The greatest firmness
Is the greatest mercy. [ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ]
The most useful is the greatest. [ Theodore Parker ]
Love is the greatest of educators. [ Mrs. Osgood ]
Thorns make the greatest crackling. [ Proverb ]
Time is the greatest of innovators. [ Bacon ]
True jests do the greatest execution. [ Proverb ]
Despair is the greatest of our errors. [ Vauvenargues ]
Lack of desire is the greatest riches. [ Seneca ]
Now-a-days truth is the greatest news. [ Proverb ]
The greatest pleasure of life is love. [ Sir W. Temple ]
Time is the greatest remedy for anger. [ Seneca ]
Empty vessels give the greatest sound. [ Proverb ]
The greatest medicine is a true friend. [ Sir W. Temple ]
Peace is the greatest of all blessings. [ Polybius ]
The greatest step is that out of doors. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]
Virtue, the greatest of all monarchies. [ Swift ]
Rigid justice is the greatest injustice. [ Proverb ]
Self-love is the greatest of flatterers. [ La Rochefoucauld ]
We carry our greatest enemies within us. [ Proverb ]
The greatest expense we have is our time. [ Proverb ]
Pleasure, or wrong or rightly understood,
Our greatest evil, or our greatest good. [ Pope ]
Time and thought tame the greatest grief. [ Proverb ]
The greatest oaks have but little acorns. [ Proverb ]
The greatest vessel hath but its measure. [ Proverb ]
Greatest scandal waits on greatest state. [ Shakespeare ]
The greatest can but blaze and pass away. [ Pope ]
The greatest attribute of Heaven is mercy. [ Beaumont and Fletcher ]
The empty vessel makes the greatest sound. [ William Shakespeare ]
Greatest happiness of the greatest number. [ Hutcheson ]
Murder itself is past all expiation,
The greatest crime that nature doth abhor. [ Goffe ]
The greatest sounds are not the best music. [ Proverb ]
The greatest calf is not the sweetest veal. [ Proverb ]
The greatest clerks are not the wisest men. [ Proverb ]
The greatest people have their weak points. [ Louisa M. Alcott ]
Silence is not the greatest vice of a woman. [ Proverb ]
None but yourself who are your greatest foe. [ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ]
The world knows nothing of its greatest men. [ Henry Taylor ]
Ideas are the greatest warriors of the world. [ Garfield ]
The greatest merit of some men is their wife. [ Poincelot ]
Friendship is the greatest bond in the world. [ Jeremy Taylor ]
A man's folly ought to be his greatest secret. [ Proverb ]
The greatest glory of a free-born people
Is to transmit that freedom to their children. [ Havard ]
The greatest packs are not always the richest. [ Proverb ]
Genius is ever the greatest mystery to itself. [ Friedrich Schiller ]
To overcome pleasure, is the greatest pleasure. [ Proverb ]
That's the greatest torture souls feel in hell.
