Quotes and anectdotes from the wise to the foolish, and the courageous to the drunk

great

We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both.

When I am grown to man's estate I shall be very proud and great. And tell the other girls and boys Not to meddle with my toys.

A difference of taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections.

A great artist is always before his time or behind it.

All really great lovers are articulate, and verbal seduction is the surest road to actual seduction.

Different taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections.

Genius at first is little more than a great capacity for receiving discipline.

Great things are done when men and mountains meet.

Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together.

Mankind is made great or little by its own will.

No great deed is done by falterers who ask for certainty.

No person will make a great business who wants to do it all himself or get all the credit.

The difference between a bad artist and a good one is: the bad artist seems to copy a great deal the good one really does.

There is a great deal of unmapped country within us which would have to be taken into account in an explanation of our gusts and storms.

There is no greater glory than love, nor any great punishment than jealously.

When death, the great reconciler, has come, it is never our tenderness that we repent of, but our severity.

When we get to wishing a great deal for ourselves, whatever we get soon turns into mere limitation and exclusion.

All the great things are simple, and many can be expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope.

For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move.

Great and good are seldom the same man.

He was a great patriot, a humanitarian, a loyal friend provided, of course, he really is dead.

How incessant and great are the ills with which a prolonged old age is replete.

I always seem to get inspiration and renewed vitality by contact with this great novel land of yours which sticks up out of the Atlantic.

I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.

I am more afraid of my own heart than of the pope and all his cardinals. I have within me the great pope, Self.

I am prepared to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter.

I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move.

Laws control the lesser man... Right conduct controls the greater one.

My books are like water those of the great geniuses are wine. (Fortunately) everybody drinks water.

My mother had a great deal of trouble with me, but I think she enjoyed it.

No crime is so great as daring to excel.

No man will make a great leader who wants to do it all himself or get all the credit for doing it.

One great object of the Constitution was to restrain majorities from oppressing minorities or encroaching upon their just rights.

One great use of words is to hide our thoughts.

See everything, overlook a great deal, correct a little.

The first day of spring is one thing, and the first spring day is another. The difference between them is sometimes as great as a month.

The great defense against the air menace is to attack the enemy's aircraft as near as possible to their point of departure.

The greatest happiness is to know the source of unhappiness.

The infinitely little have a pride infinitely great.

There is the good and the bad, the great and the low, the just and the unjust. I swear to you that all that will never change.

These are not dark days: these are great days - the greatest days our country has ever lived.

All great peoples are conservative.

Character may be manifested in the great moments, but it is made in the small ones.

Dreams must be heeded and accepted. For a great many of them come true.

History shows that the majority of people that have done anything great have passed their youth in seclusion.

I do not want people to be very agreeable, as it saves me the trouble of liking them a great deal.

I don't pretend to understand the Universe - it's a great deal bigger than I am.

I've got a great ambition to die of exhaustion rather than boredom.

Man is only great when he acts from passion.

No great art has ever been made without the artist having known danger.

No great man lives in vain. The history of the world is but the biography of great men.

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

Nurture your minds with great thoughts. To believe in the heroic makes heroes.

Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together.

The difference between Socrates and Jesus? The great conscious and the immeasurably great unconscious.

The greatest good you can do for another is not just to share your riches but to reveal to him his own.

The old cathedrals are good, but the great blue dome that hangs over everything is better.

The three great elements of modern civilization, Gun powder, Printing, and the Protestant religion.

There is a gigantic difference between earning a great deal of money and being rich.

There is a great discovery still to be made in literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write.

Where there is great love, there are always wishes.

After great pain, a formal feeling comes. The Nerves sit ceremonious, like tombs.

Almost everything that is great has been done by youth.

Beware of endeavoring to become a great man in a hurry. One such attempt in ten thousand may succeed. These are fearful odds.

From a worldly point of view, there is no mistake so great as that of being always right.

Great countries are those that produce great people.

I am a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it.

It does not matter much whom we live with in this world, but it matters a great deal whom we dream of.

Like all great travellers, I have seen more than I remember, and remember more than I have seen.

The great difficulty in education is to get experience out of ideas.

The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.

There are two great days in a person's life - the day we are born and the day we discover why.

To be conscious that you are ignorant of the facts is a great step to knowledge.

We do not look in our great cities for our best morality.

To vilify a great man is the readiest way in which a little man can himself attain greatness.

We must all obey the great law of change. It is the most powerful law of nature.

