To be really great in little things, to be truly noble and heroic in the insipid details of everyday life, is a virtue so rare as to be worthy of canonization.
Harriet Beecher StoweRead
One would like to be grand and heroic, if one could; but if not, why try at all? One wants to be very something, very great, very heroic; or if not that, then at least very stylish and very fashionable. It is this everlasting mediocrity that bores me.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote conveys a desire for greatness and the frustration with mediocrity.
Harriet Beecher Stowe expresses a longing for grandeur and heroism, suggesting that if one cannot achieve greatness, there is little motivation to strive for anything at all. This highlights a disdain for mediocrity and emphasizes the importance of ambition and aspiration in one's pursuits.
Themes
GreatnessMediocrityAmbitionStyleHeroism
In practice
Example use cases
In a motivational speech about pursuing excellence over mediocrity.
More from Harriet Beecher Stowe
All quotes →What's your hurry?" Because now is the only time there ever is to do a thing in," said Miss Ophelia.
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So much has been said and sung of beautiful young girls, why doesn't somebody wake up to the beauty of old women.
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It is generally understood that men don't aspire after the absolute right, but only to do about as well as the rest of the world.
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Death! Strange that there should be such a word, and such a thing, and we ever forget it; that one should be living, warm and beautiful, full of hopes, desires and wants, one day, and the next be gone, utterly gone, and forever!
Harriet Beecher StoweRead
Once, in an age, God sends to some of us a friend who loves in us, not a false imagining, an unreal character, but, looking through all the rubbish of our imperfections, loves in us the divine ideal of our nature, — loves, not the man that we are, but the angel that we may be.
Harriet Beecher StoweRead
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