Quotes & Sayings About Eminence

I wonder if any of you have ever noticed that it is sometimes those who find most pleasure and amusement in their fellow man, and have most hope in his goodness, who get the reputation of being his most carping critics. Maybe it is that the satirist is so full of the possibilities of humankind in general, that he tends to draw a dark and garish picture when he tries to depict people as they are at any particular moment. The satirist is usually a pretty unpopular fellow. The only time he attains even fleeting popularity is when his works can be used by some political faction as a stick to beat out the brains of their opponents. Satirical writing is by definition unpopular writing. Its aim is to prod people into thinking. Thinking hurts.
(John Dos Passos, 1957, from the speech he delivered upon accepting the Gold Medal for Eminence in Fiction from the National Institute of Arts and Letters) — John Dos Passos

I honour endurance, perseverance, industry, talent; because these are the means by which men achieve great ends and mount to lofty eminence. -St.John Rivers — Charlotte Bronte

The focus on Social Change and Social Justice do not signify an importance on proper political perspectives, or pre-eminence.The focus on Social Change and Social Justice foster our citizenship to a country. As Citizens of any society, we should be like neighbors bounded together by commonalities: common concerns and public cooperation in the quest for joint resolutions to our societal conflicts. — Henry Johnson Jr

If you go to the city of Washington, you will find that almost all of those corporation lawyers and cowardly politicians, members of congress, and mis-representatives of the masses claim, in glowing terms, that they have risen from the ranks to places of eminence and distinction. I am very glad that I cannot make that claim for myself. I would be ashamed to admit that I had risen from the ranks. When I rise it will be with the ranks, and not from the ranks. — Eugene V. Debs

However great an intellectual may be, however great one may be as a scholar or a man of learning, one has also to acquire humanness. Without humanness, scholarship and intellectual eminence are of no value. — Sathya Sai Baba

A more important antidote to American democracy is American gerontocracy. The positions of eminence and authority in Congress are allotted in accordance with length of service, regardless of quality. — John Kenneth Galbraith

But young men have not only this frivolous ambition of being thought masters of execution, inciting them on the one hand, but also their natural sloth tempting them on the other. They are terrified at the prospect before them, of the toil required to attain exactness. The impetuosity of youth is disgusted at the slow approaches of a regular siege, and desires, from mere impatience of labour, to take the citadel by storm. They wish to find some shorter path to excellence, and hope to obtain the reward of eminence by other means, than those which the indispensable rules of art have prescribed. — Joshua Reynolds

The immediate thing that strikes you when you see the inside of the hand is its compactness. The ball of your thumb, the thenar eminence, contains four different muscles. Twiddle your thumb and tilt your hand: ten different muscles and at least six different bones work in unison. Inside the wrist are at least eight small bones bones that move against one another. Bend your wrist, and you are using a number of muscles that begin in your forearm, extending into tendons as they travel down your arm to end at your hand. Even the simplest motion involves a complex interplay among many parts packed in a small space. — Neil Shubin

Participation in the dance was entirely voluntary, a mental vow to worship the Mystery in this manner being expressed by a man ardently desiring the recovery of a sick relative; or surrounded by an enemy with escape apparently impossible; or, it might be, dying of hunger ... since some inscrutable power had swept all game from forest and prairie. Others joined in the ceremony in the hope and firm belief that the Mystery ... would grant them successes against the enemy and consequent eminence at home. — Edward S. Curtis

Religion has everything on its side: revelation, prophecies, government protection, the highest dignity and eminence ... and more than this, the invaluable prerogative of being allowed to imprint its doctrines on the mind at a tender age of childhood, whereby they become almost innate ideas. — Irvin D. Yalom

What may appear as a towering peak to one may seem but an ordinary eminence to another. — Cargill Gilston Knott

The mind which relate clover with eminence, why forget to relate limitations with human ambitions. — M.H. Rakib

Know you that Allah has made Islam the most sublime path for attainment of His supreme pleasure and the highest standards of his worship and obedience. He has favoured it with noble precepts, exalted principles, undoubtable arguments, unchallengeable supremacy and undeniable wisdom. It is up to you to maintain the eminence and dignity granted to it by the Lord, to follow it sincerely, to do justice to its articles of faith and belief, to obey implicitly its tenets and orders and to give it the proper place in your lives. — Ali Ibn Abi Talib

He, although he received no symbols and types of high priesthood from any one, although he was not born of a race of priests, although he was not elevated to a kingdom by military guards, although he was not a prophet like those of old, although he obtained no honor nor pre-eminence among the Jews, nevertheless was adorned by the Father with all, if not with the symbols, yet with the truth itself. — Eusebius

Where will it all end? In the destruction of all other command for the benefit of one alone - that of the state. In each man's absolute freedom from every family and social authority, a freedom the price of which is complete submission to the state. In the complete equality as between themselves of all citizens, paid for by their equal abasement before the power of their absolute master - the state. In the disappearance of every constraint which does not emanate from the state, and in the denial of every pre-eminence which is not approved by the state. In a word, it ends in the atomization of society, and in the rupture of every private tie linking man and man, whose only bond is now their common bondage to the state. The extremes of individualism and socialism meet: that was their predestined course. — Bertrand De Jouvenel

Hence a 'bishop' who has set his heart on a position of eminence rather than an opportunity for service should realize that he is no bishop. So — Augustine Of Hippo

Pow'r above pow'rs!
O heavenly eloquence!
That with the strong rein of commanding words,
Dost manage, guide, and master th' eminence
Of men's affections, more than all their swords! — Samuel Daniel

responds to and develops recent currents of critical and scholarly thought which see Shakespeare not as a lone eminence but as a fully paid-up member of the theatrical community of his time, a working playwright with professional obligations to the theatre personnel without whose collaboration his art would have been ineffectual, and one who, like most other playwrights of the age, actively collaborated with other writers, not necessarily always as a senior partner. — Stanley Wells

I do not hesitate to say that the road to eminence and power, from an obscure condition, ought not to be made too easy, nor a thing too much of course. If rare merit be the rarest of all things, it ought to pass through some sort of probation. The temple of honor ought to be seated on an eminence. If it be open through virtue, let it be remembered, too, that virtue is never tried but by some difficulty and some struggle. — Edmund Burke

There are so many highly esteemed ones who became miserable and humiliated just because of their bad temper and morals; and humble people who have attained eminence and the highest honors because of good temper and morals. — Ali Ibn Abi Talib

It has been observed in all ages that the advantages of nature or of fortune have contributed very little to the promotion of happiness; and that those whom the splendour of their rank, or the extent of their capacity, have placed upon the summits of human life, have not often given any just occasion to envy in those who look up to them from a lower station; whether it be that apparent superiority incites great designs, and great designs are naturally liable to fatal miscarriages; or that the general lot of mankind is misery, and the misfortunes of those whose eminence drew upon them an universal attention, have been more carefully recorded, because they were more generally observed, and have in reality only been more conspicuous than others, not more frequent, or more severe. — Samuel Johnson

Let us ever remember that our interest is in concord, not in conflict; and that our real eminence rests in the victories of peace, not those of war. — William McKinley

There's nothing situate under heaven's eye But hath his bond in earth, in sea, in sky. The beasts, the fishes, and the winged fowls Are their males' subjects and at their controls. Man, more divine, the master of all these, Lord of the wide world and wild wat'ry seas, Indu'd with intellectual sense and souls, Of more pre-eminence than fish and fowls, Are masters to their females, and their lords; Then let your will attend on their accords. — William Shakespeare

To be forward to praise others implies either great eminence, that can afford to, part with applause; or great quickness of discernment, with confidence in our own judgments; or great sincerity and love of truth, getting the better of our self-love. — William Hazlitt

In the room of holding out an example for imitation, [the nobility] give only a warning to the lower classes of the people, who are taught to despise the boasted pre-eminence of birth, when attached to the meanest actions and most unwarrantable pursuits; and from hence proceeds all the licentiousness and spirit of equality that causes general disturbance. — Eliza Parsons

During a frustrating argument with a Roman Catholic cardinal, Napoleon Bonaparte supposedly burst out: Your eminence, are you not aware that I have the power to destroy the Catholic Church? The cardinal, the anecdote goes, responded ruefully: Your majesty, we, the Catholic clergy, have done our best to destroy the church for the last 1,800 years. We have not succeeded, and neither will you. — Ross Douthat

There is a form of eminence which does not depend on fate; it is an air which sets us apart and seems to prtend great things; it is the value which we unconsciously attach to ourselves; it is the quality which wins us deference of others; more than birth, position, or ability, it gives us ascendance. — Francois De La Rochefoucauld