In hell, that they must live, and cannot die. [ John Webster ]
Leaving us heirs to amplest heritages
Of all the best thoughts of the greatest sages,
And giving tongues unto the silent dead! [ Longfellow ]
The lives of trees lie only in the barks,
And in their styles the wit of greatest clerks. [ Butler ]
To lose a friend is the greatest of all losses. [ Syrus ]
Great floods have flown
From simple sources, and great seas have dried
When miracles have by the greatest been denied. [ William Shakespeare ]
Rocks whereon greatest men have oftest wreck'd. [ Milton ]
In the greatest ill the good man hath hope left. [ Proverb ]
The greatest wealth is contentment with a little. [ Proverb ]
Over the greatest beauty hangs the greatest ruin. [ Proverb ]
The greatest hate springs from the greatest love. [ Proverb ]
The greatest barkers are not the greatest biters. [ Proverb ]
Popular opinion is the greatest lie in the world. [ Proverb ]
Idleness is the greatest prodigality in the world. [ Proverb ]
The wisest truly is, in these times, the greatest. [ Carlyle ]
After the greatest danger is the greatest pleasure. [ Proverb ]
Serving one's own passions is the greatest slavery. [ Proverb ]
At last the golden oriental gate
Of greatest heaven began to open fair;
And Phoebus, fresh as bridegroom to his mate,
Came dancing forth shaking his dewy hair,
And hurled his glistering beams through gloomy air. [ Spenser ]
Our greatest misfortunes come to us from ourselves. [ Rousseau ]
Great things through greatest hazards are achiev'd,
And then they shine. [ Beaumont ]
He who subdues his anger conquers his greatest enemy. [ Proverb ]
Malice drinks up the greatest part of its own poison. [ Proverb ]
God hangs the greatest weights on the smallest wires. [ Bacon ]
Death is the greatest evil, because it cuts off hope. [ Hazlitt ]
Order is man's greatest need, and his true well-being. [ Amiel ]
The greatest business of life is to prepare for death. [ Proverb ]
He has the greatest blind side who thinks he has none. [ Proverb ]
Masters are mostly the greatest servants in the house. [ Proverb ]
The greatest things are done by the help of small ones. [ Proverb ]
Cowards run the greatest danger of any men in a battle. [ Proverb ]
He is the greatest conqueror who has conquered himself. [ Proverb ]
The greatest miracle of love is that it cures coquetry. [ La Rochefoucauld ]
The greatest architect and the one most needed is hope. [ Henry Ward Beecher ]
Certainly the greatest scholars are not the wisest men. [ Regnier ]
The greatest miracle of love is to eradicate flirtation. [ La Rochefoucauld ]
How often we see the greatest genius buried in obscurity! [ Plautus ]
He is the happiest who renders the greatest number happy. [ Desmakis ]
The greatest pleasure in life is the society of a friend. [ Mayo ]
To be loved is to receive the greatest of all compliments. [ Mme. Necker ]
The greatest favourites are in the most danger of falling. [ Proverb ]
Poverty is the greatest calamity, riches the highest good. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]
The greatest offence against virtue is to speak ill of it. [ Hazlitt ]
The greatest mischief you can do the envious is to do well. [ Proverb ]
The tell-tale out of school is of all wits the greatest fool. [ Swift ]
Patience and perseverance overcome the greatest difficulties. [ Clarissa ]
The greatest tyranny is to love where we are not loved again. [ Balzac ]
Genius, even as it is the greatest good, is the greatest harm. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
Excess and violence are the greatest outrages against liberty. [ Villemain ]
Friendship is the greatest honesty and ingenuity in the world. [ Jeremy Taylor ]
He that overcomes his passions overcomes his greatest enemies. [ Proverb ]
The greatest learning is to be seen in the greatest plainness. [ Proverb ]
The greatest difficulties lie where we are not looking for them. [ Goethe ]
The greatest of faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none. [ Carlyle ]
The greatest of all pleasures is to give pleasure to one we love. [ Boufflers ]
Of two heroes, he who esteems his rivals the most is the greatest. [ Beaumelle ]
A true and noble friendship shrinks not at the greatest of trials. [ Jeremy Taylor ]
He is a slave of the greatest slave who serves nothing but himself. [ Proverb ]
People come to look; their greatest pleasure is to feast their eyes. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]
The greatest misfortune of all is not to be able to bear misfortune. [ Bias ]
To consume an honest soul with remorse is the greatest of all crimes. [ Mademoiselle Clairon ]
Absence is a cosmetic that softens or disguises the greatest defects.
The greatest incitement to guilt is the hope of sinning with impunity. [ Cicero ]
The greatest art of an able man is to know how to conceal his ability. [ La Rochefoucauld ]
The greatest evidence of demoralization is the respect paid to wealth.
