ Douglas Jerrold ]

No good writer was ever long neglected; no great man overlooked by men equally great. Impatience is a proof of inferior strength, and a destroyer of what little there may be. [ Landor ]

Although the devil be the father of lies, he seems, like other great inventors, to have lost much of his reputation by the continual improvements that have been made upon him. [ Swift ]

Those who think that in order to dress well it is necessary to dress extravagantly or grandly make a great mistake. Nothing so well becomes true feminine beauty as simplicity. [ George D. Prentice ]

It is not written, blessed is he that feedeth the poor, but he that considereth the poor. A little thought and a little kindness are often worth more than a great deal of money. [ Ruskin ]

Sympathy is the first great lesson which man should learn.... Unless he learns to feel for things in which he has no personal interest, he can achieve nothing generous or noble. [ Talfourd ]

To have read the greatest works of any great poet, to have beheld or heard the greatest works of any great painter or musician, is a possession added to the best things of life. [ Swinburne ]

Short is the life of those who possess great accomplishments, and seldom do they reach a good old age. Whatever thou lovest, pray that thou mayest not set too high a value on it. [ Martial ]

It is good sense applied with diligence to what was at first a mere accident, and which by great application grew to be called, by the generality of mankind, a particular genius. [ Johnson ]

I am one who finds within me a nobility that spurns! the idle pratings of the great, and their mean boasts of what their fathers were, while they themselves are fools effeminate. [ Percival ]

For as much as to understand and to be mighty are great qualities, the higher that they be, they are so much the less to be esteemed if goodness also abound not in the possessor. [ Sir P. Sidney ]

As it is a great point of art, when our matter requires it, to enlarge and veer out all sail, so to take it in and contract it is of no less praise when the argument doth ask it. [ Ben Jonson ]

Men of great learning or genius are too full to be exact, and therefore choose to throw down their pearls in heaps before the reader, rather than be at the pains of stringing them. [ Spectator ]

Everything made by man may be destroyed by man; there are no ineffaceable characters except those engraved by nature; and nature makes neither princes nor rich men nor great lords. [ Rousseau ]

Science has done much for us; but it is a poor science that would hide from us the great deep sacred infinitude of Nescience, on which all science swims as a mere superficial film. [ Carlyle ]

That rich man is great who thinketh not himself great because he is rich; the proud man (who is the poor man) braggeth outwardly but beggeth inwardly; he is blown up, but not full. [ S. Hieron ]

There is scarce any man who cannot persuade himself of his own merit. Has he commonsense, he prefers it to genius; has he some diminutive virtues, he prefers them to great talents. [ Sewall ]

Feasts and business and pleasure and enjoyments seem great things to us, whilst we think of nothing else: but as soon as we add death to them they all sink into an equal littleness. [ William Law ]

Great is the power of Eloquence; but never is it so great as when it pleads along with nature, and the culprit is a child strayed from his duty, and returned to it again with tears. [ Sterne ]

The great silent man! Looking round on the noisy inanity of the world, - words with little meaning, actions with little worth, - one loves to reflect on the great Empire of Silence. [ Carlyle ]

He only is great who has the habits of greatness; who, after performing what none in ten thousand could accomplish, passes on like Samson, and tells neither father nor mother of it. [ Lavater ]

I have strictly adhered to the rule of never copying. I write at once as I intend the words to stand. This leads to great precision of thought, and makes the style fresh and vigorous. [ Louisa Molesworth, The Art Of Authorship, 1891 ]

I learn several great truths; as that it is impossible to see into the ways of futurity, that punishment always attends the villain, that love is the fond soother of the human breast. [ Goldsmith ]

Praise in the beginning is agreeable enough, and we receive it as a favor; but when it comes in great quantities, we regard it only as a debt, which nothing but our merit could extort. [ Goldsmith ]

A great man, I take it, is a man so inspired and permeated with the ideas of God and the Christly spirit as to be too magnanimous for vengeance, and too unselfish to seek his own ends. [ David Thomas ]

Everybody takes pleasure in returning small obligations; many go so far as to acknowledge moderate ones; but there is hardly anyone who does not repay great obligations with ingratitude. [ Rochefoucauld ]

Mountains never shake hands. Their roots may touch; they may keep company some way up; but at length they part company, and rise into individual, isolated peaks. So it is with great men. [ Hare ]

It may be laid down as a general rule that no woman who hath any great pretensions to admiration is ever well pleased in a company where she perceives herself to fill only a second place. [ Fielding ]

It is the care of a very great part of mankind to conceal their indigence from the rest. They support themselves by temporary expedients, and every day is lost in contriving for tomorrow. [ Johnson ]

The great blessings of mankind are within us, and within our reach; but we shut our eyes, and, like people in the dark, we fall foul upon the very thing we search for, without finding it. [ Seneca ]

He that hath so many causes of joy, and so great, is very much in love with sorrow and peevishness, who loses all these pleasures, and chooses to sit down on his little handful of thorns. [ Jeremy Taylor ]

Life may as properly be called an art as any other, and the great incidents in it are no more to be considered as mere accidents than the severest members of a fine statue or a noble poem. [ Fielding ]

The human intellect is the great truth-organ; realities, as they exist, are the subjects of its study; and knowledge is the result of its acquaintance with the things which it investigates. [ Moses Harvey ]

Who confers reputation? who gives respect and veneration to persons, to books, to great men? Who but Opinion? How utterly insufficient are all the riches of the world without her approbation! [ Pascal ]

As great enmities spring from great friendships, and mortal distempers from vigorous health, so do the most surprising and the wildest frenzies from the high and lively agitations of our souls. [ Montaigne ]

It is much easier to meet with error than to find truth; error is on the surface, and can be more easily met with; truth is hid in great depths, the way to seek does not appear to all the world. [ Goethe ]

If the ear is the road to the heart, and the heart to the affections, how keen must the affliction of deafness be to those who possess great tenderness of the one, and susceptibility of the other. [ J. Ellis ]

Great trials seem to be a necessary preparation for great duties. It would seem that the more important the enterprise, the more severe the trial to which the agent is subjected in his preparation. [ Edward Thomson ]

Simple creatures, whose thoughts are not taken up, like those of educated people, with the care of a great museum of dead phrases, are very quick to see the live facts which are going on about them. [ Holmes ]

Socrates, who is by all accounts the undoubted head of the sect of the hen-pecked, owed, and acknowledged that he owed a great part of his virtue to the exercise his useful wife constantly gave him. [ Steele ]

Greatness of mind is not shown by admitting small things, but by making small things great under its influence. He who can take no interest in what is small will take false interest in what is great. [ John Ruskin ]

All reasoning is retrospect; it consists in the application of facts and principles previously known. This will show the very great importance of knowledge, especially of that kind called experience. [ J. Foster ]

Americans want great schools for their children, safe neighborhoods for their families, and good jobs for themselves. These are just and reasonable demands of righteous people and a righteous public... [ President Donald J. Trump, Presidential Inaugeration Speech, Jan 20, 2017 ]

This is the part of a great man, after he has maturely weighed all circumstances, to punish the guilty, to spare the many, and in every state of fortune not to depart from an upright, virtuous conduct. [ Cicero ]

Men and communities in this world are often in the position of Arctic explorers, who are making great speed in a given direction, while the ice-floe beneath them is making greater speed in the opposite. [ John Burroughs ]

It is also important to guard against mistaking for good-nature what is properly good-humor, - a cheerful flow of spirits and easy temper not readily annoyed, which is compatible with great selfishness. [ Whately ]

Life is made up, not of great sacrifices or duties, but of little things, in which smiles and kindnesses and small obligations, given habitually, are what win and preserve the heart, and secure comfort. [ Sir Humphry Davy ]

Nobility is a river that sets with a constant and undeviating current directly into the great Pacific Ocean of Time; but, unlike all other rivers, it is more grand at its source than at its termination. [ Colton ]

Over all life broods Poesy, like the calm blue sky with its motherly, rebuking face. She is the great reformer, and where the love of her is strong and healthy, wickedness and wrong cannot long prevail. [ Lowell ]

If you have great talents, industry will improve them; if moderate abilities, industry will supply their deficiencies. Nothing is denied to well-directed labor: nothing is ever to be attained without it. [ Sir Joshua Reynolds ]

All life is surrounded by a great circumference of death; but to the believer in Jesus, beyond this surrounding death is a boundless sphere of life. He has only to die once to be done with death forever. [ James Hamilton ]

Have you known how to compose your manners? You have done a great deal more than he who has composed books. Have you known how to take repose? You have done more than he who has taken cities and empires. [ Montaigne ]

The truly great and good in affliction bear a countenance more princely than they are wont, for it is the temper of the highest hearts, like the palm tree, to strive most upwards when it is most burdened. [ S. P. Sidney ]

Love, when founded in the heart, will show itself in a thousand unpremeditated sallies of fondness; but every cool deliberate exhibition of the passion only argues little understanding or great insincerity. [ Goldsmith ]

He who would do some great thing in this short life, must apply himself to the work with such a concentration of his forces as to the idle spectators, who live only to amuse themselves, looks like insanity. [ John Foster ]

The great moments of life are but moments like others. Your doom is spoken in a word or two. A single look from the eyes, a mere pressure of the hand, may decide it; or of the lips, though they cannot speak. [ Thackeray ]

He that can enjoy the intimacy of the great, and on no occasion disgust them by familiarity, or disgrace himself by servility, proves that he is as perfect a gentleman by nature as his companions are by rank. [ Colton ]

Great people and champions are special gifts of God, whom He gives and preserves; they do their work and achieve great actions, not with vain imaginations or cold and sleepy cogitations, but by motion of God. [ Luther ]

Make a point never so clear, it is great odds that a man whose habits and the bent of whose mind lie a contrary way, shall be unable to comprehend it. So weak a thing is reason in competition with inclination. [ Bishop Berkeley ]

The great moments of life are but moments like the others. Your doom is spoken in a word or two. A single look from the eyes, a mere pressure of the hand, may decide it; or of the lips though they cannot speak. [ Thackeray ]

The great inventor is one who has walked forth upon the industrial world, not from universities, but from hovels; not as clad in silks and decked with honors, but as clad in fustian and grimed with soot and oil. [ Isaac Taylor ]

I think sometimes could I only have music on my own terms, could I live in a great city, and know where I could go whenever I wished the ablution and inundation of musical waves, that were a bath and a medicine. [ R. W. Emerson ]

There should be no fear. We are protected, and we will always be protected. We will be protected by the great men and women of our military and law enforcement. And most importantly, we will be protected by god. [ President Donald J. Trump, Presidential Inaugeration Speech, Jan 20, 2017 ]

It is harder to avoid censure than to gain applause; for this may be done by one great or wise action in an age. Rut to escape censure a man must pass his whole life without saying or doing one ill or foolish thing. [ Hume ]

Sir Anthony Absolute, two or three years before Evelina appeared, spoke the sense of the great body of sober fathers and husbands when he pronounced the circulating library an evergreen tree of diabolical knowledge. [ Macaulay ]

There the wicked cease from troubling; and there the weary be at rest. There the prisoners rest together; they hear not the voice of the oppressor. The small and great are there; and the servant is free from his master. [ Bible ]

All the other passions condescend at times to accept the inexorable logic of facts; but jealousy looks facts straight in the face, ignores them utterly, and says that she knows a great deal better than they can tell her. [ Helps ]

A woman whose great beauty eclipses all others is seen with as many different eyes as there are people who look at her. Pretty women gaze with envy, homely women with spite, old men with regret, young men with transport. [ D'Argens ]

Want of perseverance is the great fault of women in everything - morals, attention to health, friendship, and so on. It cannot be too often repeated that women never reach the end of anything through want of perseverance. [ Mme. Necker ]

Have you known how to compose your manners, you have achieved a great deal more than he who has composed books. Have you known how to attain repose, you have achieved more than he who has taken cities and subdued empires. [ Montaigne ]

What real good does an addition to a fortune, already sufficient, procure? Not any. Could the great man, by having his fortune increased, increase also his appetites, then precedence might be attended with real amusement. [ Goldsmith ]

Utopia! such is the name with which ignorance, folly, and incredulity have always characterized the great conceptions, discoveries, enterprises, and ideas which have illustrated the ages, and marked eras in human progress. [ E. de Girardin ]

The productions of a great genius, with many lapses and inadvertences, are infinitely preferable to the works of an inferior kind of author which are scrupulously exact, and conformable to all the rules of correct writing. [ Addison ]

Those people who are always improving never become great Greatness is an eminence, the ascent to which is steep and lofty, and which a man must seize on at once by natural boldness and vigor, and not by patient, wary steps. [ Hazlitt ]

The great secret both of health and successful industry is the absolute yielding up of one's consciousness to the business and diversion of the hour - never permitting the one to infringe in the least degree upon the other. [ Sismondi ]

Bashfulness is a great hindrance to a man, both in uttering his sentiments and in understanding what is proposed to him; it is therefore good to press forward with discretion, both in discourse and company of the better sort. [ Bacon ]

Nothing more strikingly betrays the credulity of mankind than medicine. Quackery is a thing universal, and universally successful. In this case it becomes literally true that no imposition is too great for the credulity of men. [ Thoreau ]

Fame is the inheritance not of the dead, but of the living. It is we who look back with lofty pride to the great names of antiquity, who drink of that flood of glory as of a river, and refresh our wings in it for future flight. [ Hazlitt ]

The great difficulty is first to win a reputation; the next to keep it while you live; and the next to preserve it after you die, when affection and interest are over, and nothing but sterling excellence can preserve your name. [ B. R. Haydon ]

Great men are the fire-pillars in this dark pilgrimage of mankind; they stand as heavenly signs, ever-living witnesses of what has been, prophetic tokens of what may still be, the revealed, embodied possibilities of human nature. [ Carlyle ]

Almost every great soul that has led forward, or lifted up the race, has been furnished for each nobler deed, and inspired with each patriotic and holy aspiration, by the retiring fortitude of some Spartan - some Christian mother. [ C. J. White ]

He may justly be numbered among the benefactors of mankind who contracts the great rules of life into short sentences, that may be easily impressed on the memory, and taught by frequent recollection to recur habitually to the mind. [ Johnson ]

Good people do a great deal of harm in the world. Certainly the greatest harm they do is that they make badness of such extraordinary importance. It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious. [ Oscar Wilde, Lady Windemere's Fan ]

Truth, in the great practical concerns of life, is so much a question of the reconciling and combining of opposites, that very few have minds sufficiently capacious and impartial to make the adjustment with an approach to correctness. [ J. S. Mill ]

Give not thy tongue too great a liberty, lest it take thee prisoner. A word unspoken is like the sword in the scabbard, thine; if vented, thy sword is in another's hand. If thou desire to be held wise, be so wise as to hold thy tongue. [ Quarles ]

In the life of a nation ideas are not the only things of value. Sentiment also is of great value; and the way to foster sentiment in a people, and to develop it in the young, is to have a well-recorded past, and to be familiar with it. [ Joseph Anderson ]

In composing, think much more of your matter than your manner. To be sure, spirit, grace, and dignity of manner are of great importance, both to the speaker and writer; but of infinitely more importance is the weight and worth of matter. [ Wirt ]

Art is the effort of man to express the ideas which nature suggests to him of a power above nature, whether that power be within the recesses of his own being, or in the Great First Cause of which nature, like himself, is but the effect. [ Edward Bulwer-Lytton ]

Avarice often produces opposite effects; there is an infinite number of people who sacrifice all their property to doubtful and distant expectations; others despise great future advantages to obtain present interests of a trifling nature. [ Kochefoucauld ]

