Quotes & Sayings About Grandiose

I could hear it from far away, that sound which only very big cities can produce: a sound consisting of all sounds rolled into one: the hum of voices and the cries of animals, bells ringing and the chink of coins, children's laughter and hammers beating metal, knives and forks clattering and a thousand doors slamming - the grandiose sound of life, of birth and death, itself. — Walter Moers

An individualism which has got beyond the stage of hedonism tends to yield to the lure of the grandiose. It was not man, the individual, nor even the Supreme Being, that Robespierre set up against Christ; it was that Leviathan, the Nation. — Andre Malraux

Do not try to paint the grandiose thing. Paint the commonplace so that it will be distinguished. — William Merritt Chase

You have a faculty for defining the simplest in terms of the grandiose, so that a poor devil like me can't understand it. — Malcolm Bradbury

Don't just dream about grandiose acts of doing good. Every day do small ones, that add up over time to positive patterns. — Marian Wright Edelman

If you wanted to bestow the grandiose title of "most successful organization in modern history," you would struggle to find a more obviously worthy nominee than the federal government of the United States.
In its earliest stirrings, it established a lasting and influential democracy. Since then, it has helped defeat totalitarianism (more than once), established the world's currency of choice, sent men to the moon, built the Internet, nurtured the world's largest economy, financed medical research that saved millions of lives and welcomed eager immigrants from around the world. — David Leonhardt

I was attacked the other night for being grandiose. I would just want you to note: Lincoln standing at Council Bluffs was grandiose. The Wright Brothers standing at Kitty Hawk were grandiose. John F. Kennedy was grandiose. I accept the charge that I am grandiose and that Americans are instinctively grandiose, — Newt Gingrich

The idea of Socialism is at once grandiose and simple ... We may say, in fact, that it is one of the most ambitious creations of the human spirit, ... so magnificent, so daring, that it has rightly aroused the greatest admiration. If we wish to save the world from barbarism we have to refute Socialism, but we cannot thrust it carelessly aside. — Ludwig Von Mises

The Persian Version
Truth-loving Persians do not dwell upon
The trivial skirmish fought near Marathon.
As for the Greek theatrical tradition
Which represents that summer's expedition
Not as a mere reconnaisance in force
By three brigades of foot and one of horse
(Their left flank covered by some obsolete
Light craft detached from the main Persian fleet)
But as a grandiose, ill-starred attempt
To conquer Greece - they treat it with contempt;
And only incidentally refute
Major Greek claims, by stressing what repute
The Persian monarch and the Persian nation
Won by this salutary demonstration:
Despite a strong defence and adverse weather
All arms combined magnificently together. — Robert Graves

I went into journalism in a grandiose way. I thought maybe I'd do a little journalism whilst I write the great novel of all time you see
one has to keep oneself afloat. — Neal Ascherson

For someone so conflicted, who am I to give advice to anybody? It's such a funny, grandiose idea — Florence Welch

He's got lots of money and clearly has grandiose schemes, seeing himself as an important global player. There is a reality to it. Oil is at record prices, and he's willing to spend both in Venezuela and in the region. But the question is, how much influence is he gaining — Michael Shifter

I avoid grandiose plans. I start with a small piece that I can do. I go to the root of the problem and then work around it. It's building brick by brick. — Muhammad Yunus

Lastly, there is bankruptcy, as the United States pours its economic resources into ever more grandiose military projects and shortchanges the education, health, and safety of its citizens. — Chalmers Johnson

Songs are like a form of chaos that you can control. It's a form of intelligence that maybe you only understand and you hope that someone else can understand. And you can be anyone you want: you can be as grandiose as you want or you can be as down in the gutter as you want. It's just sort of whatever emotional freeway you're on at the time. — Billie Joe Armstrong

When had my fear of broken plates gotten so grandiose? My desire for extravagant moments so small? — Sue Monk Kidd

Only ambition is fired by the coincidences of success and easy accomplishment but nothing is quite as splendidly uplifting to the heart as the defeat of a human being who battles against the invincible superiority of fate. This is always the most grandiose of all tragedies, one sometimes created by a dramatist but created thousands of times by life. — Stefan Zweig

We currently have a government planning to go to Mars, heal broken marriages, and build bridges to nowhere - and also one that cannot wage a war competently, cannot respond to a hurricane adequately, and cannot enforce borders. Is it too much to ask that it get the basic things right before embarking on grandiose schemes? — Andrew Sullivan