A great secret of success is to go through life as a man who never gets used up.

A subtle thought that is in error may yet give rise to fruitful inquiry that can establish truths of great value.

Great is the difference betwixt a man's being frightened at, and humbled for his sins.

He that has a great nose, thinks everybody is speaking of it.

He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune for they are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief.

I have a great mind to believe in Christianity for the mere pleasure of fancying I may be damned.

I have great hopes that we shall love each other all our lives as much as if we had never married at all.

It is part of a good man to do great and noble deeds, though he risk everything.

It's a great country, where anybody can grow up to be president... except me.

Life is a great big canvas throw all the paint you can at it.

Magnanimity in politics is not seldom the truest wisdom and a great empire and little minds go ill together.

Mere parsimony is not economy. Expense, and great expense, may be an essential part in true economy.

Passion for fame: A passion which is the instinct of all great souls.

Put the uncommon effort into the common task... make it large by doing it in a great way.

Television could perform a great service in mass education, but there's no indication its sponsors have anything like this on their minds.

The desire for safety stands against every great and noble enterprise.

The great art of life is sensation, to feel that we exist, even in pain.

The great end of life is not knowledge but action.

The great secret of success is to go through life as a man who never gets used up.

They never fail who die in a great cause.

Those who aim at great deeds must also suffer greatly.

To become truly great, one has to stand with people, not above them.

What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote.

When a man laughs at his troubles he loses a great many friends. They never forgive the loss of their prerogative.

Who in the world am I? Ah, that's the great puzzle.

You are that vast thing that you see far, far off with great telescopes.

A constant struggle, a ceaseless battle to bring success from inhospitable surroundings, is the price of all great achievements.

A great empire, like a great cake, is most easily diminished at the edges.

A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.

All men who have achieved great things have been great dreamers.

An invincible determination can accomplish almost anything and in this lies the great distinction between great men and little men.

Beware of little expenses. A small leak will sink a great ship.

Don't wait for extraordinary opportunities. Seize common occasions and make them great. Weak men wait for opportunities strong men make them.

Great emergencies and crises show us how much greater our vital resources are than we had supposed.

Great hopes make great men.

Half a truth is often a great lie.

Human felicity is produced not as much by great pieces of good fortune that seldom happen as by little advantages that occur every day.

I conceive that the great part of the miseries of mankind are brought upon them by false estimates they have made of the value of things.

I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear.

I have great faith in fools self-confidence my friends call it.

One of the greatest casualties of the war in Vietnam is the Great Society... shot down on the battlefield of Vietnam.

Pain and foolishness lead to great bliss and complete knowledge, for Eternal Wisdom created nothing under the sun in vain.

People who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.

Show me a great actor and I'll show you a lousy husband. Show me a great actress, and you've seen the devil.

Take time for all things: great haste makes great waste.

The great use of life is to spend it for something that will outlast it.

The greater the obstacle, the more glory in overcoming it.

The history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain clash of human temperaments.

The hottest place in Hell is reserved for those who remain neutral in times of great moral conflict.

The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires.

The overwhelming majority of Americans are possessed of two great qualities a sense of humor and a sense of proportion.

The Universe is one great kindergarten for man. Everything that exists has brought with it its own peculiar lesson.

The world is the great gymnasium where we come to make ourselves strong.

There is no medicine like hope, no incentive so great, and no tonic so powerful as expectation of something tomorrow.

There never was a truly great man that was not at the same time truly virtuous.

A great artist is a great man in a great child.

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

A great pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do.

A little thought and a little kindness are often worth more than a great deal of money.

All great art is the work of the whole living creature, body and soul, and chiefly of the soul.

Give a little love to a child, and you get a great deal back.

Great ideas originate in the muscles.

Great perils have this beauty, that they bring to light the fraternity of strangers.

I believe the first test of a truly great man is in his humility.

I think what motivates people is not great hate, but great love for other people.

If a man can bridge the gap between life and death, if he can live on after he's dead, then maybe he was a great man.

If the misery of the poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin.

In action a great heart is the chief qualification. In work, a great head.

In Genesis, it says that it is not good for a man to be alone but sometimes it is a great relief.

In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, and one must be wrong.

It is a melancholy truth that even great men have their poor relations.

Lives of great men all remind us, we can make our lives sublime, and, departing, leave behind us, footprints on the sands of time.

Many great actions are committed in small struggles.