The greatest trust between man and man is the trust of giving counsel. [ Bacon ]
Heroic poetry has ever been esteemed the greatest work of human nature. [ Dryden ]
Aggressive fighting for the right is the greatest sport the world knows. [ Theodore Roosevelt ]
In seasons of tumult and discord, the worst men have the greatest power. [ Tac ]
It is the greatest misfortune in nature for a woman to want a confidant. [ Farquhar ]
The greatest hardship of poverty is that it tends to make men ridiculous. [ Juvenal ]
We are not so sensible of. the greatest health, as of the least sickness. [ Proverb ]
One of the greatest misfortunes of worthy people is that they are cowards. [ Voltaire ]
The greatest hatred, like the greatest virtue and the worst dogs, is quiet. [ Richter ]
The greatest man is he who chooses right with the most invincible resolution. [ Seneca ]
Nationality is the aggregated individuality of the greatest men of the nation. [ Kossuth ]
He removes the greatest ornament of friendship who takes away from it respect. [ Cicero ]
Rising glory occasions the greatest envy, as kindling fire the greatest smoke. [ Spenser ]
Opinions founded on prejudice are always sustained with the greatest violence. [ Jeffrey ]
One of the greatest of human sufferings is to ask of one's self: Does God exist? [ Erckmann Chatrian ]
Beauty can afford to laugh at distinctions; it is itself the greatest distinction. [ Bovee ]
A true delineation of the smallest man is capable of interesting the greatest man. [ Carlyle ]
The anger of a woman is the greatest evil with which one can threaten his enemies. [ Chillon ]
The greatest part of mankind employ their first years to make their last miserable. [ Bruyere ]
The human race is in the best condition when it has the greatest degree of liberty. [ Dante ]
If Satan ever laughs, it must be at hypocrites; they are the greatest dupes he has. [ Colton ]
The attainment of our greatest desires is often the source of our greatest sorrows.
Anger is not only the prevailing sin of argument, but its greatest stumbling-block. [ Gladstone ]
A noble heart, like the sun, showeth its greatest countenance in its lowest estate. [ Sir P. Sidney ]
Men sunk in the greatest darkness imaginable retain some sense and awe of the Deity. [ Tillotson ]
Men naturally warm and heady are transported with the greatest flush of good-nature. [ Addison ]
Our greatest glory consists, not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall. [ Oliver Goldsmith ]
Strange that cowards cannot see that their greatest safety lies in dauntless courage. [ Lavater ]
Set all things in their own peculiar place, And know that order is the greatest grace. [ Dryden ]
Who more ready to call her neighbour scold, than the greatest scold in all the street? [ Proverb ]
Love is the greatest thing that God can give us, and it is the greatest we can give God. [ Jeremy Taylor ]
Times of general calamity and confusion have ever been productive of the greatest minds. [ Colton ]
He is the greatest whose strength carries up the most hearts by the attraction of his own. [ Ward Beecher ]
When by a pardoned murderer blood is spilt, the judge that pardoned hath the greatest guilt. [ Sir J. Denham ]
It is the greatest possible praise to be praised by a man who is himself deserving of praise. [ From the Latin ]
I will love you always!
This is the eternal lie that lovers tell with the greatest sincerity.
The greatest thief this world has ever produced is procrastination, and he is still at large. [ H. W. Shaw ]
Wisdom and virtue are the greatest beauty, but it is an advantage to a diamond to be well set. [ Matthew Henry ]
The greatest genius is never so great as when it is chastised and subdued by the highest reason. [ Colton ]
The greatest misfortune one can wish his enemy is that he may love without being loved in return. [ Labouisse ]
The tongue is the instrument of the greatest good and the greatest evil that is done in the world. [ Sir Walter Raleigh ]
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 ]
The greatest part of mankind have no other reason for their opinions than that they are in fashion. [ Johnson ]
Perhaps the greatest lesson which the lives of literary men teach us is told in a single word: Wait! [ Longfellow ]
The greatest thing a man can do for his Heavenly Father is to be kind to some of his other children. [ Henry Drummond ]
A woman can not guarantee her heart, even though her husband be the greatest and most perfect of men. [ George Sand ]
The greatest pleasure I know is to do a good action by stealth, and to have it found out by accident. [ Lamb ]
They that hold the greatest farms pay the least rent (applied to rich men that are unthankful to God). [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]
It is the strange fate of man that even in the greatest evils the fear of worse continues to haunt him. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]
Patience is the ballast of the soul that will keep it from rolling and tumbling in the greatest storms. [ Bishop Hopkins ]
War--the trade of barbarians, and the art of bringing the greatest physical force to bear on a single point. [ Napoleon ]
The commendation of adversaries is the greatest triumph of a writer, because it never comes unless extorted. [ Dryden ]
Life is to be fortified by many friendships; to love and to be loved is the greatest happiness of existence. [ S. Smith ]
The greatest satisfaction a woman can feel is to know that a man whom many other women love loves her alone.