A very small offence may be a just cause for great resentment: it is often much less the particular instance which is obnoxious to us than the proof if carries with it of the general tenor and disposition of the mind from whence it sprung. [ Greville ]

Every man stamps his value on himself. The price we challenge for ourselves is given us. There does not live on earth the man, be his station what it may, that I despise myself compared with him. Man is made great or little by his own will. [ Schiller ]

Every modulated sound is not a song, and every voice that executes a beautiful air does not sing. Singing should enchant. But to produce this effect there must be a quality of soul and voice which is by no means common even with great singers. [ Joubert ]

Without earnestness no man is ever great, or does really great things. He may be the cleverest of men; he may be brilliant, entertaining, popular; but he will want weight. No soulmoving picture was ever painted that had not in it depth of shadow. [ Peter Bayne ]

The bee is enclosed, and shines preserved, in a tear of the sisters of Phaeton, so that it seems enshrined in its own nectar. It has obtained a worthy reward for its great toils; we may suppose that the bee itself would have desired such a death. [ Martial ]

A certain amount of opposition is a great help to a man. Kites rise against and not with the wind. Even a head wind is better than none. No man ever worked his passage anywhere in a dead calm. Let no man wax pale, therefore, because of opposition. [ John Neal ]

To be forward to praise others implies either great eminence, that can afford to part with applause; or great quickness of discernment, with confidence in our own judgments; or great sincerity and love of truth, getting the better of our self-love. [ Hazlitt ]

Magnificence is likewise a source of the sublime. A great profusion of things which are splendid or valuable in themselves is magnificent. The starry heaven, though it occurs so very frequently to our view, never fails to excite an idea of grandeur. [ Burke ]

Pride is as loud a beggar as want, and a great deal more saucy. When you have bought one fine thing, you must buy ten more, that your appearance may be all of a piece; but it is easier to suppress the first desire than to satisfy all that follow it. [ Franklin ]

Much of what is great, and to all men beneficial, has been wrought by those who neither intended nor knew the good they did; and many mighty harmonies have been discoursed by instruments that had been dumb and discordant but that God knew their stops. [ John Ruskin ]

Biography, especially the biography of the great and good, who have risen by their own exertions from poverty and obscurity to eminence and usefulness, is an inspiring and ennobling study. Its direct tendency is to reproduce the excellence it records. [ Horace Mann ]

I may grieve with the smart of an evil as soon as I feel it, but I will not smart with the grief of an evil as soon as I hear of it. My evil, when it Cometh, may make my grief too great; why, then, should my grief, before it comes, make my evil greater? [ Arthur Warwick ]

Enthusiasm is the element of success in everything. It is the light that leads and the strength that lifts men on and up in the great struggles of scientific pursuits and of professional labor. It robs endurance of difficulty, and makes a pleasure of duty. [ Bishop Doane ]

Our senses will not admit anything extreme. Too much noise confuses us, too much light dazzles us, too great distance or nearness prevents vision, too great prolixity or brevity weakens an argument, too much pleasure gives pain, too much accordance annoys. [ Pascal ]

It is not the reading of many books which is necessary to make a man wise or good, but the well-reading of a few, could he be sure to have the best. And it is not possible to read over many on the same subject without a great deal of loss of precious time. [ Richard Baxter ]

A little neglect may breed great mischief. For want of a nail the shoe was lost; for want of a shoe the horse was lost; and for want of a horse the rider was lost, being overtaken and slain by the enemy; all for want of a little care about a horse-shoe nail. [ Benjamin Franklin ]

A simple garb is the proper costume of the vulgar; it is cut for them, and exactly suits their measure; but it is an ornament for those who have filled up their lives with great deeds. I liken them to beauty in dishabille, but more bewitching on that account. [ Bruyere ]

The willow which bends to the tempest, often escapes better than the oak which resists it; and so in great calamities, it sometimes happens that light and frivolous spirits recover their elasticity and presence of mind sooner than those of a loftier character. [ Sir Walter Scott ]

A man who has any relish for fine writing either discovers new beauties or receives stronger impressions from the masterly strokes of a great author every time he peruses him; besides that he naturally wears himself into the same manner of speaking and thinking. [ Addison ]

Fame is a revenue payable only to our ghosts; and to deny ourselves all present satisfaction, or to expose ourselves to so much hazard for this, were as great madness as to starve ourselves, or fight desperately for food, to be laid on our tombs after our death. [ Mackenzie ]

Genius is not a single power, but a combination of great powers. It reasons, but it is not reasoning; it judges, but it is not judgment: it imagines, but it is not imagination; it feels deeply and fiercely, but it is not passion. It is neither, because it is all. [ Whipple ]

Two qualities are demanded of a statesman who would direct any great movement of opinion in which he himself takes a part; he must have a complete understanding of the movement itself, and he must be animated by the same motives as those which inspire the movement. [ Lamartine ]

Ask men of genius how much they owe to their mothers, and you will find that they attribute almost all to them and their influence; and if we could only guage the mental capacity of the wives of great men, we might perhaps learn why genius is so seldom hereditary. [ Lord Kames ]

The only kind of sublimity which a painter or sculptor should aim at is to express by certain proportions and positions of limbs and features that strength and dignity of mind, and vigor and activity of body, which enables men to conceive and execute great actions. [ Burke ]

The little may contrast with the great, in painting, but cannot be said to be contrary to it. Oppositions of colors contrast; but there are also colors contrary to each other, that is, which produce an ill effect because they shock the eye when brought very near it. [ Voltaire ]

Great men stand like solitary towers in the city of God, and secret passages running deep beneath external Nature give their thoughts intercourse with higher intelligences, which strengthens and consoles them, and of which the labourers on the surface do not even dream. [ Longfellow ]

Great works are performed, not by strength, but by perseverance. Yonder palace was raised by single stones, yet you see its height and spaciousness. He that shall walk with vigor three hours a day will pass in seven years a space equal to the circumference of the globe. [ Johnson ]

Errors to be dangerous must have a great deal of truth mingled with them; it is only from this alliance that they can ever obtain an extensive circulation; from pure extravagance, and genuine, unmingled falsehood, the world never has, and never can sustain any mischief. [ Sydney Smith ]

Biographies of great, but especially of good men are most instructive and useful as helps, guides, and incentives to others. Some of the best are almost equivalent to gospels, - teaching high living, high thinking, and energetic action, for their own and the world's good. [ Samuel Smiles ]

What a chimera is man! What a confused chaos! What a subject of contradictions! A professed judge of all things, and yet a feeble worm of the earth! the great depositary and guardian of truth, and yet a mere bundle of uncertainties! the glory and the shame of the universe! [ Pascal ]

There is no action so slight, nor so mean, but it may be done to a great purpose, and ennobled therefore; nor is any purpose so great but that slight actions may help it, and may be so done as to help it much, most especially that chief of all purposes, the pleasing of God. [ Ruskin ]

The common cause of waves is the friction of the wind upon the surface of the water; little ridges or elevations first appear, which by continuance of the force gradually increase until they become the rolling mountains seen where the wind sweeps over a great extent of water. [ F. Marryatt ]

Enthusiasm is that secret and harmonious spirit which hovers over the production of genius, throwing the reader of a book, or the spectator of a statue, into the very ideal presence whence these works have really originated. A great work always leaves us in a state of musing. [ Isaac Disraeli ]

Great men, though far above us, are felt to be our brothers; and their elevation shows us what vast possibilities are wrapped up in our common humanity. They beckon us up the gleaming heights to whose summits they have climbed. Their deeds are the woof of this world's history. [ Moses Harvey ]

A mother should give her children a superabundance of enthusiasm; that after they have lost all they are sure to lose on mixing with the world, enough may still remain to prompt and support them through great actions. A cloak should be of three-pile, to keep its gloss in wear. [ Hare ]

