Quotes About Significance

One's own life seemed puny against the background of so much history.

I can't help but think that it's an unfortunate custom to name children after people who come to sticky ends. Even if they are fictional characters, it doesn't bode well for the poor things. There are too many Judes and Tesses and Clarissas and Cordelias around. If we must name our children after literary figures then we should search out happy ones, although it's true they are much harder to find.

On the outside of the bedroom door there was a plaque that said Valerie . On the way up, Jackson noticed that other bedrooms also had names - Eleanor, Lucy, Anna, Charlotte .Jackson wondered how you decided on a name for a room. Or a doll. Or a child, for that matter. The naming of dogs seemed even more perplexing.

A man has to BE something; he has to matter.

Men's actions to futurity appear but as the events to which they are conjoined do give them consequence.

It is natural to man to regard himself as the object of the creation, and to think of all things in relation to himself, and the degree in which they can serve and be useful to him.

It is a matter of the simplest demonstration, that no man can be really appreciated but by his equal or superior.

If God spent 180 million years making dinosaurs, what makes us think Man is so special, a tick of the clock before midnight?

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

Men value things in three ways: as useful, as pleasant or sources of pleasure, and as excellent, or as intrinsically admirable or honorable.

The smallest pebble in the well of truth has its peculiar meaning, and will stand when man's best monuments have passed away.

Gardens always mean something else, man absolutely uses one thing to say another.

Nothing that was worthy in the past departs; no truth or goodness realized by man ever dies, or can die.

It did not matter, after all. He was only one man. One man's fate is not important. "If it is not, what is?" He could not endure those remembered words.

The chief glory of a woman is not to be talked of, said Pericles, himself a much-talked-of-man.

Biography is to give a man some kind of shape after his death.

It is but the littleness of man that seeth no greatness in trifles.

No man is truly great who is great only in his lifetime. The test of greatness is the page of history.

No man burdens his mind with small matters unless he has some very good reason for doing so.

After I am dead, I would rather have men ask why Cato has no monument than why he had one.

True or false, that which is said of men often occupies as important a place in their lives, and above all in their destinies, as that which they do.

There is nothing scarier than a mediocre man with a mission.

... a man is a very important thing-maybe more important than a star.

He whom God has touched will always be a being apart: he is, whatever he may do, a stranger among men; he is marked by a sign.