My great concern is not whether you have failed, but whether you are content with your failure.

Perseverance is a great element of success. If you only knock long enough and loud enough at the gate, you are sure to wake up somebody.

Smallness in a great man seems smaller by its disproportion with all the rest.

That some achieve great success, is proof to all that others can achieve it as well.

The three great essentials to achieve anything worth while are: Hard work, Stick-to-itiveness, and Common sense.

There are many of us that are willing to do great things for the Lord, but few of us are willing to do little things.

Those who want to reap the benefits of this great nation must bear the fatigue of supporting it.

To have a great idea, have a lot of them.

To live alone is the fate of all great souls.

Well, for us, in history where goodness is a rare pearl, he who was good almost takes precedence over he who was great.

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

A great thing can only be done by a great person and they do it without effort.

All great and beautiful work has come of first gazing without shrinking into the darkness.

Attachment is the great fabricator of illusions reality can be attained only by someone who is detached.

Doing is the great thing, for if people resolutely do what is right, they come in time to like doing it.

Endurance is the crowning quality, And patience all the passion of great hearts.

Every great person is always being helped by everybody for their gift is to get good out of all things and all persons.

Great art is as irrational as great music. It is mad with its own loveliness.

Great men are like eagles, and build their nest on some lofty solitude.

Great men are seldom over-scrupulous in the arrangement of their attire.

Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts - the book of their deeds, the book of their words and the book of their art.

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

No human being, however great, or powerful, was ever so free as a fish.

No person who is not a great sculptor or painter can be an architect. If he is not a sculptor or painter, he can only be a builder.

Scientists dream about doing great things. Engineers do them.

The one great principle of English law is to make business for itself.

There is no way to be truly great in this world. We are all impaled on the crook of conditioning.

To me, acting is the most logical way for people's neuroses to manifest themselves, in this great need we all have to express ourselves.

With people of limited ability modesty is merely honesty. But with those who possess great talent it is hypocrisy.

You ask me if I keep a notebook to record my great ideas. I've only ever had one.

All men were made by the Great Spirit Chief. They are all brothers.

Every happening, great and small, is a parable whereby God speaks to us, and the art of life is to get the message.

I played a great horse yesterday! It took seven horses to beat him.

In Republics, the great danger is, that the majority may not sufficiently respect the rights of the minority.

A healthful hunger for a great idea is the beauty and blessedness of life.

Forgive, O Lord, my little jokes on Thee, and I'll forgive Thy great big joke on me.

Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.

Great things are done by a series of small things brought together.

Great things are not accomplished by those who yield to trends and fads and popular opinion.

I always entertain great hopes.

I may climb perhaps to no great heights, but I will climb alone.

If you don't know how great this country is, I know someone who does Russia.

It gives me great pleasure indeed to see the stubbornness of an incorrigible nonconformist warmly acclaimed.

Most people say that it is the intellect which makes a great scientist. They are wrong: it is character.

There may be a great fire in our hearts, yet no one ever comes to warm himself at it, and the passers-by see only a wisp of smoke.

There never was any heart truly great and generous, that was not also tender and compassionate.

A great man is different from an eminent one in that he is ready to be the servant of the society.

A man's worth is no greater than his ambitions.

Faith, there hath been many great men that have flattered the people who ne'er loved them.

Fishes live in the sea, as men do a-land the great ones eat up the little ones.

Hate is too great a burden to bear. It injures the hater more than it injures the hated.

Heaven and hell suppose two distinct species of men, the good and the bad. But the greatest part of mankind float betwixt vice and virtue.

I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure.

Little minds are tamed and subdued by misfortune but great minds rise above them.

Man as an individual is a genius. But men in the mass form the headless monster, a great, brutish idiot that goes where prodded.

Ninety-nine per cent of the people in the world are fools and the rest of us are in great danger of contagion.

Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.

There have been many great men that have flattered the people who ne'er loved them.

To accomplish great things, we must not only act, but also dream not only plan, but also believe.

To do a great right do a little wrong.

When we are born we cry that we are come to this great stage of fools.

Life should be great rather than long.

Religion has done love a great service by making it a sin.

The great questions of the day will not be settled by means of speeches and majority decisions but by iron and blood.

The lure of the distant and the difficult is deceptive. The great opportunity is where you are.

Wave after wave of love flooded the stage and washed over me, the beginning of the one great durable romance of my life.

To be an atheist requires an indefinitely greater measure of faith than to recieve all the great truths which atheism would deny.

To be great is to be misunderstood.

Trouble is the common denominator of living. It is the great equalizer.

Trust men and they will be true to you treat them greatly and they will show themselves great.

We come nearest to the great when we are great in humility.

Where the willingness is great, the difficulties cannot be great.

Whoever conquers a free town and does not demolish it commits a great error and may expect to be ruined himself.

A cloudy day or a little sunshine have as great an influence on many constitutions as the most recent blessings or misfortunes.

A grocer is attracted to his business by a magnetic force as great as the repulsion which renders it odious to artists.

A just and reasonable modesty does not only recommend eloquence, but sets off every great talent which a man can be possessed of.

Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority.

Great love affairs start with Champagne and end with tisane.

I have a great love and respect for religion, great love and respect for atheism. What I hate is agnosticism, people who do not choose.

Man seems to be capable of great virtues but not of small virtues capable of defying his torturer but not of keeping his temper.

Produce great men, the rest follows.

Small natures require despotism to exercise their sinews, as great souls thirst for equality to give play to their heart.

The atom bomb was no 'great decision.' It was merely another powerful weapon in the arsenal of righteousness.

The great city is that which has the greatest man or woman: if it be a few ragged huts, it is still the greatest city in the whole world.

The great thing in the world is not so much to seek happiness as to earn peace and self-respect.

The great tragedy of science - the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.

The man who throws a bomb is an artist, because he prefers a great moment to everything.

The smallest flower is a thought, a life answering to some feature of the Great Whole, of whom they have a persistent intuition.

There is something great and terrible about suicide.

To have great poets, there must be great audiences.

When Religion and Royalty are swept away, the people will attack the great, and after the great, they will fall upon the rich.

A great city is that which has the greatest men and women.

A great man is always willing to be little.

A great part of courage is the courage of having done the thing before.

A happy life must be to a great extent a quiet life, for it is only in an atmosphere of quiet that true joy dare live.

All architecture is great architecture after sunset perhaps architecture is really a nocturnal art, like the art of fireworks.

And your very flesh shall be a great poem.

Before we acquire great power we must acquire wisdom to use it well.

Behind every great fortune lies a great crime.

Character is higher than intellect. A great soul will be strong to live as well as think.

Death comes to all, but great achievements build a monument which shall endure until the sun grows cold.

Don't be humble... you're not that great.

Enthusiasm is the mother of effort, and without it nothing great was ever achieved.

Great dancers are not great because of their technique, they are great because of their passion.

Great geniuses have the shortest biographies.

Great hearts steadily send forth the secret forces that incessantly draw great events.

Great men are they who see that spiritual is stronger than any material force - that thoughts rule the world.

Great men or men of great gifts you shall easily find, but symmetrical men never.

I begin with the principle that all men are bores. Surely no one will prove himself so great a bore as to contradict me in this.

I see great things in baseball. It's our game - the American game.

Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear.

Never was anything great achieved without danger.

No great man ever complains of want of opportunity.

Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.

One sees great things from the valley only small things from the peak.

Our greatest glory is not in never failing, but in rising up every time we fail.

People with great gifts are easy to find, but symmetrical and balanced ones never.

The great object is that every man be armed.

The greatest humiliation in life, is to work hard on something from which you expect great appreciation, and then fail to get it.

The search after the great men is the dream of youth, and the most serious occupation of manhood.

The water in a vessel is sparkling the water in the sea is dark. The small truth has words which are clear the great truth has great silence.

There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and the tired man who wants a book to read.

There is no such thing as a great talent without great will power.

Those who dare to fail miserably can achieve greatly.

A retentive memory may be a good thing, but the ability to forget is the true token of greatness.

Every great architect is - necessarily - a great poet. He must be a great original interpreter of his time, his day, his age.

I long to accomplish a great and noble task, but it is my chief duty to accomplish small tasks as if they were great and noble.

I once wanted to prove myself by being a great actress. Now I want to prove that I'm a person. Then maybe I'll be a great actress.

It does not take much strength to do things, but it requires great strength to decide on what to do.

It is a useless life that is not consecrated to a great ideal. It is like a stone wasted on the field without becoming a part of any edifice.

It is only the great hearted who can be true friends. The mean and cowardly, Can never know what true friendship means.

Life in abundance comes only through great love.

Life is either a great adventure or nothing.

Little minds are interested in the extraordinary great minds in the commonplace.

Men are only as great as they are kind.

Out of Ireland have we come, great hatred, little room, maimed us at the start. I carry from my mother's womb a fanatic heart.

Small minds are concerned with the extraordinary, great minds with the ordinary.

The sensitivity of men to small matters, and their indifference to great ones, indicates a strange inversion.

We all become great explorers during our first few days in a new city, or a new love affair.

A great architect is not made by way of a brain nearly so much as he is made by way of a cultivated, enriched heart.

Eventually, I think Chicago will be the most beautiful great city left in the world.

Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal.

Man is not imprisoned by habit. Great changes in him can be wrought by crisis - once that crisis can be recognized and understood.

Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition.

The charm of fame is so great that we like every object to which it is attached, even death.

The greatness of man is great in that he knows himself to be wretched. A tree does not know itself to be wretched.

The machine does not isolate man from the great problems of nature but plunges him more deeply into them.

The most characteristic mark of a great mind is to choose some one important object, and pursue it for life.

The sea, the great unifier, is man's only hope. Now, as never before, the old phrase has a literal meaning: we are all in the same boat.

The state is the great fictitious entity by which everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else.

The years like great black oxen tread the world, and God, the herdsman goads them on behind, and I am broken by their passing feet.

We know but a few men, a great many coats and breeches.

What we feel and think and are is to a great extent determined by the state of our ductless glands and viscera.

Great art picks up where nature ends.

He was as great as a man can be without morality.

Little progress can be made by merely attempting to repress what is evil. Our great hope lies in developing what is good.

The good physician treats the disease the great physician treats the patient who has the disease.

The great nations have always acted like gangsters, and the small nations like prostitutes.

There have been two great accidents in my life. One was the trolley, and the other was Diego. Diego was by far the worst.

When a great many people are unable to find work, unemployment results.

A man of great common sense and good taste - meaning thereby a man without originality or moral courage.

All great truths begin as blasphemies.

An index is a great leveller.

Baseball has the great advantage over cricket of being sooner ended.

Being is the great explainer.

Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other's eyes for an instant?

Don't be afraid to give up the good to go for the great.

Everything great in the world comes from neurotics. They alone have founded our religions and composed our masterpieces.

He's a man of great common sense and good taste - meaning thereby a man without originality or moral courage.

I have a great deal of company in the house, especially in the morning when nobody calls.

I like to listen. I have learned a great deal from listening carefully. Most people never listen.

It takes a great man to be a good listener.

One of the greatest discoveries a man makes, one of his great surprises, is to find he can do what he was afraid he couldn't do.

Pray that your loneliness may spur you into finding something to live for, great enough to die for.

Prejudice is a great time saver. You can form opinions without having to get the facts.

The game of golf would lose a great deal if croquet mallets and billiard cues were allowed on the putting green.

The great advantage of a hotel is that it is a refuge from home life.

Great loves too must be endured.

Marriage is a great institution, but I'm not ready for an institution.

Nothing great in the world has ever been accomplished without passion.

One of the greatest diseases is to be nobody to anybody.

The great proof of madness is the disproportion of one's designs to one's means.

The herd seek out the great, not for their sake but for their influence and the great welcome them out of vanity or need.

To achieve great things, two things are needed a plan, and not quite enough time.

When small men attempt great enterprises, they always end by reducing them to the level of their mediocrity.

Where words are restrained, the eyes often talk a great deal.

Boldness is a mask for fear, however great.

It is of great use to the sailor to know the length of his line, though he cannot with it fathom all the depths of the ocean.

It would be very glamorous to be reincarnated as a great big ring on Liz Taylor's finger.

To know how to grow old is the master work of wisdom, and one of the most difficult chapters in the great art of living.

What seems to be generosity is often no more than disguised ambition, which overlooks a small interest in order to secure a great one.

A am a great friend of public amusements, they keep people from vice.

A great many men's gratitude is nothing but a secret desire to hook in more valuable kindnesses hereafter.

After people have repeated a phrase a great number of times, they begin to realize it has meaning and may even be true.

All the arguments which are brought to represent poverty as no evil show it evidently to be a great evil.

As it is the characteristic of great wits to say much in few words, so small wits seem to have the gift of speaking much and saying nothing.

Few enterprises of great labor or hazard would be undertaken if we had not the power of magnifying the advantages we expect from them.

Great souls are not those who have fewer passions and more virtues than others, but only those who have greater designs.

Great works are performed not by strength but by perseverance.

