Success Quote by Walter Savage Landor

Landor’s line is a cold splash of social realism dressed as a compliment to the “ordinary.” It works because it punctures the romantic idea that greatness is a steady aura. Up close, “great men” stop being statues and start being people: petty habits, moods, logistical needs, vanity, boredom. Proximity doesn’t shrink their achievements, but it strips the myth-making varnish we apply at a distance. The loss is “somewhat” - a pointed qualifier that admits real greatness exists, yet insists our worship depends on stage lighting.

The second clause flips the effect. “Ordinary men gain much” not because they suddenly become extraordinary, but because we fill in their blanks. When someone isn’t famous enough to have a public record of contradictions, we project coherence onto them. The ordinary also benefit from contrast: beside the celebrated, a competent friend can seem steadier, kinder, more “real.” Landor is quietly diagnosing the optics of reputation: grandeur is partly a product of separation, and intimacy is a solvent.

Context matters. Landor lived in an age that manufactured “great men” as a cultural genre - Romantic hero-worship, national monuments, literary celebrity - while also watching revolutions and empires prove how quickly heroes curdle into administrators. His own prickly temperament and famously cutting judgments make the sentence feel less like democratic sentiment than a warning: admiration is a distance effect, and familiarity is the most reliable critic.