Conformity Quote by Henry David Thoreau

The success of great scholars and thinkers is commonly a courtier-like success, not kingly, not manly.

— Henry David Thoreau

There are successful scholars, public-spirited scholars, upright scholars, cautious scholars, and those who are merely petty men.

— Anonymous

Success makes men rigid and they tend to exalt stability over all the other virtues; tired of the effort of willing they become fanatics…

— Walter Lippmann

It is a mistake to imagine that potentially great men are rare. It is the conditions that permit the promise of greatness to be…

— Fred Hoyle

When great men permit themselves to be cast down by the continuance of misfortune, they show us that they were only sustained by ambition,…

— Francois de La Rochefoucauld

There is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talents.

— Thomas Jefferson

Great men, great events, great epochs, it has been said, grow as we recede from them; and the rate at which they grow in…

— John Campbell Shairp

Great men lose somewhat of their greatness by being near us; ordinary men gain much.

— Walter Savage Landor

Despite the success cult, men are most deeply moved not by the reaching of the goal but by the grandness of the effort involved…

— Max Lerner

The Lives of Great Men are more oft' at variance with their profess'd Phillosophies than consistent with 'em.

— Erica Jong

Great men are the modelers, patterns, and in a wide sense creators, of whatsoever the general mass of men contrived to do and attain.

— Thomas Carlyle

The modern idea of a Great Man is one who stands at the lonely extremity of some single line of development--

— C. S. Lewis