Prodigious Quotes

• My only love sprung from my only hate.

  William Shakespeare

  Love, Dream, Hate

  'Romeo And Juliet' (1595) act 1, sc. 5, l. [142]

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• Every successful man or great genius has three particular qualities in common. The most conspicuous of these is that they all produce a prodigious amount of work. The second is that they never know fatigue. And the third is that their minds grow more brilliant as they grow older, instead of less brilliant. Great men's lives begin at forty, where the mediocre man's life ends. The genius remains an ever-flowing fountain of creative achievement until the very last breath he draws.

  Walter Russell

  Successful, Men, Creative

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• I am further of opinion that it would be better for us to have [no laws] at all than to have them in so prodigious numbers as we have.

  Michel de Montaigne

  Law, Numbers, Justice

  Michel de Montaigne, Bayle St. John (1866). “Essays [tr. by Cotton”, p.400

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• We could raise prodigious cities and create nations, and explore the universe.

  Jose Clemente Orozco

  Cities, Raises, Nations

  Clemente Orozco V., José Clemente Orozco (2004). “José Clemente Orozco: Graphic Work”, p.5, University of Texas Press

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• The God whom we worship is not a weak and incompetent God. He is able to beat back gigantic waves of opposition and to bring low prodigious mountains of evil. The ringing testimony of the Christian faith is that God is able.

  Martin Luther

  Christian, Evil, Mountain

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• He is, as you say, a remarkable horse, a prodigious horse, although as you very justly observe, a suspicious and untractable character.

  Edgar Allan Poe

  Horse, Character, Remarkable

  Edgar Allan Poe (2008). “Edgar Allan Poe Annotated and Illustrated Entire Stories and Poems”, p.334, Bottletree Books LLC

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• So let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  July, I Have A Dream Speech, Hampshire

  I Have a Dream, delivered 28 August 1963, at the Lincoln Memorial, Washington D.C.

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• If there be any among those common objects of hatred I do contemn and laugh at, it is that great enemy of reason, virtue, and religion, the multitude; that numerous piece of monstrosity, which, taken asunder, seem men, and the reasonable creatures of God, but, confused together, make but one great beast, and a monstrosity more prodigious than Hydra.

  Thomas Browne

  Confused, Taken, Men

  'Religio Medici' (1643) pt. 2, sect. 1

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• His [Thomas Edison] method was inefficient in the extreme, for an immense ground had to be covered to get anything at all unless blind chance intervened and, at first, I was almost a sorry witness of his doings, knowing that just a little theory and calculation would have saved him 90 per cent of the labor. But he had a veritable contempt for book learning and mathematical knowledge, trusting himself entirely to his inventor's instinct and practical American sense. In view of this, the truly prodigious amount of his actual accomplishments is little short of a miracle.

  Nikola Tesla

  Sorry, Book, Knowledge

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• The mind of an artist, in order to achieve the prodigious effort of freeing whole and entire the work that is in him, must be incandescent...there must be no obstacle in it, no foreign matter unconsumed.

  Virginia Woolf

  Artist, Order, Effort

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• The thinking of creative and successful men is never exerted in any direction other than that intended. That is why great men produce such a prodigious amount of work, seemingly without effort and without fatigue. The amount of work such men leave to posterity is amazing.

  Walter Russell

  Successful, Men, Thinking

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• The Spaniards are perfectly right to govern these barbarians of the New World and adjacent islands; they are in prudence, ingenuity, virtue, and humanity as inferior to the Spaniards as children are to adults and women are to men, there being as much difference between them as that between wild and cruel and very merciful persons, the prodigiously intemperate and the continent and tempered, and I daresay from apes to men

  Juan Gines de Sepulveda

  Children, Men, Differences

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• There is a prodigious selfishness in dreams: they live perfectly deaf and invulnerable amid the cries of the real world.

  George Santayana

  Dream, Real, Selfishness

  George Santayana (2009). “The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress”, p.274, The Floating Press

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• Captain Nemo pointed to this prodigious heap of shellfish, and I saw that these mines were genuinely inexhaustible, since nature's creative powers are greater than man's destructive instincts.

  Jules Verne

  Men, Creative, Captains

  Jules Verne (2013). “Captain Nemo: 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea”, p.202, Simon and Schuster

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• Never lose a chance of saying a kind word. As Collingwood never saw a vacant place in his estate but he took an acorn out of his pocket and planted it, so deal with your compliments through life. An acorn costs nothing, but it may spread into a prodigious timber.

  William Makepeace Thackeray

  Kindness, Pockets, Cost

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• Prodigious was the amount of life I lived that morning.

  Charlotte Bronte

  Morning, Amount

  Charlotte Bronte (2016). “Villette”, p.49, Xist Publishing

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• There is a poignancy in all things clear, In the stare of the deer, in the ring of a hammer in the morning. Seeing a bucket of perfectly lucid water We fall to imagining prodigious honesties.

  Richard Wilbur

  Morning, Honesty, Fall

  Richard Wilbur (2006). “Collected Poems 1943-2004”, p.385, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• One likes people much better when they're battered down by a prodigious siege of misfortune than when they triumph.

  Virginia Woolf

  Strong Women, Adversity, People

  Virginia Woolf (2003). “A Writer's Diary”, p.48, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• The summation of human experience is being expanded at a prodigious rate, and the means we use for threading through the consequent maze to the momentarily important item is the same as was used in the days of square-rigged ships.

  Vannevar Bush

  Mean, Squares, Important

  "As We May Think" by Vannevar Bush, www.theatlantic.com. July 1945.

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• Let him who looks for a monument to Washington look around the United States. Your freedom, your independence, your national power, your prosperity, and your prodigious growth are a monument to him.

  Lajos Kossuth

  Independence, Growth, United States

  Lajos Kossuth, Francis William Newman (1854). “Select Speeches of Kossuth”, p.237

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• Christ wishes to raise men up to heaven, and has given them all the means to attain this; whilst the Devil, who himself for his pride was cast down from heaven into the dominions of the air, wishes by every means to attach men to earthly,- sensual, transitory things, and, in order to attain this end, he employs the most powerful, most prodigious means.

  John of Kronstadt

  Powerful, Mean, Pride

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• Everything belonged to him. It made me hold my breath in expectation of hearing the wilderness burst into prodigious peal of laughter that would shake the fixed stars in their places.

  Joseph Conrad

  Stars, Laughter, Expectations

  Joseph Conrad (1995). “Heart of Darkness and Other Stories”, p.76, Wordsworth Editions

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• Those with prodigious skill in music are better suited for all things.

  Martin Luther

  Music, Skills, All Things

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• We live in an era when established values are no longer valid, when prodigious discoveries are being made every year, when catastrophes of unbelievable proportions occur weekly. In ancient Greek the word “chaos” means “gaping void” or “yawning emptiness.” The most effective response to the chaos in our lives is the creation of new forms of literature, music, poetry, art and cinema.

  Werner Herzog

  Art, Mean, Yawning

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• My prodigious sin was, and still is, being a non-conformist.

  Charlie Chaplin

  Sin, Stills, Non Conformist

  "My Autobiography". Book by Charlie Chaplin, September 1964.

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