Samuel Smiles Quotes

The world cannot live at the level of its great men.

We like to think of our champions and idols as superheroes who were born different from us. We don’t like to think of them as relatively ordinary people who made themselves extraordinary.

One of the interesting things is, the most gifted people, the biggest people, have no problem taking small roles.

Great men do not content us. It is their solitude, not their force, that makes them conspicuous.

Only great men have great faults.

None but great men are capable of having great flaws.

There are big men, men of intellect, intellectual men, men of talent and men of action; but the great man is difficult to find, and it needs --apart from discernment --a certain greatness to find him.

Great men stand like solitary towers in the city of God.

Great men are sometimes so even in small things.

Great countries are those that produce great people.

Circumstances have rarely favored great men. A lowly beginning is no bar to a great career. The boy who works his way through college may have a hard time of it, but he will learn how to work his way in life, and will usually take higher rank in school and in after life than his classmate who is the son of a millionaire.

In life we shall find many men that are great, and some that are good, but very few men that are both great and good.

How could you be a Great Man if history brought you no Great Events, or brought you to them at the wrong time, too young, too old?

There aren't any great men. There are just great challenges that ordinary men like you and me are forced by circumstances to meet.

To be a great leader, one unfortunately needs a war.

Great things are accomplished by men who are not conscious of the impotence of man. Such insensitiveness is precious.

If people view somebody as great, then he is.

Great men, like comets, are eccentric in their courses, and formed to do extensive good by modes unintelligible to vulgar minds.

Great men can't be ruled.

In tragedy great men are more truly great than in history. We see them only in the crises which unfold them.

Great men are true men, the men in whom nature has succeeded. They are not extraordinary - they are in the true order. It is the other species of men who are not what they ought to be.

Great men are but common men more fully developed and ripened.

Great men are among the best gifts which God bestows upon a people.

It is not obligatory for a generation to have great men.