The graves of those we have loved and lost distress and console
us.--_Arsene Houssaye._
~Gravity.~--The very essence of gravity is design, and consequently
deceit; a taught trick to gain credit with the world for more sense and
knowledge than a man is worth.--_Sterne._
Gravity is but the rind of wisdom; but it is a preservative
rind.--_Joubert._
Gravity must be natural and simple. There must be urbanity and
tenderness in it. A man must not formalize on everything. He who
formalizes on everything is a fool, and a grave fool is perhaps more
injurious than a light fool.--_Cecil._
~Greatness.~--There is but one method, and that is hard labor; and a man
who will not pay that price for greatness had better at once dedicate
himself to the pursuit of the fox, or sport with the tangles of Neaera's
hair, or talk of bullocks, and glory in the goad!--_Sidney Smith._
A really great man is known by three signs,--generosity in the design,
humanity in the execution, and moderation in success.--_Bismarck._
The great men of the earth are but the marking stones on the road of
humanity; they are the priests of its religion.--_Mazzini._
A multitude of eyes will narrowly inspect every part of an eminent man,
consider him nicely in all views, and not be a little pleased when they
have taken him in the worst and most disadvantageous lights.--_Addison._
What you can manufacture, or communicate, you can lower the price of,
but this mental supremacy is incommunicable; you will never multiply its
quantity, nor lower its price; and nearly the best thing that men can
generally do is--to set themselves, not to the attainment, but the
discovery of this; learning to know gold, when we see it, from
iron-glance, and diamond from flint-sand, being for most of us a more
profitable employment than trying to make diamonds out of our own
charcoal.--_Ruskin._
Men in great place are thrice servants: servants of the sovereign or
state, servants of fame, and servants of business; so as they have no
freedom, neither in their persons, nor in their actions, nor in their
times. It is a strange desire to seek power over others, and to lose
power over a man's self.--_Bacon._
The difference between one man and another is by no means so great as
the superstitious crowd supposes. But the same feelings which in ancient
Rome produced the apotheosis of a popular emperor, and in modern times
the canonization of a devout prelate, lead men to cherish an illusion
which furnishes them with something to adore.--_Macaulay._
Great men never make a bad use of their superiority; they see it, they
feel it, and are not less modest. The more they have, the more they know
their own deficiencies.--_Rousseau._
He who is great when he falls is great in his prostration, and is no
more an object of contempt than when men tread on the ruins of sacred
buildings, which men of piety venerate no less than if they
stood.--_Seneca._
Greatness lies not in being strong, but in the right using of
strength.--_Beecher._
Greatness seems in her [Madame de Maintenon] to take its noblest form,
that of simplicity.--_Bulwer-Lytton._
~Grief.~--Why destroy present happiness by a distant misery, which may
never come at all, or you may never live to see it? for every
substantial grief has twenty shadows, and most of them shadows of your
own making.--_Sydney Smith._