Hero-worship is strongest where there is least regard for human freedom.
Celebrity-worship and hero-worship should not be confused. Yet we confuse them every day, and by doing so we come dangerously close to depriving ourselves of all real models. We lose sight of the men and women who do not simply seem great because they are famous but are famous because they are great. We come closer and closer to degrading all fame into notoriety.
Hero-worship exists, has existed, and will forever exist, universally, among mankind.
Worship of a hero is transcendent admiration of a great man.
If everyone was satisfied with himself, there would be no heroes.
No great man lives in vain. The history of the world is but the biography of great men.
Our heroes are men who do things which we recognize, with regret, and sometimes with a secret shame, that we cannot do.
We find not much in ourselves to admire, we are always privately wanting to be like somebody else. If everybody was satisfied with himself, there would be no heroes
True heroism is remarkably sober, very undramatic. It is not the urge to surpass all others at whatever cost, but the urge to serve others at whatever cost.
This world, after all our science and sciences, is still a miracle; wonderful, inscrutable, magical and more, to whosoever will think of it.
We call that fire of the black thunder-cloud "electricity," and lecture learnedly about it, and grind the like of it out of glass and silk: but what is it? What made it? Whence comes it? Whither goes it?
The most heroic word in all languages is REVOLUTION.
The true university of these days is a collection of books.
Science has done much for us; but it is a poor science that would hide from us the great deep sacred infinitude of Nescience, on which all science swims as a mere superficial film.
Unmixed praise is not due to any one. It leaves behind a sense of unreality. We can only do justice to a great man by a discriminating criticism. Hero-worship, which paints a faultless monster, whom the world never saw, is like those modern pictures which are a blaze of light without any shadow.
Society is founded on hero-worship.
Unconsciously we all have a standard by which we measure other men, and if we examine closely we find that this standard is a very simple one, and is this: we admire them, we envy them, for great qualities we ourselves lack. Hero worship consists in just that. Our heroes are men who do things which we recognize, with regret, and sometimes with a secret shame, that we cannot do. We find not much in ourselves to admire, we are always privately wanting to be like somebody else. If everybody was satisfied with himself, there would be no heroes.
I have always been a friend to hero-worship; it is the only rational one, and has always been in use amongst civilized people - the worship of spirits is synonymous with barbarism - it is mere fetish. ... There is something philosophic in the worship of the heroes of the human race.
If youth is the period of hero-worship, so also is it true that hero-worship, more than anything else, perhaps, gives one the sense of youth. To admire, to expand one's self, to forget the rut, to have a sense of newness and life and hope, is to feel young at any time of life.
Not hero worship, but intimacy with Christ.
or simply:
