Great Quotes: Wisdom from the Greatest Minds

"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"

Jose Rizal, Writer

"I said when I came into office that I don't want to be a great leader; I want to be a good democrat"

Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, Politician

"Do not say a little in many words but a great deal in a few"

Pythagoras, Mathematician

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

Oscar Wilde, Dramatist

"Great effort from great motives is the best definition of a happy life"

William Ellery Channing, Writer

"Seek the lofty by reading, hearing and seeing great work at some moment every day"

Thornton Wilder, Writer

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

Oscar Wilde, Dramatist

"As your faith is strengthened you will find that there is no longer the need to have a sense of control, that things will flow as they will, and that you will flow with them, to your great delight and benefit"

Emmanuel Teney, Author

"We worked very hard to make the lyrics suit the music. I can't, like Elton John, for example, compose by lyrics. Elton has a great talent for that. Whatever you give him, including your questions, he composes in half an hour and makes a great song out of it"

Rick Wright, Musician

"This life of ours, this is a wonderful life. If you can get through life like this and get away with it, hey that's great. But it's very predictable. There's so many ways you can screw it up"

Paul Castellano, Criminal

"Households, cities, countries, and nations have enjoyed great happiness when a single individual has taken heed of the Good and Beautiful. Such people not only liberate themselves; they fill those they meet with a free mind"

Philo, Philosopher

"Sad will be the day for any man when he becomes contented with the thoughts he is thinking and the deeds he is doing - where there is not forever beating at the doors of his soul some great desire to do something larger; which he knows he was meant and made to do"

Phillips Brooks, Clergyman

"I love being married. It's so great to find that one special person you want to annoy for the rest of your life"

Rita Rudner, Comedian

"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"

Charles Caleb Colton, Writer

"I just had lunch with Slash two days ago. He loves Axl. He holds no grudges towards him. Twenty years of great music wasn't created because of some stupid grudge. That's a shame"

Steven Adler, Musician

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

Samuel Butler, Poet

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

John Ruskin, Writer

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

Charles de Montesquieu, Philosopher

"Theologians have a great problem because they're seeking to speak about God. Since God is the ground of everything that is, there's a sense in which every human inquiry is grist to the theological mill. Obviously, no theologian can know everything"

John Polkinghorne, Physicist

"In spite of everything I shall rise again: I will take up my pencil, which I have forsaken in my great discouragement, and I will go on with my drawing"

Vincent Van Gogh, Artist

"People assume I'm out there having this great life, but money doesn't erase the pain. When you're young you barrel through life, making choices without thinking of repercussions. A few years down the line, you wake up in a certain place and wonder how the hell you got there"

Jennifer Lopez, Musician

"Although, I am proud of all my Symphonies as they all have something special to say, my particular favourite is the Fifth. As the great Mahler expert Donald Mitchell said that if Mahler had written another Symphony, it would have been my Fifth!"

Malcolm Arnold, Composer

"Great CEOs are not just born with shiny hair and a tie"

Marc Andreessen, Businessman

"We are all faced with a series of great opportunities - brilliantly disguised as insoluble problems"

John W. Gardner, Educator

"Eating is not merely a material pleasure. Eating well gives a spectacular joy to life and contributes immensely to goodwill and happy companionship. It is of great importance to the morale"

Elsa Schiaparelli, Designer

"The great advantage about telling the truth is that nobody ever believes it"

Dorothy L. Sayers, Author

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

William Shakespeare, Dramatist

"All great movements are popular movements. They are the volcanic eruptions of human passions and emotions, stirred into activity by the ruthless Goddess of Distress or by the torch of the spoken word cast into the midst of the people"

Adolf Hitler, Criminal

"God is the great mysterious motivator of what we call nature, and it has often been said by philosophers, that nature is the will of God. And I prefer to say that nature is the only body of God that we shall ever see"

Frank Lloyd Wright, Architect

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

Frank Lloyd Wright, Architect

"Maybe we can show government how to operate better as a result of better architecture. Eventually, I think Chicago will be the most beautiful great city left in the world"

Frank Lloyd Wright, Architect

"A great city, whose image dwells in the memory of man, is the type of some great idea. Rome represents conquest; Faith hovers over the towers of Jerusalem; and Athens embodies the pre-eminent quality of the antique world, Art"

Benjamin Disraeli, Statesman

"All great truths begin as blasphemies"

George Bernard Shaw, Dramatist

"Great and good are seldom the same man"

Winston Churchill, Statesman

"There is a kind of elevation which does not depend on fortune; it is a certain air which distinguishes us, and seems to destine us for great things; it is a price which we imperceptibly set upon ourselves"

Francois de La Rochefoucauld, Writer

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

Francois de La Rochefoucauld, Writer

"Every calling is great when greatly pursued"

Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., Poet

"I open with a clock striking, to beget an awful attention in the audience - it also marks the time, which is four o clock in the morning, and saves a description of the rising sun, and a great deal about gilding the eastern hemisphere"

Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Playwright

"Instead of comparing our lot with that of those who are more fortunate than we are, we should compare it with the lot of the great majority of our fellow men. It then appears that we are among the privileged"

Helen Keller, Author

"The banalities of a great man pass for wit"

Alexander Chase, Author

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