Of all acts is not, for a man, repentance the most divine? The greatest of faults is to be conscious of none. [ Carlyle ]
He is the greatest artist who has embodied in the sum of his works the greatest number of the greatest ideas. [ John Ruskin ]
No man can be brave who thinks pain the greatest evil, nor temperate, who considers pleasure the highest good. [ Cicero ]
The greatest friend of Truth is Time, her greatest enemy is Prejudice, and her constant companion is Humility. [ Caleb C. Colton ]
It is not necessary for all men to be great in action. The greatest and sublimest power is often simple patience. [ Horace Bushnell ]
The best government is not that which renders men the happiest, but that which renders the greatest number happy. [ Charles P. Duclos ]
Time is, after all, the greatest of poets; and the sons of Memory stand a better chance of being the heirs of Fame. [ Lowell ]
Fools and sensible men are equally innocuous. It is in the half fools and the half wise that the greatest danger lies. [ Goethe ]
The slightest sorrow for sin is sufficient, if it produces amendment; and the greatest is insufficient, if it does not. [ Colton ]
The greatest of all human benefits, that at least without which no other benefit can be truly enjoyed, is independence. [ Parke Godwin ]
His calumny is not only the greatest benefit a rogue can confer on us, but the only service he will perform for nothing. [ Lavater ]
Revenge is a debt, in the paying o( which the greatest knave is honest and sincere, and, so far as he is able, punctual. [ Colton ]
Time will bring to light whatever is hidden; it will conceal and cover up what is now shining with the greatest splendor. [ Horace ]
Health is the greatest of all possessions, and it is a maxim with me that a hale cobbler is a better man than a sick king. [ Bickerstaff ]
Can that which is the greatest virtue in philosophy, doubt, be in religion, what we priests term it, the greatest of sins? [ Bovee ]
When I look to my guiltiness. I see that my salvation is one of our Saviour's greatest miracles, either in heaven or earth. [ Rutherford ]
The greatest pleasure in life is that of reading while we are young. I have had as much of this pleasure perhaps as any one. [ Hazlitt ]
Time is the greatest of all tyrants. As we go on towards age, he taxes our health, limbs, faculties, strength, and features. [ John Foster ]
It is the greatest invention man has ever made, this of marking down the unseen thought that is in him by written characters. [ Carlyle ]
As the greatest liar tells more truths than falsehoods, so may it be said of the worst man, that he does more good than evil. [ Dr. Johnson ]
The least degree of ambiguity which leaves the mind in suspense as to the meaning ought to be avoided with the greatest care. [ Blair ]
The greatest geniuses have always attributed everything to God, as if conscious of being possessed of a spark of His divinity. [ B. R. Haydon ]
On the greatest and most useful of all human inventions, that of alphabetical writing, Plato did not look with much complacency. [ T. B. Macaulay ]
Like a great poet, Nature produces the greatest results with the simplest means. There are simply a sun, flowers, water, and love. [ Heine ]
The greatest burden in the world is superstition, not only of ceremonies in the church, but of imaginary and scarecrow sins at home. [ Milton ]
Obscurity in writing is commonly an argument of darkness in the mind. The greatest learning is to be seen in the greatest plainness. [ Wilkins ]
No man can be brave who considers pain to be the greatest evil of life; nor temperate, who considers pleasure to be the highest good. [ Cicero ]
One of the greatest pleasures of life is conversation, and the pleasures of conversation are enhanced by every increase of knowledge. [ Sydney Smith ]
Propriety of thought and propriety of diction are commonly found together. Obscurity and affectation are the two greatest faults of style. [ Macaulay ]
Without memory the judgment must be unemployed, and ignorance must be the consequence. Pliny says it is one of the greatest gifts of nature. [ Montaigne ]
For the greatest fool and rascal in creation there is yet a worse condition; and that is, not to know it, but to chink himself a respectable man. [ George MacDonald ]
Gruel men are the greatest lovers of mercy, avaricious men of generosity, and proud men of humility; that is to say, in others, not in themselves. [ Colton ]
Fashionable dances as now carried on are revolting to every feeling of delicacy and propriety and are fraught with the greatest danger to millions. [ Horace Bushnell ]