Traits that are common among psychopathic serial killers
a grandiose sense of self-worth, persuasiveness, superficial charm, ruthlessness, lack of remorse, and the manipulation of others
are also shared by politicians and world leaders. — Kevin Dutton

By way of personal instinct, I have an inherent distaste for grandiose rhetorical statements, which don't have any substantive dimension to them — Kevin Rudd

All evil seems to arise from the desire to dominate others. Most men in our society are taught from a very early age to try to dominate. It isn't something that they think about consciously. It operates at a subconscious level. They are taught by the adults around them and their peers. Someone dominates them and they in turn try to dominate others. They do it without even realizing it and they do it without even thinking about why. It is without question. In their conscious awareness they may aspire to grandiose ideals but their actions speak for what really motivates them from a subconscious level. — Mark Alberto Yoder Nunez

One of the most fashionable notions of our times is that social problems like poverty and oppression breed wars. Most wars, however, are started by well-fed people with the time on their hands to dream up half-baked ideologies or grandiose ambitions, and to nurse real or imagined grievances. — Thomas Sowell

You see, evil alwys contains the seeds of its own destruction' said the angel said, 'It is ultimately negative, and therefore encompasses its downfall even at its moment of apparent triumph. No matter how grandiose, how well-planned, how apparently foolproof an evil plan, the inherent sinfulness will by definition rebound upon its instigators. No matter how apparently successful it may seem upon the way, at the end it will wreck itself. It will founder upon the rocks of inquity and sink head first to vanish without trace into the seas of oblivion. — Terry Pratchett

To our real, naked selves there is not a thing on earth or in heaven worth dying for. It is only when we see ourselves as actors in a staged (and therefore unreal) performance that death loses its frightfulness and finality and becomes an act of make-believe and a theatrical gesture. It is one of the main tasks of a real leader to mask the grim reality of dying and killing by evoking in his followers the illusion that they are participating in a grandiose spectacle, a solemn or lighthearted dramatic performance. — Eric Hoffer

I FEEL NO SHAME ABOUT HAVING PAINTINGS BE AS GRANDIOSE AND RIDICULOUS AS POSSIBLE. — Laura Owens

For the first time in his life, he truly understood love. It wasn't just an intangible emotion, it was when his own happiness was found by making her happy. It wasn't something found in a grandiose gesture. I was found in the simplest form.
A single smile that made a cold-blooded assassin weak in the knees. — Sherrilyn Kenyon

the psychopath will speak of himself in grandiose terms while blaming others and taking absolutely no responsibility for his actions. — Lillian Glass

This very insatiability of the photographing eye changes the terms of confinement in the cave, our world. In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing. Finally, the most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads-as an anthology of images. — Susan Sontag

Without sounding too grandiose, the survival of the planet itself is at stake, you have rising sea levels, acidification of the oceans, immigration sparked by climate change, droughts that are much more severe. — Laurent Fabius

The moment when Harry takes Draco's wand ... I think it really puts the elaborate, grandiose plans of Dumbledore and Voldemort in their place. That actually the history of the wizarding world hinged on two teenage boys wrestling with each other. They weren't even using magic. It became an ugly little corner tussle for the possession of wands. — J.K. Rowling

Vonnegut was talking," I say today, "about the psychic effects of trauma." There's a sentence of Alice Miller's looping in my mind, about grandiose people and depressives, Narcissus and Echo: "Neither can accept the truth that this loss or absence of love has already happened in the past, and that no effort whatsoever can change this fact." It's the main thing I've learned from reading all this psychology: the future is always trying to feel like the past. When it does, it feels like selfishness, hurt, loss at the hands of others. The trick is to let it empty. Maybe this is another way to come unstuck in time. — Kristin Dombek

I grow grandiose, which is a good sign I should become prosaic. — Isaac Asimov

A measure of narcissism is healthy. But out of balance, what was once appropriate self-confidence becomes grandiose, pathological, and destructive. — Jill Alexander Essbaum

She accused him of having grandiose ideas and sloppy habits, a fatal combination for a writer. — Isabel Allende

What is actually observed in so-called 'biplar children'? If you read the research reports carefully, they describe broad and persistent emotional dysregulation. Although these children have mood swings, they do not develop manic or hypomanic episodes. They are moody, irritable, oppositional and likely to misbehave - like all children with disruptive behavior disorders. Their grandiose thinking usually consists of little beyond boastfulness. No evidence from genetics, neurobiology, follow-up studies or treatment response shows that this syndrome has anything in common with classical bipolarity. — Joel Paris