I have great hope of a wicked man, slender hope of a mean one. A wicked man may be converted and become a prominent saint. A mean man ought to be converted six or seven times, one right after the other, to give him a fair start and put him on an equality with a bold, wicked man. [ Beecher ]

The higher enthusiasm of man's nature is for the while without exponent; yet does it continue indestructible, unweariedly active, and work blindly in the great chaotic deep. Thus sect after sect, and church after church, bodies itself forth, and melts again into new metamorphosis. [ Carlyle ]

Those orators who give us much noise and many words, but little argument and less wit, and who are the loudest when least lucid, should take a lesson from the great volume of nature; she often gives us the lightning without the thunder, but never the thunder without the lightning. [ Burritt ]

Of all studies, the most delightful and the most useful is biography. The seeds of great events lie near the surface; historians delve too deep for them. No history was ever true. Lives I have read which, if they were not, had the appearance, the interest, and the utility of truth. [ Landor ]

One great reason why men practice generosity so little in the world is their finding so little there. Generosity is catching; and if so many men escape it, it is in a great degree from the same reason the countrymen escape the smallpox, - because they meet no one to give it to them. [ Greville ]

'Tis, in fact, utter folly to ask whether a person has anything from himself, or whether he has it from others, whether he operates by himself, or operates by means of others. The main point is to have a great will, and skill and perseverance to carry it out. All else is indifferent. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]

Whatever of true glory has been won by any nation of the earth; whatever great advance has been made by any nation in that which constitutes a high Christian civilization, has been always at the cost of sacrifice; has cost the price marked upon it in God's inventory of national good. [ J. G. Holland ]

Life affords no higher pleasure than that of surmounting difficulties, passing from one step of success to another, forming new wishes and seeing them gratified. He that labors in any great or laudable undertaking has his fatigues first supported by hope and afterwards rewarded by joy. [ Dr. Johnson ]

Poetry can make even the thought of death beautiful, and the sadness of bereavement not without a certain pleasure. Great poets have elicited from the sternest suffering a principle of enjoyment. Sublime faith and earnest love can conjure spirits the most lovely from the darkest abyss. [ Tuckerman ]

Be not too rash in the breaking of an inconvenient custom; as it was gotten, so leave it by degrees. Danger attends upon too sudden alterations; he that pulls down a bad building by the great may be ruined by the fall, but he that takes it down brick by brick may live to build a better. [ Quarles ]

Nature eschews regular lines; she does not shape her lines by a common model. Not one of Eve's numerous progeny in all respects resembles her who first culled the flowers of Eden. To the infinite variety and picturesque inequality of nature we owe the great charm of her uncloying beauty. [ Whittier ]

The silent power of books is a great power in the world; and there is a joy in reading them which those alone can know who read them with desire and enthusiasm. Silent, passive, and noiseless though they be, they may yet set in action countless multitudes, and change the order of nations. [ Henry Giles ]

It is very sad for a man to make himself servant to a thing, his manhood all taken out of him by the hydraulic pressure of excessive business. I should not like to be merely a great doctor, a great lawyer, a great minister, a great politician - I should like to be also something of a man. [ Theodore Parker ]

It seems strange that a butterfly's wing should be woven up so thin and gauzy in the monstrous loom of nature, and be so delicately tipped with fire from such a gross hand, and rainbowed all over in such a storm of thunderous elements. The marvel is that such great forces do such nice work. [ Theodore Parker ]

Great art dwells in all that is beautiful; but false art omits or changes all that is ugly. Great art accepts Nature as she is, but directs the eyes and thoughts to what is most perfect in her; false art saves itself the trouble of direction by removing or altering whatever is objectionable. [ John Ruskin ]

The gracious and self-sacrificing and womanly women of our revolution wore dresses cut lower than those of their great-granddaughters, as any portrait gallery will show. The dress is indefensible, but let us not be too ready to condemn the wearer for worse sins than thoughtlessness and vanity. [ Mrs. L. G. Calhoun ]

He only is great of heart who floods the world with a great affection. He only is great of mind who stirs the world with great thoughts. He only is great of will who does something to shape the world to a great career; and he is greatest who does the most of all these things, and does them best. [ R. D. Hitchcock ]

Because half a dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their importunate chink, whilst thousands of great cattle, reposing beneath the shadow of the British oak, chew the cud and are silent, pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field. [ Burke ]

Nor do we accept as genuine the person not characterized by this blushing bashfulness, this youthfulness of heart, this sensibility to the sentiment of suavity and self-respect. Modesty is bred of self-reverence. Fine manners are the mantle of fair minds. None are truly great without this ornament. [ Alcott ]

It is a great mortification to the vanity of man that his utmost art and industry can never equal the meanest of Nature's productions, either for beauty or value. Art is only the underworkman, and is employed to give a few strokes of embellishment to those pieces which come from the hand of the master. [ Hume ]

I once asked a distinguished artist what place he gave to labor in art. Labor, he in effect said, is the beginning, the middle, and the end of art. Turning then to another - And you, I inquired, what do you consider as the great force in art? Love, he replied. In their two answers I found but one truth. [ Bovee ]

The style of writing required in the great world is distinguished by a free and daring grace, a careless security, a fine and sharp polish, a delicate and perfect taste; while that fitted for the people is characterized by a vigorous natural fulness, a profound depth of feeling, and an engaging naivete. [ Goethe ]

Of him that hopes to be forgiven it is indispensably required that he forgive. It is, therefore, superfluous to urge any other motive. On this great duty eternity is suspended, and to him that refuses to practise it, the throne of mercy is inaccessible, and the Saviour of the world has been born in vain. [ Johnson ]

The style of writing required in the great world is distinguished by a free and daring grace, a careless security, a fine and sharp polish, a delicate and perfect taste; while that fitted for the people is characterised by a vigorous natural fulness, a profound depth of feeling, and an engaging naïveté. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]

Looking round on the noisy inanity of the world, words with little meaning, actions with little worth, one loves to reflect on the great empire of silence. The noble silent men, scattered here and there each in his department, silently thinking, silently working; whom no morning newspaper makes mention of. [ Carlyle ]

A few words worthy to be remembered suffice to give an idea of a great mind. There are single thoughts that contain the essence of a whole volume, single sentences that have the beauties of a large work, a simplicity so finished and so perfect that it equals in merit and in excellence a large and glorious composition. [ Joubert ]

Hudibras has defined nonsense, as Cowley does wit, by negatives. Nonsense, he says, is that which is neither true nor false. These two great properties of nonsense, which are always essential to it, give it such a peculiar advantage over all other writings, that it is incapable of being either answered or contradicted. [ Addison ]

Before dinner men meet with great inequality of understanding; and those who are conscious of their inferiority have the modesty not to talk; when they have drunk wine, every man feels himself happy, and loses that modesty, and grows impudent and vociferous; but he is not improved; he is only not sensible of his defects. [ Johnson ]

If you love music, hear it; go to operas, concerts, and pay fiddlers to play to you. But I insist upon your neither piping nor fiddling yourself; it puts a gentleman in a very frivolous, contemptible light; brings him into a great deal of bad company, and takes up a great deal of time which might be much better employed. [ Chesterfield ]

Might I give counsel to any young hearer, I would say to him, try to frequent the company of your betters. In books and life is the most wholesome society; learn to admire rightly; the great pleasure of life is that. Note what the great men admire, - they admired great things; narrow spirits admire basely, and worship meanly. [ Thackeray ]

As well might a lovely woman look daily in her mirror, yet not be aware of her beauty, as a great soul be unconscious of the powers with which Heaven has gifted him; not so much for himself, as to enlighten others - a messenger from God Himself, with a high and glorious mission to perform. Woe unto him who abuses that mission! [ Chambers ]