Life at the greatest and best is but a froward child, that must be humored and coaxed a little till it falls asleep, and then all the care is over. [ Goldsmith ]
The highest art is always the most religious; and the greatest artist is always a devout man. A scoffing Raphael or Michael Angelo is not conceivable. [ Blackie ]
It is in periods of apparent disaster, during the sufferings of whole generations, that the greatest improvement in human character has been effected. [ Sir A. Alison ]
The royal navy of England has ever been its greatest defence and ornament; it is its ancient and natural strength; the floating bulwark of the island. [ Sir Wm. Blackstone ]
The greatest and most amiable privilege which the rich enjoy over the poor is that which they exercise the least, - the privilege of making them happy. [ Colton ]
Real friends are our greatest joy and our greatest sorrow. It were almost to be wished that all true and faithful friends should expire on the same day. [ Fenelon ]
The esteem of wise and good men is the greatest of all temporal encouragements to virtue; and it is a mark of an abandoned spirit to have no regard to it. [ Burke ]
The direct relation of music is not to ideas, but emotions. Music, in the works of its greatest masters, is more marvellous, more mysterious, than poetry. [ Henry Giles ]
Music, of all the liberal arts, has the greatest influence over the passions, and is that to which the legislator ought to give the greatest encouragement. [ Napoleon I ]
Irresolution on the schemes of life which offer themselves to our choice, and inconstancy in pursuing them, are the greatest causes of all our unhappiness. [ Addison ]
Greatness lies not in being strong, but in the right using of strength. He is greatest whose strength carries up the most hearts by the attraction of his own. [ Ward Beecher ]
Government is the greatest combination of forces known to human society. It can command more men and raise more money than any and all other agencies combined. [ D. D. Field ]
A good library is an anchor to keep a young man from roving, and a helm to aid an old man to gain the greatest possible benefit from what remains of the breeze. [ W. D. Haley ]
Be still, then, thou uneasy mortal; know that God is unerringly wise; and be assured that, amidst the greatest multiplicity of beings, He does not overlook thee. [ James Hervey ]
Success in business is seldom owing to uncommon talents or original power which is untractable and self-willed, but to the greatest degree of commonplace capacity. [ Hazlitt ]
Exclusively of the abstract sciences, the largest and worthiest portion of our knowledge consists of aphorisms; and the greatest and best of men is but an aphorism. [ Coleridge ]
It is always esteemed the greatest mischief a man can do to those whom he loves, to raise men's expectations of them too high by undue and impertinent commendations. [ Sprat ]
Can that which is the greatest virtue in philosophy, doubt (called by Galileo the father of invention), be in religion what the priests term it, the greatest of sins? [ Bovee ]
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 ]
The greatest cosmopolites are generally the neediest beggars, and they who embrace the entire universe with love, for the most part, love nothing but their narrow self. [ Herder ]
The greatest truths are wronged if not linked with beauty; and they win their way most surely and deeply into the soul when arrayed in this their natural and fit attire. [ Channing ]
Perfect taste is the faculty of receiving the greatest possible pleasure from those material sources which are attractive to our moral nature in its purity and perfection. [ Ruskin ]
The greatest luxury of riches is that they enable you to escape so much good advice. The rich are always advising the poor; but the poor seldom venture to return the compliment. [ Sir Arthur Helps ]
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 ]
There is this difference between happiness and wisdom: he that thinks himself the happiest man is really so; but he that thinks himself the wisest is generally the greatest fool. [ Bacon ]
Rest and undisturbed content have now no place on earth, nor can the greatest affluence of worldly good procure them, ... they are peculiar to the love and fruition of God alone. [ Thomas à Kempis ]
Extremes touch: he who wants no favors from Fortune may be said to have obtained the very greatest that she can bestow, in realizing an independence which no changes can diminish. [ Chatfield ]
Man, it is not thy works, which are mortal, infinitely little, and the greatest no greater than the least, but only the spirit thou workest in, that can have worth or continuance. [ Carlyle ]