The ordinary is not good enough for us; our hubris wants something grandiose. But the ordinary done in obedience to Christ is beautiful, inspired, and oftentimes heroic. — Edward T. Welch

The goal ... is not to change your desires and wishes but to persuade you to stop demanding that you absolutely must have what you wish-from yourself, from others, and from the world. You can by all means keep your wishes, preferences, and desires, but unless you prefer to remain needlessly anxious, not your grandiose demands. — Albert Ellis

We were the unflinching prisoners of a grandiose make-believe, we who looked upon ourselves as heard-headed materialists. We dismissed the distress of today, the human wreckage scattered all about us, the terror and militarism prevailing in the country with the stereotyped belief that we were marching forward with great strides. — Jan Valtin

That's when I began drinking coffee. I was hung up on every little thing. I loved Paris, and felt straightaway at home. Not to be grandiose, but it seemed like all the city had been waiting for me. — Rosecrans Baldwin

Being an athlete helps me get those grandiose emotions of pleasure and pain that are involved in sports. — Yanni

America is the most grandiose experiment the world has seen, but, I am afraid, it is not going to be a success. — Sigmund Freud

Trimmed in gleaming teakwood. The cavernous space had been fashioned into offices and conference rooms centered on a grandiose lobby — Kimball Lee

Over the years, that investors continued to fund Pike's grandiose predictions, the price of coal was high enough to send men day after day into a flawed & dangerous place. Now that they are dead the price is not high enough to get them out — Rebecca Macfie

Music, together with certain sorts of majestic landscape, had a well-known tendency to induce such faux-sublime moments: artificial intimations of transcendent truths, grandiose hunches about the nature of the universe. It was all nonsense. Her tears had been no different from the ones people cried at sentimental television commercials. They represented nothing but a momentary and regrettable submission to kitsch. — Zoe Heller

Note: The most relevant gestures we miss from our everyday interactions aren't the most grandiose. The subtle little here and there gestures are sometimes of profound depth than the grandiose we expect or see. — Ufuoma Apoki

Words are man's first and most grandiose invention. With language he created a whole new universe; — Aldous Huxley

I ate them like salad, books were my sandwich for lunch, my tiffin and dinner and midnight munch. I tore out the pages, ate them with salt, doused them with relish, gnawed on the bindings, turned the chapters with my tongue! Books by the dozen, the score and the billion. I carried so many home I was hunchbacked for years. Philosophy, art history, politics, social science, the poem, the essay, the grandiose play, you name 'em, I ate 'em. — Ray Bradbury

Hearing, seeing and understanding each other, humanity from one end of the earth to the other now lives simultaneously, omnipresent like a god thanks to its own creative ability. And, thanks to its victory over space and time, it would now be splendidly united for all time, if it were not confused again and again by that fatal delusion which causes humankind to keep on destroying this grandiose unity and to destroy itself with the same resources which gave it power over the elements. — Stefan Zweig

I think that doing comedy and playing Dwight is a service. Not to get grandiose about it, but I have a talent for playing oddball characters and I can make people laugh and that can help bring families together and people will really enjoy it and it puts a smile on their face and I think that is a really great thing. — Rainn Wilson

With that we have articulated a basic criticism of the most grandiose of all human attempts to advance toward the divine
by way of the church. Christianity conceals within itself a germ hostile to the church. It is far too easy for us to base our claims to God on our own Christian religiosity and our church commitment, and in so doing utterly to misunderstand and distort the Christian idea. — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Things seemed to consist not of wood and stone but of some grandiose and infinitely tender immorality that, the moment it came in contact with him, turned into a deep moral shock. — Robert Musil

And from there, he wandered off into an argument with Friedrich Schiller's grandiose statement that human stupidity was what the gods fought in vain. Not so, in Toby's opinion, and no excuse for anybody, whether god or man. What the gods and all reasonable humans fought in vain wasn't stupidity at all. It was sheer, wanton, bloody indifference to anybody's interests but their own. — John Le Carre

Lyndon Johnson is not a comfortable model for President Obama to imitate. He is an all-but-forgotten president - pilloried for the failed war in Vietnam and criticized for grandiose reforms conservatives denounce as the epitome of federal social engineering that costs too much and does too little. — Robert Dallek

