A Quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson

All history is but the lengthened shadow of a great man.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Quote Topics

Great Great Man History Man Shadow

Quote Author

Ralph Waldo Emerson
American - Philosopher
May 25, 1803 - April 27, 1882

Great groups give the lie to the remarkably persistent but incorrect notion that successful organizations are the lengthened shadow of a great woman or man. However, each great group has a strong leader. In fact, great groups and great leaders create each other.

Warren G. Bennis

Every great institution is the lengthened shadow of a single man. His character determines the character of the organization.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man; as, monachism of the Hermit Anthony, the Reformation of Luther, Quakerism of Fox, Methodism of Wesley, abolition of Clarkson. Scipio, Milton called "the height of Rome;" and all history resolves itself easily into the biography of a few stout and earnest persons. Let a man, then, know his worth, and keep things under his feet.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Fear is the lengthened shadow of ignorance.

Arnold H. Glasow

It is the same for all men. None of us can escape this shadow of the father, even if that shadow fills us with fear, even if it has no name or face. To be worthy of that man, to prove something to that man, to exorcise the memory of that man from every corner of our life--however it affects us, the shadow of that man cannot be denied.

Kent Nerburn

A shadowless man is a monster, a devil, a thing of evil. A man without a shadow is soulless. A shadow without a man is a pitiable shred. Yet together, light and dark, they make a whole.

Jane Yolen

The hours of a wise man are lengthened by his ideas.

Joseph Addison

There is a belief that there is a hyperobject called Overmind, or God, that casts a shadow into time. History is our group experience if this shadow. As one draws closer and closer to the source of the shadow, the paradoxes intensify, the rate of change intensifies. What is happening is that the hyperobject is beginning to ingress into three-dimensional space.

Terence McKenna

Universal history, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here.

Thomas Carlyle

I thought the most beautiful thing in the world must be shadow, the million moving shapes and cul-de-sacs of shadow. There was shadow in bureau drawers and closets and suitcases, and shadow under houses and trees and stones, and shadow at the back of people's eyes and smiles, and shadow, miles and miles and miles of it, on the night side of the earth.

Sylvia Plath

The State has no more existence than gods and devils have. They are equally the reflex and creation of man, for man, the individual, is the only reality. The State is but the shadow of man, the shadow of his opaqueness, of his ignorance and fear.

Emma Goldman

A man is whole only when he takes into account his shadow as well as himself - and what is a man's shadow but his upright astonishment?

Djuna Barnes

If a man's shadow is brighter than himself, than that man becomes the shadow itself!

Mehmet Murat Ildan

A great man is a gift, in some measure a revelation of God. A great man, living for high ends, is the divinest thing that can be seen on earth. The value and interest of history are derived chiefly from the lives and services of the eminent men whom it commemorates. Indeed, without these, there would be no such thing as history, and the progress of a nation would be little worth recording, as the march of a trading caravan across a desert.