Great And Small Quotes

“When the Day of Judgment dawns and people, great and small, come marching in to receive their heavenly rewards, the Almighty will gaze upon the mere bookworms and say to Peter, Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them. They have loved reading.”

— Virginia Woolf

“Every happening, great and small, is a parable whereby God speaks to us, and the art of life is to get the message.”

— Malcolm Muggeridge

“It is our Lord's wisdom, that His kirk should ever hang by a thread; and yet the thread breaketh not, being hanged upon Him who is the sure Nail in David's house (Isa. xxii. 23), upon whom all the vessels, great and small, do hang; and the Nail (God be thanked) neither crooketh nor can be broken. Jesus,”

— Samuel Rutherford

“All space is relative. There is no such thing as size. The telescope and the microscope have produced a deadly leveling of great and small, far and near. The only little thing is sin, the only great thing is fear!
("The Jelly-Fish")”

— David H. Keller

“We are a sum total of what we have learned from all who have taught us, both great and small.”

— Myles Munroe

“Even Pushkin, who could understand everything, did not grasp the real significance of Dead Souls. He thought that the author was grieving for Russia, ignorant, savage, and outdistanced by the other nations. But it is not only in Russia that Gogol discovers "dead souls." All men, great and small, seem to him lunatics, lifeless, automata which obediently and mechanically carry out commandments imposed on them from without. They eat, they drink, they sin, they multiply; with stammering tongue they pronounce meaningless words. No trace of free will, no sparkle of understanding, not the slightest wish to awake from their thousand-year sleep.”

— Lev Shestov

“Why Dream?
Life is a difficult assignment. We are fragile creatures, expected to function at high rates of speed, and asked to accomplish great and small things each day. These daily activities take enormous amounts of energy. Most things are out of our control. We are surrounded by danger, frustration, grief, and insanity as well as love, hope, ecstasy, and wonder. Being fully human is an exercise in humility, suffering, grace, and great humor. Things and people all around us die, get broken, or are lost. There is no safety or guarantees.
The way to accomplish the assignment of truly living is to engage fully, richly, and deeply in the living of your dreams. We are made to dream and to live those dreams.”

— SARK

“Child, you have to learn to see things in the right proportions. Learn to see great things great and small things small.”

— Corrie Ten Boom

“Something that made you believe there was a God but he didn't make miracles. He created beings and gave them the power to make miracles, miracles both great and small.”

— Kristen Ashley

“He prayeth best, who loveth best All things both great and small; For the dear God who loveth us, He made and loveth all.”

— James Baldwin

“Just as the towering myth of Abraham Lincoln-honest backwoods lawyer, spinner of yarns, righter of wrongs-tells only part of the truth, so, too, is the myth of America woefully incomplete. The country that Ronald Reagan once called "a shining city upon a hill" has, in fact, been tangled up in darkness since before she was born. Millions of souls have graced the American stage over the centuries, played parts both great and small, and made their final exits. But of all the souls who witnessed America's birth and growth, who fought in her finest hours, and who had a hand in her hidden history, only one soul remains to tell the whole truth. What follows is the story of Henry Sturges. What follows is the story of an American life.”

— Seth Grahame-Smith

“Masters of the first rank are recognized by the fact that in matters great and small they know how to find an end perfectly, be it the end of a melody or a thought.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche

“Fairy-tale city. From the air, red rooftops hug a kink in a dark river, and by night the forested hills appear as spans of black nothing against the dazzle of the lit castle, the spiking Gothic towers, the domes great and small. The river captures all the lights and teases them out, long and wavering, and the side-slashing rain blurs it all to a dream. This was Akiva's first sight of Prague;”

— Laini Taylor

“Larry, wouldn't it be a fine thing, a swell thing, a boon to the community of man and to all creatures great and small, if this girl's soul was as ripe and stunning as her ass.”

— Tom Robbins

“My long struggles as a soldier of the Chinese Revolution have forced me to realize the necessity of facing hard facts. There will be neither peace, nor hope, nor future for any of us unless we honestly aim at political, social and economic justice for all peoples of the world, great and small.”

— Chiang Kai-shek

“The Americans are the nature of the future," she would announce in her hearty voice. "Here's to 'em. God bless their gadgets, great and small, God bless Frigidaire, Tampax and Coca-Cola. Yes, even Coca-Cola,darling." (It was generally conceded that Coca-Cola's advertising was ruining the picturesqueness of Morocco.)”

