greater quotes

Something made greater by ourselves and in turn that makes us greater.

- Maya originally MayaJohnson Angelou
  Defining work. Interview in Black Scholar,  Jan^Feb. Collected in Conversations with Maya  Angelou (1989).

   Id quo maius non cogitari potest. That than which a greater cannot be thought.

-St Anselm
  Of God. Proslogion, ch.3. His famous ontological argument for the existence of God. Since a being that exists is necessarily greater than a being that does not, God must by this definition exist.

One thing alone I charge you. As you live, believe in life! Always human beings will live and progress to a greater, broader and fuller life. The only possible death is to lose belief in this truth simply because the great end comes slowly, because time is long.

-W(illiam) E(dward) B(urghardt) Du Bois
  Written 26  Jun, and read as an oration at his funeral.

   A little season of love and laughter, Of light and life, and pleasure and pain, And horror of outer darkness after, And dust returneth to dust again. Then the lesser life shall be as the greater, And the lover of life shall join the hater, And the one thing cometh sooner or later, And no one knoweth the loss or gain.

- Adam Lindsay Gordon
'The Swimmer', stanza10, collected in Bush Ballads and Galloping Rhymes (1870).

And the talk slid north, and the talk slid south, With the sliding puffs from the hookah-mouth. Four things greater than all things are, Women and Horses and Power and War. Kipling And the Wolf that shall keep it may prosper, but the Wolf that shall break it must die.

- (Joseph) Rudyard Kipling
  'The Ballad of the King's  Jest'. 1895  The Second Jungle Book,'The Law of the  Jungle'.

A mesure qu'on a plus d'esprit, on trouve qu'il y a plus d'hommes originaux. Les gens du commun ne trouvent pas de diffe  rence entre les hommes. The more intelligent one is, the greater the differences onefindsamong men.Ordinary persons donot perceive differences among men.

- Blaise Pascal
c.1654^1662  Pense  es, pt.1, no.7.