I will be satisfied if my epitaph shall be written thus: 'Here lies one who never rose to any eminence, who only courted the low ambition to have it said that he striven to ameliorate the condition of the poor, the lowly, the
downtrodden of every race and language and color.' — Thaddeus Stevens

Well, in that case, your mighty eminence of unbiased objectivity and impartiality," said the Accuser sarcastically, "I ask for seven days to finish discovery, since I was surprised by the unreasonable volume of documents that deluged my council. These tablets of unending toledoth are time consuming." He was referring to the clay tablets that contained the genealogies of the heavens and the earth as well as those of Adam's descendants. The gall of this rascal amazed Enoch. He could turn everything into an accusation, even against Yahweh Elohim. The Accuser continued, "And you really have to admit that this endless list of animal names is quite tedious and would fatigue any staff, much less my own of less than two hundred Watchers." After a deliberate delay, he added, "Your magnificent majesty most high. — Brian Godawa

But assuredly Fortune rules in all things; she raised to eminence or buries in oblivion everything from caprice rather than from well-regulated principle.
[Lat., Sed profecto Fortuna in omni re dominatur; ea res cunctas ex lubidine magis, quam ex vero, celebrat, obscuratque.] — Sallust

If men of eminence are exposed to censure on one hand, they are as much liable to flattery on the other. If they receive reproaches which are not due to them, they likewise receive praises which they do not deserve. — Joseph Addison

I was brought up in a Christian environment where, because God had to be given pre-eminence, nothing else was allowed to be important. I have broken through to the position that because God exists, everything has significance.360 — Mark A. Noll

Tungnath's lonely eminence gives it a magic of its own. To get there (or beyond), one passes through some of the most delightful temperate forest in the Garhwal Himalaya. Pilgrim, or trekker, or just plain rambler such as myself, one comes away a better person, forest-refreshed, and more aware of what the world was really like before mankind began to strip it bare. Duiri — Ruskin Bond

Power is seldom innocent, and envy is the yokefellow of eminence. — Martin Farquhar Tupper

I do not find illness an eminence, and I do not understand how people can use it to draw attention to themselves since the attention they draw is nearly always reluctantly given and unpleasantly carried out. — John Steinbeck

I love the pride whose measure is its own eminence and not the insignificance of someone else. — Franz Grillparzer

I never climbed any ladder: I have achieved eminence by sheer gravitation. — George Bernard Shaw

Perhaps the rhinos and she-crocodiles whose gyrations between Mortimer's and East Hampton gives us our vision of social eminence today are content to entrust their faces to Andy Warhol's mingily cosmetic Polaroidising, but one would bet they would rather go to Sargent. — Robert Hughes

Excellence in art is to be attained only by active effort, and not by passive impressions; by the manly overcoming of difficulties, by patient struggle against adverse circumstance, by the thrifty use of moderate opportunities. The great artists were not rocked and dandled into eminence, but they attained to it by that course of labor and discipline which no man need go to Rome or Paris or London to enter upon. — George Stillman Hillard

The iambic pentameter owes its pre-eminence in English poetry to its genius for variation. Good blank verse does not sound like a series of identically measured lines. It sounds like a series of subtle variations on the same theme. — James Fenton

The endurance of monotony has about the same place in a healty mind that the endurance of darkness has: that is to say, as a strong intellect will have pleasure in the solemnities of storm and twilight, and in the broken and mysterious lights that gleam among them, rather than in mere brilliancy and glare, while a frivolous mind will dread the shadow and storm; and as a great man will be ready to endure much darkness of fortune in order to reach greater eminence of power or felicity, while an inferior man will not pay the price; exactly in like manner a great mind will accept, or even delight in, monotony which would be wearisome to an inferior intellect, because it has more patience and power of expectation, and is ready to pay the full price for the great future pleasure of change. — John Ruskin

Men are merely on a lower or higher stage of an eminence, whose summit is God's throne infinitely above all; and there is just as much reason for the wisest as for the simplest man being discontent with his position, as respects the real quantity of knowledge he possesses. — John Ruskin

The Grace of God and the human will are co-operant, but not on equal terms. Grace has the pre-eminence. — William Burton Pope

An upright character is of greater worth than the gold of Ophir. Without it none can rise to an honorable eminence. But character is not inherited. It cannot be bought. Moral excellence and fine mental qualities are not the result of accident. The most precious gifts are of no value unless they are improved. The formation of a noble character is the work of a lifetime and must be the result of diligent and persevering effort. God gives opportunities; success depends upon the use made of them. - Patriarchs and Prophets, pp. 222, 223. — Ellen G. White