— Paul Bowles

“Mr. Romney is quick to uphold rules great and small. During primary debates, when his rivals spoke out of turn or exceeded their allotted time, he would sometimes lecture them. When supporters ask Mr. Romney to sign dollar bills or American flags, he refuses and often gives them a little lesson about why doing so is against the law.”

— Jodi Kantor

“We embark on this quest not from a simple desire, but from a mandate of our species to search for our place in the cosmos. The quest is old, not new. And has garnered the attention of thinkers great and small, across time and across culture. What we have discovered, the poets have known all along.”

— Neil DeGrasse Tyson

“Recall what used to be the theme of poetry in the romantic era. In neat verses the poet lets us share his private, bourgeois emotions: his sufferings great and small, his nostalgias, his religious or political pre-occupations, and, if he were English, his pipe-smoking reveries. On occasions, individual genius allowed a more subtle emanation to envelope the human nucleus of the poem - as we find in Baudelaire for example. But this splendour was a by-product. All the poet wished was to be a human being.
When he writes, I believe today's poet simply wishes to be a poet.”

— José Ortega Y Gasset

“Oh, it's mysterious lamplit evenings, here in the galaxy, one after the other. It's one of those nights when I wander from window to window, looking for a sign. But I can't see. Terror and a beauty insoluble are a ribband of blue woven into the fringes of garments of things both great and small. No culture explains, no bivouac offers real haven or rest. But it could be that we are not seeing something. Galileo thought that comets were an optical illusion. This is fertile ground: since we are certain that they're not, we can look at what scientists are saying with fresh hope. What if there are really gleaming castellated cities hung upside-down over the desert sand? What limpid lakes and cool date palms have our caravans passed untried? Until, one by one, by the blindest of leaps, we light on the road to these places, we must stumble in darkness and hunger.”

— Annie Dillard

“My dear Homer, if you are really only once removed from the truth, with reference to virtue, instead of being twice removed and the manufacturer of a phantom, according to our definition of an imitator, and if you need to be able to distinguish between the pursuits which make men better or worse, in private and in public, tell us what city owes a better constitution to you, as Lacedaemon owes hers to Lycurgus, and as many cities, great and small, owe theirs to many other legislators? What state attributes to you the benefits derived from a good code of laws? Italy and Sicily recognize Charondas in this capacity, and we solon. But what state recognizes you.”

— Plato

“How lovely to think that no one need wait a moment, we can start now, start slowly changing the world! How lovely that everyone, great and small, can make their contribution toward introducing justice straightaway ... And you can always, always give something, even if it is only kindness!”

— Anne Frank

“In neither taste nor precision is any man's practice a court of last appeal, for writers all, both great and small, are habitual sinners against the light; and their accuser is cheerfully aware that his own work will supply ... many 'awful examples' ...”

— Ambrose Bierce

“An eagle soaring above a sheer cliff, where I suppose its nest is, makes another striking show of life, and helps to bring to mind the other people of the so-called solitude-deer in the forest caring for their young; the strong, well-clad, well-fed bears; the lively throng of squirrels; the blessed birds, great and small, stirring and sweetening the groves; and the clouds of happy insects filling the sky with joyous hum as part and parcel of the down-pouring sunshine.”

— John Muir

“Photography is a great adventure in thinking and looking, a wonderful magic toy that miraculously manages to combine our adult awareness with the fairy-tale world of childhood, a never-ending journey through great and small, through variations and the realm of illusions and appearances, a labyrinthine and specular place of multitudes and simulation.”

— Luigi Ghirri

“A good joke, that!" returned Don Quixote. "Books that have been printed with the king's licence, and with the approbation of those to whom they have been submitted, and read with universal delight, and extolled by great and small, rich and poor, learned and ignorant, gentle and simple, in a word by people of every sort, of whatever rank or condition they may be-that these should be lies!”

— Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra

“A great means to preserve continual peace and tranquillity of soul is to receive everything from the hands of God, both great and small, and in whatever way it comes.”

— Dorotheus Of Gaza

“Creation is in part merely the business of forgoing the great and small distractions.”

