Grandeur Quotes

“Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”
― Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species

“Until every soul is freely permitted to investigate every book, and creed, and dogma for itself, the world cannot be free. Mankind will be enslaved until there is mental grandeur enough to allow each man to have his thought and say. This earth will be a paradise when men can, upon all these questions differ, and yet grasp each other's hands as friends. It is amazing to me that a difference of opinion upon subjects that we know nothing with certainty about, should make us hate, persecute, and despise each other. Why a difference of opinion upon predestination, or the trinity, should make people imprison and burn each other seems beyond the comprehension of man; and yet in all countries where Christians have existed, they have destroyed each other to the exact extent of their power. Why should a believer in God hate an atheist? Surely the atheist has not injured God, and surely he is human, capable of joy and pain, and entitled to all the rights of man. Would it not be far better to treat this atheist, at least, as well as he treats us?

Christians tell me that they love their enemies, and yet all I ask is—not that they love their enemies, not that they love their friends even, but that they treat those who differ from them, with simple fairness.

We do not wish to be forgiven, but we wish Christians to so act that we will not have to forgive them. If all will admit that all have an equal right to think, then the question is forever solved; but as long as organized and powerful churches, pretending to hold the keys of heaven and hell, denounce every person as an outcast and criminal who thinks for himself and denies their authority, the world will be filled with hatred and suffering. To hate man and worship God seems to be the sum of all the creeds.”
― Robert G. Ingersoll, Some Mistakes of Moses

“It's not about outward appearances but inward significance. A grandeur in the world, but not of the world, a grandeur that the world doesn't understand. That first glimpse of pure otherness, in whose presence you bloom out and out and out.

A self one does not want. A heart one cannot help.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“Noi fummo i Gattopardi, i Leoni; quelli che ci sostituiranno saranno gli sciacalletti, le iene; e tutti quanti gattopardi, sciacalli e pecore, continueremo a crederci il sale della terra."

("We were the Leopards, the Lions; those who'll take our place will be little jackals, hyenas; and the whole lot of us, Leopards, jackals, and sheep, we'll all go on thinking ourselves the salt of the earth.")”
― Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, The Leopard

“Had you but seen it, I promise you, your high-minded principles would have melted like candle wax. Never would you have wished such beauty away.”
― Jennifer Donnelly, Revolution

“It is India that gave us the ingenious method of expressing all numbers by means of ten symbols, each symbol receiving a value of position as well as an absolute value; a profound and important idea which appears so simple to us now that we ignore its true merit. But its very simplicity and the great ease which it has lent to computations put our arithmetic in the first rank of useful inventions; and we shall appreciate the grandeur of the achievement the more when we remember that it escaped the genius of Archimedes and Apollonius, two of the greatest men produced by antiquity.”
― Pierre-Simon Laplace

“In time, all great masterpieces turn into shameless creatures who laugh at their creators.”
― Erol Ozan

“Then he took the sword in both hands and raised it—and Gawain’s posture took on an unmistakable grandeur.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, The Buried Giant

“the grandeur of God reveals itself through simple things”
― Paulo Coelho

“In the serene weather of the tropics it is exceedingly pleasant—the mast-head; nay, to a dreamy meditative man it is delightful. There you stand, a hundred feet above the silent decks, striding along the deep, as if the masts were gigantic stilts, while beneath you and between your legs, as it were, swim the hugest monsters of the sea, even as ships once sailed between the boots of the famous Colossus at old Rhodes.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“For hate dies, suffocated to death by its own stupidity and mediocrity. But grandeur is eternal.”
― Leon Degrelle, The Eastern Front: Memoirs of a Waffen SS Volunteer, 1941-1945

“He shuffles atoms and jet of light, remotest nebulae, drips of water, prick-points of sensation, slime-oozings and cosmic bulks, all mixed with pearls of faith, love of woman, imagined dignities, frightened surmises, and pompous arrogances, and of the stuff builds himself an immortality to startle the heavens and baffle the immensities. He squirms on his dunghill, and like a child lost in the dark among goblins, calls to the gods that he is their younger brother, a prisoner of the quick that is destined to be as free as they - monuments of egotism reared by the epiphenomena; dreams and the dust of dreams, that vanish when the dreamer vanishes and are no more when he is not.”
― Jack London, John Barleycorn: Alcoholic Memoirs

“If we wish to identify the truly great things in life, we can identify them by the fact that no matter how much we are exposed to them or how often we’re privileged to engage them, they remain great despite what our perception of them might do to them.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough, The Eighth Page: A Christmas Journey

“ऐश्वर्य जितना बड़ा हो उतने ही शिष्टाचार के बंधन अधिक कठोर होते हैं!”
― Vishnu Sakharam Khandekar, Yayati: A Classic Tale of Lust

“We are eternal souls on a great journey. We have many past lives, and when we are not in the body, we are continuing our lessons and lives in-between, in the spirit world, on other planets and dimensions. It is a grand journey.”
― Stephen Poplin, Inner Journeys, Cosmic Sojourns: Life transforming stories, adventures and messages from a spiritual hypnotherapist's casebook

“Tracy had never been so conscious of the sky above the earth, the dangerous clouds that gathered there, the way humans lived beneath such grandeur and threat every moment of their lives.”
― Paul Russell, The Coming Storm

“The grandeur of the thieving falsity is larceny, the fall of cities.”
― Justin K. McFarlane Beau

“Listen! The court jester's cap and bells. The King is coming!”
― Ljupka Cvetanova, The New Land

“ceux qui se révèlent incapables de sentir en eux-mêmes la petitesse des grandes choses ne sauraient reconnaître chez les autres la grandeur des petites choses.”
― Kakuzō Okakura, The Book of Tea

“Je me sentais responsable de la beauté du monde.”
― Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian

“One of the greatest goals of all is to recognize the commonality of the grand that only appears uncommon because it is missed by the ignorance of our souls turned sour.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough, The Eighth Page: A Christmas Journey

“The origin of self is self not wanting to be by itself. The purpose of self is companionship. Love so love.”
― Wald Wassermann

“Life wants you to touch, taste and see the grandeur of the world's unfathomable variety.”
― Bryant McGill, Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life

“He informed Byrdie that his social engineering ambitions betrayed all the delusions of grandeur that you might expect from the son of a poet.”
― Nell Zink, Mislaid

“The grandeur of God, the glory of His majesty.”
― Lailah Gifty Akita

“Then the realization of grandeur of the human soul, immediately followed by the rapture of the realization of God. He glances back and sees how futile his life and ambitions have so far been. Then realizes his present reconcilement with the cosmos and that the rest of his life must be continual joy.”
― Richard Maurice Bucke, Cosmic Consciousness: A Study in the Evolution of the Human Mind

“Solace is found in true grandeur, not in ideas, which orbit around that which is grand but possess no real grandeur of their own.”
― Hans von Trotha, Pollaks Arm

“The United Kingdom is like a schizophrenic patient with delusions of grandeur.”
― Ryan Gelpke, 2017: Our Summer of Reunions: Braai Seasons with Howl Gang (Howl Gang Legend)

“When we praise greatness in the world, greatness increases in the world. No praise for greatness is too much, so let us not restrain ourselves!”
― Giannis Delimitsos

“Just a reminder of what I'd always been told. There is grandeur, and if you can't see it, shame on you. -- Miller, Why Fish Don't Exist”
― Lulu Miller, The Man With the Golden Gun