History may well be a series of stories we tell about the past, but the stories are not just any stories. They're not chosen by chance. By and large, the stories are about famous men and celebrated events. We throw in a couple of exceptional women every now and then, not out of any need to recognize female eminence, but out of embarrassment. — Thomas King

Bear with me then, if lawful what I ask; Love not the heav'nly Spirits, and how thir Love Express they, by looks onely, or do they mix Irradiance, virtual or immediate touch? To whom the Angel with a smile that glow'd Celestial rosie red, Loves proper hue, Answer'd. Let it suffice thee that thou know'st Us happie, and without Love no happiness. Whatever pure thou in the body enjoy'st (And pure thou wert created) we enjoy In eminence, and obstacle find none Of membrane, joynt, or limb, exclusive barrs: Easier then Air with Air, if Spirits embrace, Total they mix, Union of Pure with Pure Desiring; nor restrain'd conveyance need As Flesh to mix with Flesh, or Soul with Soul. But I can now no more; the parting Sun Beyond the Earths green Cape and verdant Isles HESPEREAN sets, my Signal to depart. — John Milton

It is no slight testimonial, both to the merit and worth of Christianity, that in all ages since its promulgation the great mass of those who have risen to eminence by their profound wisdom and integrity have recognized and reverenced Jesus of Nazareth as the Son of the living God. — John Quincy Adams

Satan may play his wicked role in the drama and take Job's children and strike him with boils from head to toe, but Job will not give Satan the eminence of ultimate causality. That belongs to God alone, even if we cannot understand it all. When Job's ten children were crushed to death, he "fell upon the ground, and worshiped. And he said, 'Naked I came from my mother's womb, and naked shall I return; the LORD gave, and the LORD has taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD'" (Job 1:20-21, RSV). — John Piper

That praises are without reason lavished on the dead, and that the honours due only to are paid to antiquity, is a complaint likely to be always continued by those who, being able to add nothing to truth, hope for eminence from the heresies of paradox; or those who, being forced by disappointment upon consolatory expedients, are willing to hope from posterity what the present age refuses, and flatter themselves that the regard which is yet denied by envy will be at last bestowed by time. — Ben Jonson

What makes the existence and the evolution of society possible is precisely the fact that peaceful cooperation under the social division of labor in the long run best serves the selfish concerns of all individuals. The eminence of the market society is that its whole functioning and operation is the consummation of this principle. — Ludwig Von Mises

Such is the fate, in some form or other, of all those who unbalance the master's sense of self, poke holes in his vanity, or make him doubt his pre-eminence. — Robert Greene

The Arthashastra does not forget to warn the tyrant that he can never win. He may rise to eminence through ambition or the call of duty, but the more absolute his power, the more he is hated, and the more he is the prisoner of his own trap. The web catches the spider. He cannot wander at leisure in the streets and parks of his own capital, or sit on a lonely beach listening to the waves and watching the gulls. Through enslaving others he himself becomes the most miserable of slaves. — Alan W. Watts

I was once on a BBC current-affairs show and the sneering host produced a Solzhenitsyn quote designed to demonstrate that my view of American pre-eminence was all hooey, and rounded it out with a snide "I take it you've heard of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn?" "Oh, sure," I said. "We have the same piano tuner." Which we did. — Mark Steyn

The Land of Israel will be small, but the people of Israel will make it great. Not
in opulence, but in eminence will their destiny be fulfilled, and the elixir of their
pride will be distilled not out of dominion or far-flung borders, but out of the
faithful and skillful building of the good society. — Abba Hillel Silver

Eminence without merit earns deference without esteem. — Nicolas Chamfort

Selfhood is a heavy, hardly translucent medium, which cuts off most of the light of reality and distorts what little it permits to pass.' This is Huxley's central notion [of Grey Eminence], that we should 'stand out of our own light' in order to see the eternal truths. — Nicholas Murray

The moral nature of man is more sacred in my eyes than his intellectual nature. I know they cannot be divorced
that without intelligence we should be brutes
but it is the tendency of our gaping, wondering dispositions to give pre-eminence to those faculties which most astonish us. Strength of character seldom, if ever, astonishes; goodness, lovingness, and quiet self-sacrifice, are worth all the talents in the world. — George Henry Lewes