— E.B. White

“All happenings, great and small, are parables whereby God speaks. The art of life is to get the message. To see all that is offered us at the windows of the soul, and to reach out and receive what is offered, this is the art of living.”

— Malcolm Muggeridge

“Let the revolting distinction of rich and poor disappear once and for all, the distinction of great and small, of masters and valets, of governors and governed. Let there be no other differences between human beings than those of age and sex. Since all have the same needs and the same faculties, let there be one education for all, one food for all.”

— Francois-Noel Babeuf

“The music of the supreme architect, Bach, is filled with pages of discursive argument and rumination, glorifying the nameless whole by a rich embroidery of passages which lead everywhere and nowhere. The ideas are presented, stood on their head, dissolved into fragments, until the ultimate message becomes the connections of all things great and small, a chain of being which cannot be secured until the last note is in place.”

— Russell Sherman

“I've always relied on discipline to achieve goals great and small. At a young age, my father instilled a real work ethic in me - and a fear of men. I always felt like if I didn't have a natural knack for something, I could kind of out-discipline the competition as it were. So I would always work as hard as I possibly could, sometimes to my own detriment and my personal life. For me, I think will power and discipline are very synonymous.”

— Ryan Reynolds

“Running has taken me on adventures great and small, at home and around the world. It has provided me with hope and perseverance on days when I had none-and even, once every great while, warmed me with that fleeting ray of sunshine known as glory. Running has taught me that I can do anything, just so long as I keep putting one foot in front of the other. Sometimes that notion is metaphorical and sometimes not. In this way, I have been inspired to attempt things I would have never dreamed possible. And it all started with a single step.”

— Martin Dugard

“There's love, sweet love, for one and all
For love is best for great and small.”

— Maud Lindsay

“We lose the fear of making decisions, great and small; as we realize that should our choice prove wrong we can, if we will, learn from the experience.”

— Bill W.

“In everything both great and small, We see the Hand of God in all.”

— Helen Steiner Rice

“All creatures are great and small.”

— Willard Wigan

“Patriotism is a salt against rottenness, a glorious spur to high endeavour; it recovers the half-obliterated virtue of loyalty, calls every man to service, and ennobles great and small alike.”

— Percy Dearmer

“While it is unlikely that poetry or art shall eliminate the reality of war in the twenty-first century, it is thrilling to know there remain individuals, and even entire communities, still willing to invest in art and poetry's own uniquely explosive contributions to the great, and small, dramas of human history.”

— Aberjhani

“To correct the evils, great and small, which spring from want of sympathy and from positive enmity among strangers, as nations or as individuals, is one of the highest functions of civilization.”

— Abraham Lincoln

“When the profits of trade happen to be greater than ordinary, over-trading becomes a general error both among great and small dealers.”

— Adam Smith

“Let us see that we keep God before our eyes; that we walk in His ways and seek to please and glorify Him in everything, great and small. Depend upon it, God's work, done in God's way, will never lack God's supplies.”

— Hudson Taylor

“There remains an experience of incomparable value ... to see the great events of world history from below; from the perspective of the outcast, the suspects, the maltreated, the powerless, the oppressed, the reviled
in short, from the perspective of those who suffer ... to look with new eyes on matters great and small.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“Character - in things great and small - is indicated when a man (or person) pursues with sustained follow-through what he feels himself capable of doing.”

— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

“Profundity easily turns into dullness and astuteness deteriorates into wit. Be guided by natural common sense and it will accommodate great and small.”

— Franz Grillparzer

“Great and small suffer the same mishaps.”

— Blaise Pascal

“Every good thing great and small needs defense”

— John Muir

“My ground is the Bible. Yea, I am a Bible-bigot. I follow it in all things, both great and small.”

— John Wesley

“God in his goodness sent the grapes
To cheer both great and small;
Little fools will drink too much
And great fools none at all!”

— Walter Scott

“After Darwin, God's role changes from being the designer of all creatures great and small to being the designer of the laws of nature, from which natural selection can unfold, to being perhaps just the chooser of the laws. By the time God's role has been so diminished, he becomes a bit like a constitutional monarch, presiding ceremonially but not having any more work to do. That's a place for God if it makes people comfortable to keep God as the presider over the universe. I suppose that is satisfying for many.”

— Daniel Dennett