Grandeur Quotes - Page 13

• Maybe science is just magic with delusions of lack of grandeur.

  Peter David

  Magic, Delusion

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• A little while ago I visited Omaha Beach for the second time in my life. In the intervening 26 years, nearly 20,000 tides had come and gone and little remains visible of the greatest military landing in man's history of endless warring. What's to be seen is mostly in a superb museum and a panoramic cemetery. The cemetery memorializes with dignity and grandeur the event and the dead, and moves one deeply. Before they die less precipitously and/or in lesser purpose, Americans who can should visit World War II's Normandy Beach. Such seeing and remembering helps a man's perspective.

  Malcolm Forbes

  Beach, Military, War

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• While the focus in the landscape of Old World cities was commonly government structures, churches, or the residences of rulers, the landscape and the skyline of American cities have boasted their hotels, department stores, office buildings, apartments, and skyscrapers. In this grandeur, Americans have expressed their Booster Pride, their hopes for visitors and new settlers, and customers, for thriving commerce and industry.

  Daniel J. Boorstin

  Pride, Government, Cities

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• On a very rough-and-ready basis we might define an eccentric as a man who is a law unto himself, and a crank as one who, having determined what the law is, insists on laying it down to others. An eccentric puts ice cream on steak simply because he likes it; should a crank do so, he would endow the act with moral grandeur and straightaway denounce as sinners (or reactionaries) all who failed to follow suit. Cranks, at their most familiar, are a sort of peevish prophets, and it's not enough that they should be in the right; others must also be in the wrong.

  Louis Kronenberger

  Men, Ice Cream, Law

  "Company Manners: A Cultural Inquiry into American Life". Book by Louis Kronenberger, 1954.

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• The grandeur of a philosophy does not certify its truth.

  Mason Cooley

  Truth, Philosophy, Philosophical

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• Shakespeare, with an improved education and in a more enlightened age, might easily have attained the purity and correction of Racine; but nothing leads one to suppose that Racine in a barbarous age would have attained the grandeur, force and nature of Shakespeare.

  Horace Walpole

  Age, Might, Purity

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• In heterosexual love there's no solution. Man and woman are irreconcilable, and it's the doomed attempt to do the impossible, repeated in each new affair, that lends heterosexual love its grandeur.

  Marguerite Duras

  Men, Impossible, Affair

  Marguerite Duras (1993). “Practicalities”, p.35, Grove Press

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• Isadore [Duncan], who had an un-American genius for art, for organizing love, maternity, politics and pedagogy on a great personal scale, had also an un-American genius for grandeur.

  Janet Flanner

  Art, Genius, Maternity

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• Here is the mistake of the cut-and-dried man of culture. He goes about with the secret of having learned to appreciate the "grandstyle." He has lived in Homer till he can recall the roll of that many-sounding sea. He has pored over the lofty and pictorial thought of Plato till he begins to pique himself upon its grandeur. His fancy has been fed on the quaint old-world genius of Herodotus, his judgment on the melancholy wisdom of Tacitus and the complacent cynicism of Gibbon--and of all this he is conscious and proud.

  Richard Holt Hutton

  Plato, Mistake, Cutting

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• The silliness-much of which is clearly intentional-is blended with some genuine grandeur. The Pixar touch is evident in the precision of the visual detail and in the wit and energy of Michael Giacchino's score, but the quality control that has been exercised over this project also has a curiously undermining effect. The movie eagerly sells itself as semitrashy, almost-campy fun, but it is so lavish and fussy that you can't help thinking that it wants to be taken seriously, and therefore you laugh at, rather than with, its mock sublimity.

  A. O. Scott

  Fun, Taken, Thinking

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• The ability to choose is at the essential core of our grandeur. Even evil exists because God respects our ability to choose.

  William P. Young

  Evil, Essentials, Ability

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• I don't believe any more in democracy. But I can't believe in the old sort of aristocracy, either, nor can I wish it back, splendid as it was. What I believe in is the old Homeric aristocracy, when the grandeur was inside a man, and he lived in a simple wooden house.

  D. H. Lawrence

  Believe, Simple, Men

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• The man whose bosom neither riches nor luxury nor grandeur can render happy may, with a book in his hand, forget all his torments under the friendly shade of every tree; and experience pleasures as infinite as they are varied, as pure as they are lasting, as lively as they are unfading, and as compatible with every public duty as they are contributory to private happiness.