Wherever the human mind is healthy and vigorous in all its proportions, great in imagination and emotion no less than in intellect, and not overborne by an undue or hardened pre-eminence of the mere reasoning faculties, there the grotesque will exist in full energy. — John Ruskin

I venture to allude to the impression which seemed generally to prevail among their brethren across the seas, that the Old Country must wake up if she intends to maintain her old position of pre-eminence in her colonial trade against foreign competitors. — King George V

Reading is the royal road to intellectual eminence ... Truly good books are more than mines to those who can understand them. They are the breathings of the great souls of past times. Genius is not embalmed in them, but lives in them perpetually. — William Ellery Channing

An incessant change of means to attain unalterable ends is always going on; we must take care not to let these sundry means undo eminence in the perspective of our minds; for, since the beginning, there has been an unending cycle of them, and for each its advocates have claimed adoption as the sole solution of successful war. — George S. Patton

What has history said of eminence without honor, wealth without wisdom, power and possessions without principle? The answer is reiterated in the overthrow of the mightiest empires of ancient times. Babylon, Persia, Greece, Rome! The four successive, universal powers of the past. What and where are they? — Orson F. Whitney

Spring had come finally and after much hesitation, to Lincoln's Inn Fields and there were daffodils out upon the green grass and gilly-flowers blooming in the window-boxes of the ground floor sets. This being Lincoln's Inn, where an air of general severity prevails, they did so with an unconscionable meekness, as if they feared that some legal eminence- Mr Crabbe perhaps- would descend in wrath from his chambers and present them with a writ for unlicensed blossoming or occupying too great a proportion of space. — D.J. Taylor

To presume a want of motives for such contests as an argument against their existence, would be to forget that men are ambitious, vindictive, and rapacious. To look for a continuation of harmony between a number of independent, unconnected sovereignties in the same neighborhood, would be to disregard the uniform course of human events, and to set at defiance the accumulated experience of ages. The causes of hostility among nations are innumerable. There are some which have a general and almost constant operation upon the collective bodies of society. Of this description are the love of power or the desire of pre-eminence and dominion - the jealousy of power, or the desire of equality and safety. There are — Alexander Hamilton

Serious or trivial, his daily behavior has instituted a canon which millions observe this day with conscious memory. No one regarded by any section of the human race as Perfect Man has ever been imitated so minutely.The conduct of the founder of Christianity has not governed the ordinary life of his followers. Moreover, no founder of a religion has left on so solitary an eminence as the Muslim apostle. — David George Hogarth

Maximus was my model for self-control, fixity of purpose, and cheerfulness under ill-health or other misfortunes. His character was an admirable combination of dignity and charm, and all the duties of his station were performed quietly and without fuss. He gave everyone the conviction that he spoke as he believed, and acted as he judged right. Bewilderment or timidity were unknown to him; he was never hasty, never dilatory; nothing found him at a loss. He indulged neither in despondency nor forced gaiety, nor had anger or jealousy any power over him. Kindliness, sympathy, and sincerity all contributed to give the impression of a rectitude that was innate rather than inculcated. Nobody was ever made by him to feel inferior, yet none could have presumed to challenge his pre-eminence. He was also the possessor of an agreeable sense of humour. — Marcus Aurelius

The lusts of the flesh can be gratified anywhere; it is not this sort of license that distinguishes New York. It is rather, a lust of the total ego for recognition, even for eminence. More than elsewhere, everybody here wants to be somebody. — Sydney J. Harris

By a peculiar prerogative, not only each individual is making daily advances in the sciences, and may make advances in morality (which is the science, by way of eminence, of living well and being happy), but all mankind together is making a continual progress in proportion as the universe grows older. So that the whole human race, during the course of so many ages, may be considered as one man who never ceases to live and learn. — Blaise Pascal

The unambitious sluggard pretends that the eminence is not worth attaining, declines altogether the struggle, and calls himself a philosopher. I say he is a poor-spirited coward. — William Makepeace Thackeray

[Science] has challenged the super-eminence of religion; it has turned all philosophy out of doors except that which clings to its skirts; it has thrown contempt on all learning that does not depend on it; and it has bribed the skeptics by giving us immense material comforts. — Katharine Fullerton Gerould

I never knew a man come to greatness or eminence who lay abed late in the morning. — Jonathan Swift