A just and reasonable modesty does not only recommend eloquence, but sets off every great talent which a man can be possessed of. It heightens all the virtues which it accompanies; like the shades of paintings, it raises and rounds every figure, and makes the colors more beautiful, though not so glowing as they would be without it. [ Addison ]

A time will come when the science of destruction shall bend before the arts of peace; when the genius which multiplies our powers, which creates new products, which diffuses comfort and happiness among the great mass of the people, shall occupy in the general estimation of mankind that rank which reason and commonsense now assign to it. [ Arago ]

Never teach false modesty. How exquisitely absurd to teach a girl that beauty is of no value, dress of no use! Beauty is of value; her whole prospects and happiness in life may often depend upon a new gown or a becoming bonnet; if she has five grains of commonsense she will find this out. The great thing is to teach her their proper value. [ Sydney Smith ]

The study of art possesses this great and peculiar charm, that it is absolutely unconnected with the struggles and contests of ordinary life. By private interests, by political questions, men are deeply divided, and set at variance; but beyond and above all such party strifes, they are attracted and united by a taste for the beautiful in art. [ Guizot ]

As it often happens that the best men are but little known, and consequently cannot extend the usefulness of their examples a great way, the biographer is of great utility, as, by communicating such valuable patterns to the world, he may perhaps do a more extensive service to mankind than the person whose life originally afforded the pattern. [ Fielding ]

Humor implies a sure conception of the beautiful, the majestic, and the true, by whose light it surveys and shapes their opposites. It is an humane influence, softening with mirth the ragged inequalities of existence, prompting tolerant views of life, bridging over the spaces which separate the lofty from the lowly, the great from the humble. [ E. P. Whipple ]

Quality and title have such allurements that hundreds are ready to give up all their own importance, to cringe. to flatter, to look little, and to pall every pleasure in constraint, merely to be among the great, though without the least hopes of improving their understanding or sharing their generosity. They might be happier among their equals. [ Goldsmith ]

Propriety of thought and propriety of diction are commonly found together. Obscurity and affectation are the two great faults of style. Obscurity of expression generally springs from confusion of ideas; and the same wish to dazzle, at any cost, which produces affectation in the manner of a writer, is likely to produce sophistry in his reasoning. [ Macaulay ]

It is a great mistake to suppose that bribery and corruption, although they may be very convenient for gratifying the ambition or the vanity of individuals, have any great effect upon the fortunes or the power of parties. And it is a great mistake to suppose that bribery and corruption are means by which power can either be obtained or retained. [ Beaconsfield ]

Nature, at all events, humanly speaking, is manifestly very fond of color; for she has made nothing without it. Her skies are blue; her fields, green; her waters vary with her skies; her animals, vegetables, minerals, are all colored. She paints a great many of them in apparently superfluous hues, as if to show the dullest eye how she loves color. [ Leigh Hunt ]

They that have read about everything are thought to understand everything too; but it is not always so. Reading furnishes the mind only with the materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours. We are of the ruminating kind, and it is not enough to cram ourselves with a great load of collections, - we must I chew them over again. [ Channing ]

You will get more profit from trying to find where beauty is, than in anxiously inquiring what it is. Once for all, it remains undemonstrable; it appears to us, as in a dream, when we behold the works of the great poets and painters; and in short, of all feeling artists; it is a hovering, shining, shadowy form, the outline of which no definition holds. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]

Promising is the very air of the time; it opens the eyes of expectation: performance is ever the duller for his act; and, but in the plainer and simpler kind of people, the deed of saying is quite out of use. To promise is most courtly and fashionable; performance is a kind of will, or testament, which argues a great sickness in his judgment that makes it. [ William Shakespeare ]

Man is so great that his greatness appears even in the consciousness of his misery. A tree does not know itself to be miserable. It is true that it is misery indeed to know one's self to be miserable; but then it is greatness also. In this way, all man's miseries go. to prove his greatness. They are the miseries of a mighty potentate, of a dethroned monarch. [ Pascal ]

The motives of the best actions will not bear too strict an inquiry. It is allowed that the cause of most actions, good or bad, may be resolved into the love of ourselves; but the self-love of some men inclines them to please others, and the self-love of others is wholly employed in pleasing themselves. This makes the great distinction between virtue and vice. [ Swift ]

People are always talking about originality; but what do they mean? As soon as we are born, the world begins to work upon us; and this goes on to the end. And after all, what can we call our own, except energy, strength, and will? If I could give an account of all that I owe to great predecessors and contemporaries, there would be but a small balance in my favor. [ Goethe ]

It was the saying of a great man, that if we could trace our descents, we should find all slaves to come from princes, and all princes from slaves; and fortune has turned all things topsy-turvy in a long series of revolutions; beside, for a man to spend his life in pursuit of a title, that serves only when he dies to furnish out an epitaph, is below a wise man's business. [ Seneca ]

I have so great a contempt and detestation for meanness, that I could sooner make a friend of one who had committed murder, than of a person who could be capable, in any instance, of the former vice. Under meanness, I comprehend dishonesty; under dishonesty, ingratitude; under ingratitude, irreligion; and under this latter, every species of vice and immorality in human nature. [ Sterne ]

Great merit or great failings will make you respected or despised; but trifles, little attentions, mere nothings, either done or neglected, will make you either liked or disliked, in the general run of the world. Examine yourself, why you like such and such people and dislike such and such others; and you will find that those different sentiments proceed from very slight causes. [ Chesterfield ]

Enthusiasm is a virtue rarely to be met with in seasons of calm and unruffled prosperity. Enthusiasn: Nourishes in adversity, kindles in the hour of danger, and awakens to deeds of renown. The terrors of persecution only serve to quicken the energy of its purposes. It swells in proud integrity, and, great in the purity of its cause, it can scatter defiance amidst hosts of enemies. [ Dr. Chalmers ]

That great mystery of time, were there no other; the illimitable, silent never-resting thing called time, rolling, rushing on, swift, silent like an all-embracing oceantide, on which we and all the universe swim like exhalations, like apparitions which are and then are not - this is for ever very literally a miracle, a thing to strike us dumb; for we have no word to speak about it. [ Carlyle ]

If I might venture to appeal to what is so much out of fashion at Paris, I mean to experience, I should tell you that in my course I have known and, according to my measure, have cooperated with great men; and I have never yet seen any plan which has not been mended by the observations of those who were much inferior in understanding to the person who took the lead in the business. [ Burke ]

We frequently fall into error and folly, not because the true principles of action are not known, but because for a time they are not remembered; he may, therefore, justly be numbered among the benefactors of mankind who contracts the great rules of life into short sentences that may early be impressed on the memory, and taught by frequent recollection to occur habitually to the mind. [ Johnson ]

It deserves to be considered that boldness is ever blind, for it sees not dangers and inconveniences. Whence it is bad in council though good in execution. The right use of bold persons, therefore, is that they never command in chief, but serve as seconds, under the direction of others. For in council it is good to see dangers, and in execution not to see them unless they are very great. [ Bacon ]

When the great Kepler had at length discovered the harmonic laws that regulate the motions of the heavenly bodies, he exclaimed: Whether my discoveries will be read by posterity or by my contemporaries is a matter that concerns them more than me. I may well be contented to wait one century for a reader, when God Himself, during so many thousand years, has waited for an observer like myself. [ Macaulay ]

Lord Bacon told Sir Edward Coke when he boasted, The less you speak of your greatness, the more I shall think of it. Mirrors are the accompaniments of dandies, not heroes. The men of history were not perpetually looking in the glass to make sure of their own size. Absorbed in their work they did it, and did it so well that the wondering world saw them to be great, and labeled them accordingly. [ Rev. S. Coley ]

It is not every man that can afford to wear a shabby coat; and worldly wisdom dictates to her disciples the propriety of dressing somewhat beyond their means, but of living somewhat within them, - for every one sees how we dress, but none see how we live, except we choose to let them. But the truly great are, by universal suffrage, exempted from these trammels, and may live or dress as they please. [ Colton ]