It [9/11 tragedy] was the spectacle, what al-Qaeda gets its main power from - why their terrorism truly earns the word "acts." They are very theatrical, always - the simultaneous violence, the grandiose, symbolic gestures (the number 911, "United" and "American" flights, the World Trade as target etc). And then its aftermath. — Porochista Khakpour

We tend to think of "geography" in grandiose terms but sometimes forget that our own micro-geography can lend us competitive advantage. Taking in the "lay of the land" has always been an activity of the finest generals, and developing a practiced eye for the playing field is essential for successful strategic thought. What are the factors that make for a geographic advantage in your own interactions? Do you consciously structure situations to give yourself the geographic advantage? — Anonymous

Utopians ... consider individual freedom as the stumbling block on which the grandiose idea of mankind's totalization may flounder. — Thomas Steven Molnar

My identity has everything to do with me and my instrument. It doesn't have to do with what production style I use, or how many people played on it, whether it's sparse or grandiose or whatever. And I'm social, frankly. — Liz Phair

Do we pour $40 billion into grandiose Louisiana engineering projects or do we instead put up no trespassing- signs in the areas below sea level? All are hard choices with various merits and pains. The important thing, however, is for America to decide whether the current policy of inaction is really the way we want to deal with the worst natural disaster in our history. — Douglas Brinkley

The grandiose plans of what Macintosh was gonna be was just so far out of whack with the truth of what the product was doing. And the truth of what the product was doing was not horrible, it was salvageable. But the gap between the two was just so unthinkable that somebody had to do something, and that somebody was John Sculley. — Chris Espinosa

grandiose paranoid schizophrenia. — Nancy Kress

The child must adapt to ensure the illusion of love, care, and kindness, but the adult does not need this illusion to survive. He can give up his amnesia and then be in a position to determine his actions with open eyes. Only this path will free him from his depression. Both the depressive and the grandiose person completely deny their childhood reality by living as though the availability of the parents could still be salvaged: the grandiose person through the illusion of achievement, and the depressive through his constant fear of losing "love." Neither can accept the truth that this loss or absence of love has already happened in the past, and that no effort whatsoever can change this fact. — Alice Miller

Business success is less a function of grandiose predictions than it is a result of being able to respond rapidly to real changes as they occur. — Jack Welch

A writer should never install himself before a panorama, however grandiose it may be. — Blaise Cendrars

It is to escape the responsibility for failure that the weak so eagerly throw themselves into grandiose undertakings. — Eric Hoffer

Death will not be denied. To try is grandiose. It drives madness into the soul. It leaches out virtue. It injects poison into friendship, and makes a mockery of love. — Helen Garner

Because like all psychopaths he was grandiose, and convinced of his own personal magnetism, assumed worship on the part of others. — Jonathan Kellerman

With that incredible voice that he [Alan Rickman] could play like a sort of wonderful instrument, like a cello or something. He played his voice, and he could be the most subtle of actors. And he could also be quite a big actor. He could do the grandiose performances as well. — Helen Mirren

Forbes was highly motivated by Noynoy's words: ... Therefore in order to make this country better, you don't need grandiose platforms, all you have to do is to do your job, and do it well, rightly, and in accordance with the principled objective. — Wilfrido V. Villacorta

God's goals are great and grandiose. — Sunday Adelaja

Christmas is God saving mankind from the folly of mankind's grandiose sense of greatness. — Craig D. Lounsbrough

No, dance is not a monster. The stage is monstrous, not in the negative sense but on the grandiose side. And dance is sacred as something emotionally strong happens. — Sylvie Guillem

In my job, I am portrayed as a misfit, a grandiose high fashion lady or an unearthly creature. At home, it's important I can look in the mirror, strip away the disguise and be comfortable with who stares back. — Erin O'Connor

Psychopaths have a grandiose self-structure which demands a scornful and detached devaluation of others, in order to ward off their envy toward the good perceived in other people. He will choose you, disarm you with his words, and control you with his presence. He will delight you with his wit and his plans. He will show you a good time but you will always get the bill. He will smile and deceive you, and he will scare you with his eyes. And when he is through with you, and he will be through with you, he will desert you and take with him your innocence and your pride. — Robert D. Hare

Central Park is the grandiose symbol of the front yard each child in New York hasn't got. — Robert Benchley

Our vast collections of knowledge and experience are just part of ego's display, part of the grandiose quality of ego. We display them to the world and, in so doing, reassure ourselves that we exist, safe and secure, as "spiritual" people. — Chogyam Trungpa

