Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes

No man is a hero to his valet.

Only have enough of little virtues and common fidelities, and you need not mourn because you are neither a hero nor a saint.

No man is a hero to his valet de chamber

The nearer we come to great men the more clearly we see that they are only men. They rarely seem great to their valets.

Rarely do they appear great before their valets.

No man is a hero to his valet. This is not because the hero is no hero, but because the valet is a valet.

If we lived in a State where virtue was profitable, common sense would make us good, and greed would make us saintly. And we'd live like animals or angels in the happy land that /needs/ no heroes. But since in fact we see that avarice, anger, envy, pride, sloth, lust and stupidity commonly profit far beyond humility, chastity, fortitude, justice and thought, and have to choose, to be human at all... why then perhaps we /must/ stand fast a little --even at the risk of being heroes.

Fools boast of what they will do. Heroes do it.

My reason for coming out isn't to be some sort of hero.

For God's sake stop making people in your image. Harry was real. He wasn't just your hero and my lover. He was Harry. He was in a racket. He did bad things. What about it? He was the man we knew.

I like to say I'm not a hero. I was lucky enough to lead a very successful war.

Heroes, it would seem, exist always and a certain worship of them.

I will not go so far as to say, with a living poet, that the world knows nothing of its greatest men; but there are forms of greatness, or at least of excellence, which "die and make no sign"; there are martyrs that miss the palm, but not the stake; heroes without the laurel, and conquerors without the triumph.

I learned that it is better, a thousandfold , for a proud man to fall and be humbled, than to hold up his head in his pride and fancied innocence. I learned that he that will be a hero, will barely be a man; that he that will be nothing but a doer of his work, is sure of his manhood. In nothing was my ideal lowered, or dimmed, or grown less precious; I only saw it too plainly, to set myself for a moment beside it.

To a valet no man is a hero.

Heroes don't need to talk about what they did.

Worship of a hero is transcendent admiration of a great man.

Hence the importance of patience in the New Testament, which becomes the basic constituent of Christianity, more central even than humility: the power to wait, to persevere, to hold out, to endure to the end, not to transcend one's own limitations, not to force issues by playing the hero or the titan, but to practice the virtue that lies beyond heroism, the meekness of the Lamb which is led.

My mama didn't raise any fools and she didn't raise any heroes.

He whom prosperity humbles, and adversity strengthens, is the true hero.

Hero-worship is the deepest root of all; the tap-root, from which in a great degree all the rest were nourished and grown . . . Worship of a Hero is transcendent admiration of a Great Man. I say great men are still admirable; I say there is, at bottom, nothing else admirable! No nobler feeling than this of admiration for one higher than himself dwells in the breast of men.

Heroes do extraordinary things. What I did was not an extraordinary thing. It was normal.

I was never disappointed by the people I've admired. And the choices I made when I was in a position where it was do-or-die were made with my heroes in mind.

Mankind has always made too much of its saints and heroes, and how the latter handle the fuss might be called their final test.