  Johann Georg Ritter von Zimmermann

  Reading, Book, Men

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• You will not find in semantics any remedy for decayed teeth or illusions of grandeur or class conflict.

  Alfred Tarski

  Class, Illusions Of Grandeur, Teeth

  Alfred Tarski, Steven R. Givant (1986). “Alfred Tarski, Collected Papers: 1935-1944”

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• It has a supernatural grandeur which expands the soul and unites it with God. I say an Our Father or a Hail Mary when I feel so spiritually barren that I cannot summon up a single worth while thought. These two prayers fill me with rapture and feed and satisfy my soul.

  Therese of Lisieux

  Prayer, Father, Two

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• Sublime wonders lie in store,I am shown a regal residence;a mighty kingdom, an empirewith more grandeur than before.

  E. A. Bucchianeri

  Lying, Sublime, Kingdoms

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• The grandeur of the acts of men are measured by the inspiration from which they spring.

  Louis Pasteur

  Spring, Inspiration, Men

  "Spiritual Literacy : Reading the Sacred in Everyday Life". Book by Frederic Brussat and Mary Ann Brussat, 1998.

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• I wished to acquire the simplicity, native feelings, and virtues of savage life; to divest myself of the factitious habits, prejudices and imperfections of civilization; ... and to find, amidst the solitude and grandeur of the western wilds, more correct views of human nature and of the true interests of man. The season of snows was preferred, that I might experience the pleasure of suffering, and the novelty of danger.

  Estwick Evans

  Men, Views, Civilization

  Estwick Evans (2007). “Evans's Pedestrious Tour”, p.102, Applewood Books

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• The key is love, the action is service, and the joy is knowing the grandeur that is God in us and in everything.

  Dorothy Maclean

  Keys, Knowing, Joy

  Dorothy MacLean (1998). “Choices of Love”, p.41, SteinerBooks

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• I just can't imagine my life without Dostoevsky and The Brothers Karamazov. I can spin off of that and talk about Crime and Punishment and Tolstoy. I could talk about other novels, but for me it's Dostoevsky. His sheer size and grandeur, his sacramentality, his ecclesiology, and his sense of the human predicament are as powerful as it gets. Can't imagine not reading the Russians.

  Gordon T. Smith

  Brother, Powerful, Reading

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• [T]he liberty, the unalienable, indefeasible rights of men, the honor and dignity of human nature, the grandeur and glory of the public, and the universal happiness of individuals, were never so skillfully and successfully consulted as in that most excellent monument of human art, the common law of England.

  John Adams

  Art, Freedom, Men

  John Adams, Charles Francis Adams (1851). “The Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States: With a Life of the Author, Notes and Illustrations”, p.440

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• However much the various phases of the French Revolution may have modelled themselves on Roman history the early phase on Republican virtue, the later on Imperial grandeur the fact remains that classicism depended on a fixed and rational philosophy; whereas the spirit of the Revolution was one of change and of emotion.

  Kenneth Clark

  Philosophy, Phases, May

  Kenneth Clark (1973). “The romantic rebellion: romantic versus classic art”

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• Lord of the golden tongue and smiting eyes; Great out of season and untimely wise: A man whose virtue, genius, grandeur, worth, Wrought deadlier ill than ages can undo.

  William Watson

  Wise, Character, Eye

  William Watson (1936). “The Poems of Sir William Watson: 1878-1935”

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• Often, when following the trail which meanders over the hills, I pull myself up in an effort to encompass the glory and the grandeur which envelops the whole horizon. Often, when the clouds pile up in the north and the sea is churned with white caps, I say to myself: "This is the California that men dreamed of years ago, this is the Pacific that Balboa looked out on from the Peak of Darien, this is the face of the earth as the Creator intended it to look.

  Henry Miller

  Men, Clouds, Years

  Henry Miller (1957). “Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch”, p.6, New Directions Publishing

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• There is a material advancement; we desire it. There is, also, a moral grandeur; we hold fast to it.

  Victor Hugo

  Desire, Advancement, Moral

  Victor Hugo, Charles Edwin Wilbour (1862). “Cosette”, p.135

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