Don't start on the tortured poet crap, okay? You have no idea what it's like to deal with you guys. You just walk away when it suits you. You have all these soulful songs, you have these grandiose feelings, angst and pain. You cry and I feel sorry for you. I want to cradle you and care for you, do anything to help put the broken pieces back together. But then, guess what? When it's over, when it all falls apart, I'm broken, too. You're perfectly happy being in pieces, but I'm not. I'm not happy being broken. — Sayer Adams

It is a dull sensation, your heart breaking, like the sound of a pebble dropping on the sand. Not a shattering, not a tearing apart, there is nothing shrill or grandiose about the sensation. It is merely an internal realization that something treasured you never knew you had is leaving forever. — Samantha Bruce-Benjamin

When I was writing my first draft, and feeling grandiose, I e-mailed an artist/clothing designer I know and suggested we collaborate on a fashion line inspired by the outfits my characters wore. I regret that we never did that. — Heidi Julavits

But in 1877 it erupted into grandiose dimensions. — Anonymous

If utopia was illusion hypostasized, communism, going still further, will be illusion decreed, imposed: a challenge to the omnipresence of evil, an obligatory optimism. A man will find it hard to accommodate himself to it if he lives, by dint of ordeals and experiments, in the intoxication of disappointment and if, like the author of Genesis, he is reluctant to identify the Age of Gold with the future, with becoming. Not that he scorns the fanatics of "infinite progress" and their efforts to make justice prevail here on earth; but he knows, to his misery, that justice is a material impossibility, a grandiose meaninglessness, the only ideal about which we can declare quite certainly that it will never be realized, and against which nature and society seem to have mobilized all their laws. — Emil Cioran

So often, happiness is the extent to which we balance our grandiose expectations with reality. — Cathy Guisewite

All right, New York City! Welcome to Madison ... Square ... Jericho! And after tonight, when I become the true, undisputed Intercontinental champion, the Jerichoholics of the Big Apple will throw a celebration party that will make the millennium bash in Times Square look like my sister's seventh birthday party! It'll be a celebration so huge, so grandiose, so spectacular, that it will never, EEEEEEEEVER, be forgotten again! — Chris Jericho

Life is a terrible conflict, a grandiose and atrocious confluence. Hunting submerges man deliberately in that formidable mystery and therefore contains something of religious rite and emotion in which homage is paid to what is divine, transcendent, and in the laws of Nature. — Jose Ortega Y Gasset

Pardis Sabeti thought small by focusing patiently for years on a narrow niche (the genetics of diseases in Africa), but then acting big once she acquired enough capital to identify a mission (using computational genetics to help understand and fight ancient diseases). Sarah and Jane, by contrast, reversed this order. They started by thinking big, looking for a world-changing mission, but without capital they could only match this big thinking with small, ineffectual acts. The art of mission, we can conclude, asks us to suppress the most grandiose of our work instincts and instead adopt the patience - the style of patience observed with Pardis Sabeti - required to get this ordering correct. — Cal Newport

Neither fate, nor history, nor the anger of the State, nor the glory or infamy of battle has any power to affect those who call themselves human beings. No, whatever life holds in store
hard-won glory, poverty and despair, or death in a labor camp
they will live as human beings and die as human beings, the same as those who have already perished; and in this alone lies man's eternal and bitter victory over all the grandiose and inhuman forces that ever have been or will be ... — Vasily Grossman

The all-or-nothing quality of Poonja-ji's teaching obliged him to acknowledge the full enlightenment of any person who was grandiose or manic enough to claim it. Thus, I repeatedly witnessed fellow students declare their complete and undying freedom, all the while appearing quite ordinary - or worse. In certain cases, these people had clearly had some sort of breakthrough, but Poonja-ji's insistence upon the finality of every legitimate insight led many of them to delude themselves about their spiritual attainments. Some left India and became gurus. From what I could tell, Poonja-ji gave everyone his blessing to spread his teachings in this way. — Sam Harris

The visual side of being a performer or in a band is, to me, as important as the music. I know not everyone shares that same opinion, but when I'm writing songs or working on lyrics or coming up with an idea, I think about videos as I'm in the studio. If I had all the money in the world, I would have the most amazing videos ever, you know? You're saying grandiose, and big; if the song warrants it, I try to push the visuals as far as I can. — Tamaryn

