Most of the trouble in the world is caused by people wanting to be important.
- Topic: Humility, Society
- Location: Antelope Canyon
- Photo: Jeffrey Benjamin
More Quotes from T. S. Eliot
The purpose of literature is to turn blood into ink.
If you haven't the strength to impose your own terms upon life, then you must accept the terms it offers you.
Half of the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm; they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.
The very existence of libraries affords the best evidence that we may yet have hope for the future of man.
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Do you wish to rise? Begin by descending. You plan a tower that will pierce the clouds? Lay first the foundation of humility.
Any one thing in creation is sufficient to demonstrate a Providence to a humble and grateful mind.
The Constitution is not an instrument for the government to restrain the people, it is an instrument for the people to restrain the government—lest it come to dominate our lives and interests.
Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute.
Man lives in a world of surmise, of mystery, of uncertainties.
Most people are on the world, not in it—have no conscious sympathy or relationship to anything about them—undiffused, separate, and rigidly alone like marbles of polished stone, touching but separate.
America’s abundance was not created by public sacrifices to the “common good,” but by the productive genius of free men who pursued their own personal interests and the making of their own private fortunes.
There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way in which it treats its children.
Not in the clamor of the crowded street, not in the shouts and plaudits of the throng, but in ourselves, are triumph and defeat.
What is not good for the swarm is not good for the bee.
The United States of America is the greatest, the noblest and, in its original founding principles, the only moral country in the history of the world.
It is not reason which is the guide of life, but custom.
In my many years I have come to a conclusion that one is useless man is a shame, two is a law firm, and three or more is a congress.
If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.
When civil fury first grew high, and men fell out they knew not why.