Charles Caleb Colton Quotes

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

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.

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

Great passions are for the great of soul, and great events can be seen only by those who are on a level with them

Great men can't be ruled.

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

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

Great men have all been formed either before academies or independent of them.

I know of no great men except those who have rendered great service to the human race.

When a great man has some one object in view to be achieved in a given time, it may be absolutely necessary for him to walk out of all the common roads.

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

Great men are always exceptional men; and greatness itself is but comparative. Indeed, the range of most men in life is so limited that very few have the opportunity of being great.

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.

A really great man has always an idea of something greater than himself.

A great man is a gift, in some measure a revelation of God. A great man, living for high ends, is the divinest thing that can be seen on earth. The value and interest of history are derived chiefly from the lives and services of the eminent men whom it commemorates. Indeed, without these, there would be no such thing as history, and the progress of a nation would be little worth recording, as the march of a trading caravan across a desert.

In business, what distinguishes leaders from laggards and greatness from mediocrity is the ability to uniquely imagine what could be.

I have come to think that great men are characterized precisely by the extreme position which they take, and that their heroism consists in holding to that extremity throughout their lives.

Complacency with our traditional judgement based thinking methods is not enough. Our existing thinking habits are excellent just as the rear wheel of a motor car is excellent but not enough. We need to put far more emphasis on creative and design thinking. Judgement and analysis are not enough.

In historic events, the so-called great men are labels giving names to events, and like labels they have but the smallest connection with the event itself. Every act of theirs, which appears to them an act of their own will, is in an historical sense involuntary and is related to the whole course of history and predestined from eternity.

Two weeks before his death, a friend asked him half jokingly if he had discovered any meaning in life. "Yes," he replied, "there is a meaning; at least, for me, there is one thing that matters - to set a chime of words tinkling in the minds of a few fastidious people."

I have played some of the great men in history and I believe in the great man who does heroic deeds, even in these egalitarian times.

The ascent to greatness, however steep and dangerous, may entertain an active spirit with the consciousness and exercise of its own power: but the possession of a throne could never yet afford a lasting satisfaction to an ambitious mind.

Great men are the inspired texts of that divine Book of Revelations, whereof a chapter is completed from epoch to epoch, and by some named History.