No one can take less pains than to hold his tongue. Hear much, and speak little; for the tongue is the instrument of the greatest good and greatest evil that is done in the world. [ Sir Walter Raleigh ]
The greatest of all injustice is that which goes under the name of law; and of all sorts of tyranny, the forcing the letter of the law against the equity is the most insupportable. [ L'Estrange ]
The greatest flood has the soonest ebb; the sorest tempest the most sudden calm; the hottest love the coldest end; and from the deepest desire oftentimes ensues the deadliest hate. [ Socrates ]
The greatest of fools is he who imposes on himself, and in his greatest concern thinks certainly he knows that which he has least studied, and of which he is most profoundly ignorant. [ Shaftesbury ]
He that had never seen a river imagined the first he met with to be the sea; and the greatest things that have fallen within our knowledge we conclude the extremes that nature makes of the kind. [ Montaigne ]
Perhaps, if I am very lucky, the feeble efforts of my lifetime will someday be noticed, and maybe, in some small way, they will be acknowledged as the greatest works of genius ever created by Man. [ Jack Handey, Deep Thoughts ]
Times of general calamity and confusion have ever been productive of the greatest minds. The purest ore is produced from the hottest furnace, and the brightest thunderbolt is elicited from the darkest storm. [ Colton ]
The greatest chastisement that a man may receive who hath outraged another, is to have done the outrage; and there is no man who is so rudely punished as he that is subject to the whip of his own repentance. [ Seneca ]
There is, I know not how, in the minds of men, a certain presage, as it were, of a future existence; and this takes the deepest root, and is most discoverable, in the greatest geniuses and most exalted souls. [ Cicero ]
The pleasure of eloquence is in greatest part owing often to the stimulus of the occasion which produces it - to the magic of sympathy, which exalts the feeling of each by radiating on him the feeling of all. [ Emerson ]
Delusive ideas are the motives of the greatest part of mankind, and a heated imagination the power by which their actions are incited. The world in the eye of a philosopher may be said to be a large madhouse. [ Mackenzie ]
Weakness has its hidden resources, as well as strength; there is a degree of folly and meanness which we cannot calculate upon, and by which we are as much liable to be foiled as by the greatest ability or courage. [ Hazlitt ]
He is the rich man who can avail himself of all men's faculties. He is the richest man who knows how to draw a benefit from the labors of the greatest number of men, - of men ia distant countries and in past times. [ Emerson ]
Of all varieties of fopperies, the vanity of high birth is the greatest. True nobility is derived from virtue, not from birth. Title, indeed, may be purchased, but virtue is the only coin that makes the bargain valid. [ Burton ]
The art of navigation is one of the greatest achievements of human genius; man with its aid obtains a knowledge of the globe he inhabits, opens communications with, and extends his field of operations to all its parts. [ A. Brisbane ]
Men of the greatest genius are not always the most prodigal of their encomiums. But then it is when their range of power is confined, and they have in fact little perception, except of their own particular kind of excellence. [ Hazlitt ]
The greatest man is he who chooses the right with invincible resolution; who resists the sorest temptations from within and without; who is calmest in storms, and whose reliance on truth, on virtue, on God, is the most unfaltering. [ Channing ]
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 ]
Now, my young friends to whom I am addressing myself, with reference to this habit of reading, I make bold to tell you that it is your pass to the greatest, the purest, and the most perfect pleasure that God has prepared for His creatures. [ Anthony Trollope ]
All men who have sense and feeling are being continually helped; they are taught by every person they meet, and enriched by everything that falls in their way. The greatest is he who has been oftenest aided. Originality is the observing eye. [ Ruskin ]
Of all faults the greatest is the excess of impious terror, dishonoring divine grace. He who despairs wants love, wants faith; for faith, hope, and love are three torches which blend their light together, nor does the one shine without the other. [ Metastasio ]