There is a world of science necessary in choosing books. I have known some people in great sorrow fly to a novel, or the last light book in fashion. One might as well take a rose-draught for the plague! Light reading does not do when the heart is really heavy. I am told that Goethe, when he lost his son, took to study a science that was new to him. Ah! Goethe was a physician who knew what he was about. [ Edward Bulwer-Lytton ]

In eloquence, the great triumphs of the art are when the orator is lifted above himself; when consciously he makes himself the mere tongue of the occasion and the hour, and says what cannot but be said. Hence the term abandonment, to describe the self-surrender of the orator. Not his will, but the principle on which he is horsed, the great connection and crisis of events, thunder in the ear of the crowd. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]

Whosoever shall look heedfully upon those who are eminent for their riches will not think their condition such as that he should hazard his quiet, and much less his virtue, to obtain it, for all that great wealth generally gives above a moderate fortune is more room for the freaks of caprice, and more privilege for ignorance and vice, a quicker succession of flatteries, and a larger circle of voluptuousness. [ Johnson ]

Excellence in art is to be attained only by active effort, and not by passive impressions; by the manly overcoming of difficulties, by patient struggle against adverse circumstance, by the thrifty use of moderate opportunities. The great artists were not rocked and dandled into eminence, but they attained to it by that course of labor and discipline which no man need go to Rome or Paris or London to enter upon. [ Hillard ]

How absolute and omnipotent is the silence of night! And yet the stillness seems almost audible! From all the measureless depths of air around us comes a half-sound, a half-whisper, as if we could hear the crumbling and falling away of earth and all created things, in the great miracle of nature, decay and reproduction, ever beginning, never ending, - the gradual lapse and running of the sand in the great hour-glass of Time. [ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ]

Courage, by keeping the senses quiet, and the understanding clear, puts us in a condition to receive true intelligence, to make just computations upon danger, and pronounce rightly upon that which threatens us. Innocence of life, consciousness of worth, and great expectations, are the best foundations of courage. These ingredients make a richer cordial than youth can prepare. They warm the heart at eighty, and seldom fail in operation. [ Collier ]

Columbus died in utter ignorance of the true nature of his discovery. He supposed he had found India, but never knew how strangely God had used him. So God piloted the fleet. The great discoverer, with all his heroic virtues, did not know whither he went. He sailed for the back door of Asia, and landed at the front door of America, and knew it not. He never settled the continent. Thus far and no farther, said the Lord. His providence was over all. [ David James Burrell ]

Young people are dazzled by the brilliancy of antithesis, and employ it. Matter-of-fact men, and those who like precision, naturally fall into comparisons and metaphor. Sprightly natures, full of fire, and whom a boundless imagination carries beyond all rules, and even what is reasonable, cannot rest satisfied even with hyperbole. As for the sublime, it is only great geniuses and those of the very highest order that are able to rise to its height. [ Bruyere ]

The whole difference between a man of genius and other men, it has been said a thousand times, and most truly, is that the first remains in great part a child, seeing with the large eyes of children, in perpetual wonder, not conscious of much knowledge - conscious, rather, of infinite ignorance, and yet infinite power; a fountain of eternal admiration, delight, and creative force within him meeting the ocean of visible and governable things around him. [ Ruskin ]

A statue lies hid in a block of marble, and the art of the statuary only clears away the superfluous matter and removes the rubbish. The figure is in the stone; the sculptor only finds it. What sculpture is to a block of marble, education is to a human soul. The philosopher, the saint, or the hero, - the wise, the good, or the great man, - very often lies hid and concealed in a plebeian, which a proper education might have disinterred, and have brought to light. [ Joseph Addison ]

Rare almost as great poets, rarer, perhaps, than veritable saints and martyrs, are consummate men of business. A man, to be excellent in this way, requires a great knowledge of character, with that exquisite tact which feels unerringly the right moment when to act. A discreet rapidity must pervade all the movements of his thought and action. He must be singularly free from vanity, and is generally found to be an enthusiast who has the art to conceal his enthusiasm. [ Helps ]

There are chords in the human heart - strange varying strings - which are only struck by accident; which will remain mute and senseless to appeals the most passionate and earnest, and respond at last to the slightest casual touch. In the most insensible or childish minds there is some train of reflection which art can seldom lead or skill assist, but which will reveal itself, as great truths have done, by chance, and when the discoverer has the plainest and simplest end in view. [ Dickens ]

It is good for any man to be alone with nature and himself, or with a friend who knows when silence is more sociable than talk, In the wilderness alone, there where nature worships God. It is well to be in places where man is little and God is great, where what he sees all around him has the same look as it had a thousand years ago, and will have the same, in all likelihood, when he has been a thousand years in his grave. It abates and rectifies a man, if he is worth the process. [ Sydney Smith ]

Throughout the pages of history we are struck with the fact that our remarkable men possessed mothers of uncommon talents for good or bad, and great energy of character; it would almost seem from this circumstance, that the impress of the mother is more frequently stamped on the boy, and that of the father upon the girl - we mean the mental intellectual impress, in distinction from the physical ones. Mothers will do well to remember that their impress is often stamped upon their sons. [ Helen Mar ]

The names of great painters are like passing-bells: in the name of Velasquez you hear sounded the fall of Spain; in the name of Titian, that of Venice; in the name of Leonardo, that of Milan; in the name of Raphael, that of Rome. And there is profound justice in this, for in proportion to the nobleness of the power is the guilt of its use for purposes vain or vile; and hitherto the greater the art, the more surely has it been used, and used solely, for the decoration of pride or the provoking of sensuality. [ Ruskin ]

I put myself, my experiences, my observations, my heart and soul into my work. I press my soul upon the white paper. The writer who does this may have any style, he or she will find the hearts of their readers. Writing a book involves, not a waste, but a great expenditure of vital force. Yet I can assure you I have written the last lines of most of my stories with tears. The characters of my own creation had become dear to me. I could not bear to bid them good-bye and send them away from me into the wide world. [ Amelia E. Barr, The Art of Authorship, 1891 ]

When we turn away from some duty or some fellow-creature, saying that our hearts are too sick and sore with some great yearning of our own, we may often sever the line on which a Divine message was coming to us. We shut out the man, and we shut out the angel who had sent him on to open the door . . . There is a plan working in our lives; and if we keep our hearts quiet and our eyes open, it all works together; and, if we don't, it all fights together, and goes on fighting till it comes right, somehow, somewhere. [ Annie Keary ]

Who can fathom the depth of a mother's love! No friendship so pure, so devoted; the wild storm of adversity and the bright sunshine of prosperity are all alike to her; however unworthy we may be of that affection, a mother never ceases to love her erring child. Often, when alone, as we gaze up to the starry heaven, can we in imagination catch a glimpse of the angels around the great white throne, and among the brightest and fairest of them all is our sweet mother, ever beckoning us onward and upward to her celestial home. [ R. Smith ]

Two things a master commits to his servant's care - the child and the child's clothes. It will be a poor excuse for the servant to say, at his master's return, Sir, here are all the child's clothes, neat and clean, but the child is lost. Much so of the account that many will give to God of their souls and bodies at the great day. Lord, here is my body; I am very grateful for it; I neglected nothing that belonged to its contents and welfare; but as for my soul, that is lost and cast away forever. I took little care and thought about it. [ John Flavel ]

If a man were only to deal in the world for a day, and should never have occasion to converse more with mankind, never more need their good opinion or good word, it were then no great matter (speaking as to the concernments of this world), if a man spent his reputation all at once, and ventured it at one throw; but if he be to continue in the world, and would have the advantage of conversation while he is in it, let him make use of truth and sincerity in all his words and actions; for nothing but this will last and hold out to the end. [ Tillotson ]

