No good book or good thing of any kind shows it best face at first. No the most common quality of in a true work of art that has excellence and depth, is that at first sight it produces a certain disappointment. |
No great man lives in vain. The history of the world is but the biography of great men. |
No iron chain, or outward force of any kind, can ever compel the soul of a person to believe or to disbelieve. |
No man lives without jostling and being jostled; in all ways he has to elbow himself through the world, giving and receiving offence. |
No man sees far, most see no farther than their noses. |
No man who has once heartily and wholly laughed can be altogether irreclaimably bad. |
No person is important enough to make me angry. |
No person was every rightly understood until they had been first regarded with a certain feeling, not of tolerance, but of sympathy. |
No pressure, no diamonds. |
No sadder proof can be given by a man of his own littleness than disbelief in great men. |
No sadder proof can be given of a person's own tiny stature, than their disbelief in great people. |
No sooner does a great man depart, and leave his character as public property, than a crowd of little men rushes towards it. There they are gathered together, blinking up to it with such vision as they have, scanning it from afar, hovering round it this way and that, each cunningly endeavoring, by all arts, to catch some reflex of it in the little mirror of himself. |
No sooner is your ocean filled, than he grumbles that it might have been of better vintage. Try him with half of a Universe, of an Omnipotence, he sets to quarrelling with the proprietor of the other half, and declares himself the most maltreated of men. Always there is a black spot in our sunshine: it is even as I said, the Shadow of Ourselves. |
No violent extreme endures. |
Not brute force but only persuasion and faith are the kings of this world. |