Sciences usually advances by a succession of small steps, through a fog in which even the most keen-sighted explorer can seldom see more than a few paces ahead. Occasionally the fog lifts, an eminence is gained, and a wider stretch of territory can be surveyed-sometimes with startling results. A whole science may then seem to undergo a kaleidoscopic rearrangement, fragments of knowledge sometimes being found to fit together in a hitherto unsuspected manner. Sometimes the shock of readjustment may spread to other sciences; sometimes it may divert the whole current of human thought. — James Jeans

Everyone will tell you that genealogy serves two purposes: self-knowledge and social status, some sort of pedigree divined from names, locations, and achievements of eminence. However, there is nothing quite like an anomaly to suck attention away from the droning census records. A suicide hinted at emotion and thought. A closet door was flung open and daylight flooded a skeleton. — Ellen Meloy

So that, upon the whole, there must be some kind of subjection due from every man to every man, which cannot be made void by any power, pre-eminence, or authority whatsoever. — Jonathan Swift

He held it one of the prettiest attitudes of the feminine mind to adore a man's pre-eminence without too precise a knowledge of what it consisted in. — George Eliot

Whoever is humble to men for God's sake, may God exalt his eminence ... — Elijah Muhammad

The Bolsheviks were atheists but they were hardly secular politicians in the conventional sense: they stooped to kill from the smugness of the highest moral eminence. Bolshevism may not have been a religion, but it was close enough. Stalin told Beria the Bolsheviks were "a sort of military-religious order." When Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Cheka, died, Stalin called him "a devout knight of the proletariat." Stalin's "order of sword-bearers" resembled the Knights Templars, or even the theocracy of the Iranian Ayatollahs, more than any traditional secular movement. They would die and kill for their faith in the inevitable progress towards human betterment, making sacrifices of their own families, with a fervour seen only in the religious slaughters and martyrdoms of the Middle Ages - and the Middle East. They — Simon Sebag Montefiore

No one loves his country for its size or eminence, but because it's his own. — Seneca The Younger

Things have their time, even eminence bows to timeliness. — Baltasar Gracian

We are more put off by people who parade their dignity than by people who show off their wardrobes. When people have to trick themselves out to gain attention, it is a sure sign that they are unworthy of it. If we want to make ourselves worthy, we can do so only by the innate eminence conferred by virtue. We hold great people in esteem more for the qualities of their soul than for the qualities of their fortune. — Madeleine De Souvre, Marquise De ...

Charles Talent Manx the Third at your service, my dear! CEO of Christmasland Enterprises, director of Christmasland Entertainment, president of fun! Also His Eminence, the King Shit of Turd Hill, although it doesn't say that on my card. — Joe Hill

Flaubert teaches you to gave upon the truth and not blink from its consequences; he teaches you, with Montaigne, to sleep on the pillow of doubt; he teaches you to dissect out the constituent parts of reality, and to observe the Nature is always a mixture of genres; he teaches you the most exact use of language; he teaches you not to approach a book in search of moral or social pills
literature is not a pharmacopoeia; he teaches the pre-eminence of Truth, Beauty, Feeling and Style. And if you study his private life, he teaches courage, stoicism, friendship; the importance of intelligence, skepticism and wit; the folly of cheap patriotism; the virtue of being able to remain by yourself in your own room; the hatred of hypocrisy; distrust of the doctrinaire; the need for plain speaking. — Julian Barnes

Today's Quote of the Day is an excerpt from 'The Religion of God (Divine Love)' by His Divine Eminence RA Gohar Shahi

'Had all humanity called upon God by one name, all would have been united inwardly despite different religions. — Riaz Ahmed Gohar Shahi

The gratification which affluence of wealth, extent of power, and eminence of reputation confer, must be always, by their own nature, confined to a very small number; and the life of the greater part of mankind must be lost in empty wishes and painful comparisons, were not the balm of philosophy shed upon us, and our discontent at the appearances of unequal distribution soothed and appeased. — Samuel Johnson

That eminence of learning is not to be gained without labour, at least equal to that which any other kind of greatness can require, will be allowed by those who wish to elevate the character of a scholar; since they cannot but know that every human acquisition is valuable in proportion to the difficulty of its attainment. — Samuel Johnson