He who expects from a great name in politics, in philosophy, in art, equal greatness in other things, is little versed in human nature. Our strength lies in our weakness. The learned in books are ignorant of the world. He who is ignorant of books is often well acquainted with other things; for life is of the same length in the learned and unlearned; the mind cannot be idle; if it is not taken up with one thing, it attends to another through choice or necessity; and the degree of previous capacity in one class or another is a mere lottery. [ Hazlitt ]

The man who makes a success of an important venture never waits for the crowd. He strikes out for himself. It takes nerve, it takes a great lot of grit; but the man that succeeds has both. Anyone can fail. The public admires the man who has enough confidence in himself to take a chance. These chances are the main things after all. The man who tries to succeed must expect to be criticised. Nothing important was ever done but the greater number consulted previously doubted the possibility. Success is the accomplishment of that which most people think can't be done. [ C. V. White ]

When I look upon the tombs of the great, every motion of envy dies; when I read the epitaphs of the beautiful, every inordinate desire forsake me: when I meet with the grief of parents upon a tombstone, my heart melts with compassion; when I see the tombs of the parents themselves, I reflect how vain it is to grieve for those whom we must quickly follow; when I see kings lying beside those who deposed them, when I behold rival wits placed side by side, or the holy men who divided the world with their contests and disputes, I reflect with sorrow and astonishment on the frivolous competitions, factions, and debates of mankind. [ Addison ]

It is chiefly through books that we enjoy intercourse with superior minds. In the best books great men talk to us, give us their most precious thoughts, and pour their soul into ours. God be thanked for books; they are the voices of the distant and the dead, and make us heirs of the spiritual life of past ages. Books are the true levellers; they give to all, who will faithfully use them, the society, the spiritual presence, of the best and greatest of our race. No matter how poor I am, I shall not pine for want of intellectual companionship, and I may become a cultivated man, though excluded from what is called the best society in the place where I live. [ W. E. Channing ]

My friends, if you had but the power of looking into the future you might see that great things may come of little things. There is the great ocean, holding the navies of the world, which comes from little drops of water no larger than a woman's tears. There are the great constellations in the sky, made up of little bits of stars. Oh, if you could consider his future you might see that he might become the greatest poet of the universe, the greatest warrior the world has ever known, greater than Caesar, than Hannibal, than--er--er" (turning to the father) - What's his name? The father hesitated, then whispered back: His name? Well, his name is Mary Ann. [ Mark Twain, Educations and Citizenship ]

This is my seventieth birthday, and I wonder if you all rise to the size of that proposition, realizing all the significance of that phrase, seventieth birthday. The seventieth birthday! It is the time of life when you arrive at a new and awful dignity; when you may throw aside the decent reserves which have oppressed you for a generation and stand unafraid and unabashed upon your seven-terraced summit and look down and teach--unrebuked. You can tell the world how you got there. It is what they all do. You shall never get tired of telling by what delicate arts and deep moralities you climbed up to that great place. You will explain the process and dwell on the particulars with senile rapture. I have been anxious to explain my own system this long time, and now at last I have the right. [ Mark Twain, Seventieth Birthday speech ]

Morals are an acquirement - like music, like a foreign language, like piety, poker, paralysis - no man is born with them. I wasn't myself, I started poor. I hadn't a single moral. There is hardly a man in this house that is poorer than I was then. Yes, I started like that - the world before me, not a moral in the slot. Not even an insurance moral. I can remember the first one I ever got. I can remember the landscape, the weather, the - I can remember how everything looked. It was an old moral, an old second-hand moral, all out of repair, and didn't fit, anyway. But if you are careful with a thing like that, and keep it in a dry place, and save it for processions, and Chautauquas, and World's Fairs, and so on, and disinfect it now and then, and give it a fresh coat of whitewash once in a while, you will be surprised to see how well she will last and how long she will keep sweet, or at least inoffensive. When I got that mouldy old moral, she had stopped growing, because she hadn't any exercise; but I worked her hard, I worked her Sundays and all. Under this cultivation she waxed in might and stature beyond belief, and served me well and was my pride and joy for sixty-three years; then she got to associating with insurance presidents, and lost flesh and character, and was a sorrow to look at and no longer competent for business. She was a great loss to me. Yet not all loss. I sold her - ah, pathetic skeleton, as she was - I sold her to Leopold, the pirate King of Belgium; he sold her to our Metropolitan Museum, and it was very glad to get her, for without a rag on, she stands 57 feet long and 16 feet high, and they think she's a brontosaur. Well, she looks it. They believe it will take nineteen geological periods to breed her match. [ Mark Twain, Seventieth Birthday speech ]

great in Scrabble®

The word great is playable in Scrabble®, no blanks required.

Scrabble® Letter Score: 6

Highest Scoring Scrabble® Plays In The Letters great:

RETAG
(24)
GREAT
(24)
GRATE
(24)
 

All Scrabble® Plays For The Word great

GREAT
(24)
GREAT
(21)
GREAT
(21)
GREAT
(21)
GREAT
(20)
GREAT
(18)
GREAT
(18)
GREAT
(18)
GREAT
(16)
GREAT
(16)
GREAT
(16)
GREAT
(14)
GREAT
(14)
GREAT
(12)
GREAT
(12)
GREAT
(12)
GREAT
(12)
GREAT
(12)
GREAT
(12)
GREAT
(9)
GREAT
(9)
GREAT
(8)
GREAT
(8)
GREAT
(8)
GREAT
(8)
GREAT
(8)
GREAT
(7)
GREAT
(7)
GREAT
(7)
GREAT
(6)

The 200 Highest Scoring Scrabble® Plays For Words Using The Letters In great

RETAG
(24)
GREAT
(24)
GRATE
(24)
GRATE
(21)
RETAG
(21)
GRATE
(21)
GREAT
(21)
GREAT
(21)
RETAG
(21)
GRATE
(21)
GREAT
(21)
GATE
(21)
GEAR
(21)
RETAG
(21)
GRATE
(20)
GREAT
(20)
RETAG
(20)
GRATE
(18)
RAGE
(18)
RAGE
(18)
RETAG
(18)
GREAT
(18)
RETAG
(18)
RETAG
(18)
GEAR
(18)
GATE
(18)
GRATE
(18)
GREAT
(18)
GREAT
(18)
GRATE
(18)
GRATE
(16)
GRATE
(16)
GRATE
(16)
GREAT
(16)
GREAT
(16)
RETAG
(16)
RETAG
(16)
RETAG
(16)
GREAT
(16)
RAGE
(15)
GEAR
(15)
GATE
(15)
TEAR
(15)
GATE
(15)
TARE
(15)
GEAR
(15)
GEAR
(15)
TARE
(15)
RAGE
(15)
GEAR
(15)
GATE
(15)
RAGE
(15)
RATE
(15)
RATE
(15)
RAGE
(15)
GATE
(15)
TEAR
(15)
RETAG
(14)
GREAT
(14)
GRATE
(14)
GATE
(14)
GEAR
(14)
GREAT
(14)
GRATE
(14)
RETAG
(14)
GREAT
(12)
TARE
(12)
RETAG
(12)
RAGE
(12)
TAG
(12)
TEAR
(12)
AGE
(12)
GATE
(12)
RETAG
(12)
RAG
(12)
RETAG
(12)
RAG
(12)
GRATE
(12)
RAG
(12)
ERG
(12)
RETAG
(12)
GRATE
(12)
RAGE
(12)
GREAT
(12)
GREAT
(12)
ERG
(12)
GET
(12)
GREAT
(12)
ERG
(12)
GREAT
(12)
GRATE
(12)
TARE
(12)
TARE
(12)
GRATE
(12)
GET
(12)
TEAR
(12)
RATE
(12)
AGE
(12)
GEAR
(12)
TEAR
(12)
TAG
(12)
RATE
(12)
RATE
(12)
GET
(12)
RATE
(12)
TARE
(12)
GRATE
(12)
RETAG
(12)
GREAT
(12)
RETAG
(12)
GRATE
(12)
TEAR
(12)
TAG
(12)
AGE
(12)
GEAR
(10)
RAGE
(10)
TEAR
(10)
RATE
(10)
GATE
(10)
TEAR
(10)
TARE
(10)
RATE
(10)
RAGE
(10)
RAGE
(10)
GATE
(10)
GATE
(10)
TARE
(10)
GEAR
(10)
GEAR
(10)
GEAR
(10)
RAGE
(10)
GATE
(10)
GRATE
(9)
ART
(9)
RETAG
(9)
ETA
(9)
ARE
(9)
GRATE
(9)
ARE
(9)
TEA
(9)
ARE
(9)
ART
(9)
RETAG
(9)
GEAR
(9)
GATE
(9)
TEA
(9)
GREAT
(9)
ETA
(9)
ERA
(9)
EAR
(9)
EAR
(9)
RAT
(9)
ATE
(9)
EAR
(9)
EAT
(9)
EAT
(9)
RAGE
(9)
EAT
(9)
ATE
(9)
ERA
(9)
TAR
(9)
RAT
(9)
RAT
(9)
TEA
(9)
ATE
(9)
ERA
(9)
AG
(9)
TAR
(9)
ETA
(9)
TAR
(9)
ART
(9)
GREAT
(9)
AG
(9)
GET
(8)
GRATE
(8)
GRATE
(8)
AGE
(8)
GET
(8)
GRATE
(8)
RATE
(8)
TARE
(8)
RATE
(8)
RATE
(8)
RATE
(8)
AGE
(8)
GRATE
(8)
RAG
(8)
GREAT
(8)
GREAT
(8)
GREAT
(8)
GREAT
(8)
TARE
(8)
RETAG
(8)
RAG
(8)
TARE
(8)
RAG
(8)
AGE
(8)
RAG
(8)
RETAG
(8)
GREAT
(8)