Every man must bear his own burden, and it is a fine thing to see any one trying to do it manfully; carrying his cross bravely, silently, patiently, and in a way which makes you hope that he has taken for his pattern the greatest of all sufferers. [ James Hamilton ]
The greatest man is he who chooses the right with invincible resolution; who resists the sorest temptations from within and without; who bears the heaviest burdens cheerfully; and whose reliance on truth, on virtue, and on God, is most unfaltering. [ William Ellery Channing ]
True friends are the whole world to one another; and he that is a friend to himself, is also a friend to mankind; even in my studies the greatest delight I take is that of imparting it to others; for there is no relish to me in the possessing of anything without a partner. [ Seneca ]
So long as thou art ignorant, be not ashamed to learn : he that is so fondly modest, not to acknowledge his own defects of knowledge, shall in time, be so foully impudent to justify his own ignorance; ignorance is the greatest of all infirmities, and, justified, the chiefest of all follies. [ Quarks ]
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 ]
Liberty is one of the most precious gifts which heaven has bestowed upon man; with it we cannot compare the treasures which the earth contains or the sea conceals; for liberty, as for honor, we can and ought to risk our lives; and on the other hand, captivity is the greatest evil that can befall man. [ Cervantes ]
Friendship is one of the greatest boons God can bestow on man. It is a union of our finest feelings; an uninteresting binding of hearts, and a sympathy between two souls. It is an indefinable trust we repose in one another, a constant communication between two minds, and an unremitting anxiety for each other's souls. [ J. Hill ]
The very greatest genius, after all, is not the greatest thing in the world, any more than the greatest city in the world is the country or the sky. It is the concentration of some of its greatest powers, but it is not the greatest diffusion of its might. It is not the habit of its success, the stability of its sereneness. [ Leigh Hunt ]
Facts are to the mind the same thing as food to the body. On the due digestion of facts depends the strength and wisdom of the one, just as vigour and health depend on the other. The wisest in council, the ablest in debate, and the most agreeable in the commerce of life, is that man who has assimilated to his understanding the greatest number of facts. [ Burke ]
The mind of the greatest man on earth is not so independent of circumstances as not to feel inconvenienced by the merest buzzing noise about him; it does not need the report of a cannon to disturb his thoughts. The creaking of a vane or a pully is quite enough. Do not wonder that he reasons ill just now; a fly is buzzing by his ear; it is quite enough to unfit him for giving good counsel. [ Pascal ]
The receipt to make a speaker, and an applauded one too, is short and easy. Take commonsense quantum sufficit (in sufficient quantity); add a little application to the rules and orders of the House of Commons, throw obvious thoughts in a new light, and make up the whole with a large quantity of purity, correctness and elegancy of style. Take it for granted that by far the greatest part of mankind neither analyze nor search to the bottom; they are incapable of penetrating deeper than the surface. [ Chesterfield ]
The love of flowers seems a naturally implanted passion, without any alloy or debasing object in its motive; we cherish them in youth, we admire them in declining years; but perhaps it is the early flowers of spring that always bring with them the greatest degree of pleasure; and our affections seem to expand at the sight of the first blossom under the sunny wall, or sheltered bank, however humble its race may be. With summer flowers we seem to live, as with our neighbors, in harmony and good order; but spring flowers are cherished as private friendships. [ G. A. Sola ]
All the performances of human art, at which we look with praise or wonder, are instances of the resistless force of perseverance; it is by this that the quarry becomes a pyramid, and that distant countries are united by canals. If a man was to compare the effect of a single stroke of a pickaxe, or of one impression of the spade, with the general design and last result, he would be overwhelmed with the sense of their disproportion; yet those petty operations, incessantly continued, in time surmount the greatest difficulties, and mountains are leveled and oceans bounded, by the slender force of human beings. [ Dr. Johnson ]
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 ]