The chief distinction in the intellectual powers of the two sexes is shown by mans attaining to a higher eminence, in whatever he takes up, than the woman. Whether deep thought, reason, or imagination or merely the use of the senses and hands ... We may also infer ... The average mental power in man must be above that of woman. — Charles Darwin

Our Lord might be described as the great Physician, Healer, Engineer, Chief Scout, Foreman, Builder, or the like - all showing his pre-eminence in the field concerned, and all pointing attention to his power to deal in the spiritual field with human souls as these mortal counterparts deal in their temporal pursuits. — Bruce R. McConkie

A plague on eminence! I hardly dare cross the street anymore without a convoy, and I am stared at wherever I go like an idiot member of a royal family or an animal in a zoo; and zoo animals have been known to die from stares. — Igor Stravinsky

I could not help weeping with him - not over my own fate which, however clearly laid out, was just as sad as his, but over the injustices, the iniquities, and the crimes to which the exploited poor are always and everywhere subjected to, by a mob of scoundrels and trash who deck themselves out in many-colored robes, in helmet and plumed hats, in gold and silver embroideries, and take themselves titles of majesty, holiness, eminence, lordship, in order to fleece, bleed, and slaughter the poor. — Jean-Marie Deguignet

though this pre-eminence in it applies to the human race itself, giving the white man ideal mastership over every dusky tribe; — Herman Melville

Suddenly we were in Hawaii - tropical mountains running down to sparkling seas, sweeping bays, flawless beaches guarded by listing palms, little green and rocky islands standing off the headlands. From time to time we drove through sunny canefields, overlooked by the steep, blue eminence of the Great Dividing Range. — Bill Bryson

If you are one of the truly elect, be careful how you attain your eminence. — C.P. Cavafy

A position of eminence makes a great person greater and a small person less. — Jean De La Bruyere

You're pretty full of yourself. You're marveling at the tragic spectacle of Caleb Trask - Caleb the
magnificent, the unique. Caleb whose suffering should have its Homer. Did you ever think of yourself
as a snot-nose kid - mean sometimes, incredibly generous sometimes? Dirty in your habits, and
curiously pure in your mind. Maybe you have a little more energy than most, just energy, but outside
of that you're very like all the other snot-nose kids. Are you trying to attract dignity and tragedy to
yourself because your mother was a whore? And if anything should have happened to your brother,
will you be able to sneak for yourself the eminence of being a murderer, snot-nose? — John Steinbeck

As parents, we can have no joy, knowing that this government is not sufficiently lasting to ensure any thing which we may bequeath to posterity: And by a plain method of argument, as we are running the next generation into debt, we ought to do the work of it, otherwise we use them meanly and pitifully. In order to discover the line of our duty rightly, we should take our children in our hand, and fix our station a few years farther into life; that eminence will present a prospect, which a few present fears and prejudices conceal from our sight. — Thomas Paine

Idiots are always in favour of inequality of income (their only chance of eminence), and the really great in favour of equality. — George Bernard Shaw

I affect no contempt for the high eminence he [Senator Stephen Douglas] has reached. So reached, that the oppressed of my species,might have shared with me in the elevation, I would rather stand on that eminence, than wear the richest crown that ever pressed a monarch's brow. — Abraham Lincoln

By the '40s, Sam Goldwyn is a very serious man. By the '50s, he's the dean of American producers. To the end, he was Hollywood's gray eminence. — A. Scott Berg

... your midthirties...is the age that women usually start to feel confident. Having finally left behind the...awfulness of your twenties...your thirties are the point where the good stuff kicks in...How odd, then, that as your face and body finally begin to display the signs (lines, softening, gray hairs) that you've entered the zone of kick-ass eminence and intolerance of dullards, there should be pressure for you to...totally remove them. Give the impression that, actually, you are still a bit gullible and incompetent, and totally open to being screwed over by someone a bit cleverer and older than you... Lines and grayness are nature's way of telling you not to fuck with someone--the equivalent of the yellow-and-black banding on a wasp...Lines are your weapons against the idiots. Lines are your 'KEEP AWAY FROM THE WISE INTOLERANT WOMAN' sign. — Caitlin Moran

His Eminence Michael cardinal Logue, archbishop of
Armagh, primate of all Ireland, His Grace, the most reverend Dr William
Alexander, archbishop of Armagh, primate of all Ireland, the chief
rabbi, the presbyterian moderator, the heads of the baptist, anabaptist,
methodist and Moravian chapels and the honorary secretary of the society
of friends. — James Joyce