great in Words With Friends™

The word great is playable in Words With Friends™, no blanks required.

Words With Friends™ Letter Score: 7

Highest Scoring Words With Friends™ Plays In The Letters great:

RETAG
(39)
GRATE
(39)
GREAT
(39)
 

All Words With Friends™ Plays For The Word great

GREAT
(39)
GREAT
(28)
GREAT
(27)
GREAT
(27)
GREAT
(27)
GREAT
(26)
GREAT
(21)
GREAT
(21)
GREAT
(21)
GREAT
(20)
GREAT
(18)
GREAT
(16)
GREAT
(16)
GREAT
(16)
GREAT
(15)
GREAT
(15)
GREAT
(14)
GREAT
(14)
GREAT
(14)
GREAT
(14)
GREAT
(14)
GREAT
(14)
GREAT
(12)
GREAT
(11)
GREAT
(11)
GREAT
(11)
GREAT
(11)
GREAT
(11)
GREAT
(10)
GREAT
(9)
GREAT
(9)
GREAT
(9)
GREAT
(9)
GREAT
(9)
GREAT
(9)
GREAT
(8)
GREAT
(8)
GREAT
(8)
GREAT
(8)
GREAT
(7)

The 200 Highest Scoring Words With Friends™ Plays Using The Letters In great

RETAG
(39)
GRATE
(39)
GREAT
(39)
GEAR
(36)
GATE
(36)
GREAT
(28)
GRATE
(28)
RETAG
(28)
GREAT
(27)
GREAT
(27)
GREAT
(27)
GRATE
(27)
RETAG
(27)
GRATE
(27)
RETAG
(27)
RETAG
(27)
GRATE
(27)
RETAG
(26)
GREAT
(26)
GRATE
(26)
RAGE
(24)
GATE
(24)
RAGE
(24)
GEAR
(24)
RETAG
(21)
GREAT
(21)
RETAG
(21)
GREAT
(21)
GREAT
(21)
GRATE
(21)
GRATE
(21)
GRATE
(21)
RETAG
(21)
GRATE
(20)
RETAG
(20)
GREAT
(20)
GEAR
(18)
GATE
(18)
GATE
(18)
GEAR
(18)
GEAR
(18)
RATE
(18)
RATE
(18)
GEAR
(18)
GEAR
(18)
GATE
(18)
GRATE
(18)
GATE
(18)
RAGE
(18)
RAGE
(18)
RAGE
(18)
GATE
(18)
GREAT
(18)
RAGE
(18)
TEAR
(18)
TARE
(18)
TARE
(18)
RETAG
(18)
TEAR
(18)
GREAT
(16)
RETAG
(16)
GRATE
(16)
RETAG
(16)
GRATE
(16)
GREAT
(16)
GRATE
(16)
GREAT
(16)
RETAG
(16)
TAG
(15)
GREAT
(15)
AGE
(15)
ERG
(15)
ERG
(15)
TAG
(15)
GREAT
(15)
ERG
(15)
RAG
(15)
RAG
(15)
GRATE
(15)
GRATE
(15)
RAG
(15)
AGE
(15)
GET
(15)
GET
(15)
GET
(15)
RETAG
(15)
RETAG
(15)
TAG
(15)
AGE
(15)
GATE
(14)
GREAT
(14)
GRATE
(14)
GREAT
(14)
GRATE
(14)
GREAT
(14)
GREAT
(14)
GEAR
(14)
GEAR
(14)
GATE
(14)
GRATE
(14)
GREAT
(14)
GRATE
(14)
GRATE
(14)
GREAT
(14)
RETAG
(14)
GRATE
(14)
RETAG
(14)
RETAG
(14)
RAGE
(14)
RAGE
(14)
RETAG
(14)
RAGE
(14)
RETAG
(14)
RETAG
(14)
GET
(13)
TAG
(13)
ERG
(13)
RAG
(13)
TARE
(12)
RATE
(12)
GATE
(12)
GATE
(12)
RATE
(12)
RATE
(12)
RATE
(12)
GATE
(12)
GRATE
(12)
TARE
(12)
GEAR
(12)
GATE
(12)
GATE
(12)
TEAR
(12)
GEAR
(12)
TEAR
(12)
TEAR
(12)
GEAR
(12)
AG
(12)
GEAR
(12)
GEAR
(12)
AG
(12)
TEAR
(12)
RETAG
(12)
TARE
(12)
RAGE
(12)
RAGE
(12)
RAGE
(12)
RAGE
(12)
GREAT
(12)
RAGE
(12)
TARE
(12)
GREAT
(11)
GRATE
(11)
GREAT
(11)
GREAT
(11)
AGE
(11)
RETAG
(11)
RETAG
(11)
RETAG
(11)
GRATE
(11)
RETAG
(11)
RAG
(11)
RETAG
(11)
GRATE
(11)
GET
(11)
GRATE
(11)
GRATE
(11)
ERG
(11)
TAG
(11)
GREAT
(11)
GREAT
(11)
GEAR
(10)
RAGE
(10)
TAG
(10)
RAGE
(10)
TAG
(10)
GEAR
(10)
TAG
(10)
GEAR
(10)
TEAR
(10)
AGE
(10)
TEAR
(10)
RAG
(10)
GET
(10)
RAG
(10)
GET
(10)
GET
(10)
AG
(10)
TARE
(10)
GRATE
(10)
RATE
(10)
AGE
(10)
RETAG
(10)
GATE
(10)
RATE
(10)
AGE
(10)
TARE
(10)
ERG
(10)
ERG
(10)
GREAT
(10)
RAG
(10)

Word Growth involving great

Shorter words in great

at eat

re

Longer words containing great

greatcircle greatcircles

greatcoat greatcoats

greaten greatening

greater

greatest

greatgrandchild greatgrandchildren

greatgranddaughter greatgranddaughters

greatgrandfather greatgrandfathers

greatgrandmother greatgrandmothers

greatgrandson

greathearted greatheartedly

greathearted greatheartedness

greatly

greatness

greats

greatuncle