He who waits to do a great deal of good at once will never do anything.

Heat of blood makes young people change their inclinations often, and habit makes old ones keep to theirs a great while.

His was a great sin who first invented consciousness. Let us lose it for a few hours.

However glorious an action in itself, it ought not to pass for great if it be not the effect of wisdom and intention.

I have always considered it as treason against the great republic of human nature, to make any man's virtues the means of deceiving him.

It is great folly to wish to be wise all alone.

It is not enough to have great qualities We should also have the management of them.

Leisure and curiosity might soon make great advances in useful knowledge, were they not diverted by minute emulation and laborious trifles.

No man was ever great by imitation.

Nothing is so contagious as example and we never do any great good or evil which does not produce its like.

Self-confidence is the first requisite to great undertakings.

The harder the struggle, the more glorious the triumph. Self-realization demands very great struggle.

There are a great many men valued in society who have nothing to recommend them but serviceable vices.

They that apply themselves to trifling matters commonly become incapable of great ones.

Those that have had great passions esteem themselves for the rest of their lives fortunate and unfortunate in being cured of them.

Those who are incapable of committing great crimes do not readily suspect them in others.

To know how to hide one's ability is great skill.

To love one that is great, is almost to be great one's self.

Too great haste to repay an obligation is a kind of ingratitude.

We may seem great in an employment below our worth, but we very often look little in one that is too big for us.

We only acknowledge small faults in order to make it appear that we are free from great ones.

A great social success is a pretty girl who plays her cards as carefully as if she were plain.

Absence diminishes mediocre passions and increases great ones, as the wind extinguishes candles and fans fires.

As great minds have the faculty of saying a great deal in a few words, so lesser minds have a talent of talking much, and saying nothing.

I have tried to know absolutely nothing about a great many things, and I have succeeded fairly well.

It is a great act of cleverness to be able to conceal one's being clever.

A great value of antiquity lies in the fact that its writings are the only ones that modern men still read with exactness.

A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal.

A subject for a great poet would be God's boredom after the seventh day of creation.

Abuse of words has been the great instrument of sophistry and chicanery, of party, faction, and division of society.

All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.

As usual, there is a great woman behind every idiot.

Every great and deep difficulty bears in itself its own solution. It forces us to change our thinking in order to find it.

Good artists copy, great artists steal.

Great achievement is usually born of great sacrifice, and is never the result of selfishness.

Great indebtedness does not make men grateful, but vengeful and if a little charity is not forgotten, it turns into a gnawing worm.

Great is the guilt of an unnecessary war.

Great minds discuss ideas average minds discuss events small minds discuss people.

Great thoughts speak only to the thoughtful mind, but great actions speak to all mankind.

I always felt that the great high privilege, relief and comfort of friendship was that one had to explain nothing.

I believe in the fundamental truth of all great religions of the world.

If you cannot do great things, do small things in a great way.

Man becomes great exactly in the degree in which he works for the welfare of his fellow-men.

Most great people have attained their greatest success just one step beyond their greatest failure.

No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist.

No great intellectual thing was ever done by great effort.

No man is worth his salt who is not ready at all times to risk his well-being, to risk his body, to risk his life, in a great cause.

Now that the House of Commons is trying to become useful, it does a great deal of harm.

Only he can take great resolves who has indomitable faith in God and has fear of God.

Only passions, great passions can elevate the soul to great things.

Power always thinks it has a great soul and vast views beyond the comprehension of the weak.

Some are made modest by great praise, others insolent.

Success has always been a great liar.

Surrealism had a great effect on me because then I realised that the imagery in my mind wasn't insanity. Surrealism to me is reality.

The essence of all beautiful art, all great art, is gratitude.

The moment you think you understand a great work of art, it's dead for you.

The salesman knows nothing of what he is selling save that he is charging a great deal too much for it.

There is a woman at the begining of all great things.

Two great European narcotics, alcohol and Christianity.

When one has a great deal to put into it a day has a hundred pockets.

I have seen great intolerance shown in support of tolerance.

Land and sea, weakness and decline are great separators, but death is the great divorcer for ever.

So great was the extremity of his pain and anguish, that he did not only sigh but roar.

The philosopher has never killed any priests, whereas the priest has killed a great many philosophers.

There are trivial truths and the great truths. The opposite of a trivial truth is plainly false. The opposite of a great truth is also true.

Truth is always served by great minds, even if they fight it.