My dear Mrs. Ali, I would hardly refer to you as old," he said. "You are in what I would call the very prime flowering of mature womanhood." It was a little grandiose but he hoped to surprise a blush. Instead she laughed out loud at him. "I have never heard anyone try to trowel such a thick layer of flattery on the wrinkles and fat deposits of advanced middle age, Major," she said. "I am fifty-eight years old and I think I have slipped beyond flowering. I can only hope now to dry out into one of those everlasting bouquets. — Helen Simonson

By aggrandizing one's own abilities and achievements, the grandiose person remains out of touch with who they truly are and as such, remains prone to crossing the boundaries of others. — Steven Franssen

We, with our propensity for murder, torture, slavery, rape, cannibalism, pillage, advertising jingles, shag carpets, and golf, how could we be seriously considered as the perfection of a four-billion-year-old grandiose experiment? perhaps as a race, we have evolved as far as we are capable, yet that by no means suggests that evolution has called it quits. in all likelihood, it has something beyond human on the drawing board. we tend to refer to our most barbaric and crapulous behavior as "inhuman," whereas, in point of fact, it is exactly human, definitively and quintessentially human, since no other creature habitually indulges in comparable atrocities. this negates neither our occasional virtues nor our aesthetic triumphs, but if a being at least a little bit more than human is not waiting around the bend of time then evolution has suffered a premature ejaculation. — Tom Robbins

I tried to instill a different motivation, to give them the security and the conviction that they were doing something good, something necessary, something useful - if you want to use a grandiose expression, that they were doing something for peace. — Markus Wolf

Often the art in New York is related to the buildings, to grandiose things. — Christo

Child. This ability to grieve - that is, to give up the illusion of his "happy" childhood, to feel and recognize the full extent of the hurt he has endured - can restore the depressive's vitality and creativity and free the grandiose person from the exertions of and dependence on his Sisyphean task. If a person is able, during this long process, to experience the reality that he was never loved as a child for what he was but was instead needed and exploited for his achievements, success, and good qualities - and that he sacrificed his childhood for this form of love - he will be very deeply shaken, but one day he will feel the desire to end these efforts. He will discover in himself a need to live according to his true self and no longer be forced to earn "love" that always leaves him empty-handed, since it is given to his false self - something he has begun to identify and relinquish. — Alice Miller

Mr. Ellison is that unreasonable man that possesses the ostranenie effect-- he has a keen eye to see the simplest things and make them profound, and make simple minded people see deeply into mundane topics- bringing a philosophical charm to even politics.

No man, not even a semi-god lived an entire life without making a mistake and the fact that Mr. Ellison has lived a life so grandiose with such few errors, is a testament and a plaque to the big person he is. — Avra Amar Filion

The grandiose person is never really free; first because he is excessively dependent on admiration from others, and second, because his self-respect is dependent on qualities, functions, and achievements that can suddenly fail. — Alice Miller

I had never done anything with blue screen before, or prosthetics, or anything like that. Lord of the Rings was like stepping into a videogame for me. It was another world completely. But, to be honest, I basically did it so that I could have the ears. I thought they would really work with my bare head.Working with Martin Scorsese was an absolute minute-by-minute education without him ever being grandiose about it. — Cate Blanchett

So, to do right by a Gothic tale, let's be frank, requires that the author be a militant romantic who relates the action of his narratives in dreamy and more than usually emotive language. Hence, the well-known grandiose rhetoric of the Gothic tale, which may be understood by the sympathetic reader as not just an inflatable raft on which the imagination floats at its leisure upon waves of bombast, but also as the sails of the Gothic artist's soul filling up with the winds of ecstatic hysteria. So it's hard to tell someone how to write the Gothic tale, since one really has to be born to the task. Too bad. — Thomas Ligotti

What happened, Bob explained to us now, although we didn't need telling, was that Jack Abbott was a psychopath. He couldn't bear being disrespected. His self-worth was too grandiose for that. He couldn't control his impulses. "When — Jon Ronson

I have learned that greatness is not often born at the head of armies or standing before large gatherings of people. I have learned that it is only rarely manifested in grandiose words or bold action and that it has little to do with position or title or authority. Rather, true greatness most often comes from small turnings within the soul, in quiet ways, in actions that the world will little note. Greatness is around us, below us. It is not often above us. We need to reach down for greatness, where the small things are at our feet. It comes in small, simple words and sublime magnanimity. — Donald S. Smurthwaite

There's something so showy about desperation, it takes hard wits to see it's a grandiose form of funk. — Elizabeth Bowen