A Quote by Samuel Smiles

Commonplace though it may appear, this doing of one's duty embodies the highest ideal of life and character. There may be nothing heroic about it; but the common lot of men is not heroic.

Samuel Smiles

Quote Topics

About Appear Character Common Commonplace Doing Duty Embodies Heroic Highest Ideal Life Lot May Men Nothing Though

Quote Author

Samuel Smiles
Scottish - Author
December 23, 1812 - April 16, 1904

Heroic people take risks to themselves to help others. There's nothing heroic about accepting $5 million to go out and run around chasing a ball, although you may show fortitude or those other qualities while you do it.

Gregg Easterbrook

The characteristic of genuine heroism is its persistency. All men have wandering impulses, fits and starts of generosity. But when you have resolved to be great, abide by yourself, and do not weakly try to reconcile yourself with the world. The heroic cannot be the common, nor the common the heroic.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Somehow super power and hero are so synonymous that they get combined into one word, 'superhero,' whereas I'm kind of more interested in separating those two ideas out. You have characters with super powers who may or may not be heroic, because human beings aren't all heroic. I tend to be drawn to antiheros.

Doug Liman

I suppose the textbook definition of an anti-hero is pretty straightforward - a protagonist who embodies not only heroic characteristics but also some characteristics typically deemed non-heroic, even villainous.

Paul S. Kemp

There is nothing man desires more than a heroic life: there is nothing less common to men than heroism.

Jacques Maritain

The only lesson to extract from any civil war is that it's pointless and futile and ugly, and that there is nothing glamorous or heroic about it. There are heroes, but the causes are never heroic.

Anthony Minghella

We don't relate to her too much because you don't want the heroic character to not be heroic.

Radha Mitchell

The heroic cannot be the common, nor the common the heroic.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Every man has at times in his mind the Ideal of what he should be, but is not. This ideal may be high and complete, or it may be quite low and insufficient; yet in all men, that really seek to improve, it is better than the actual character... Man never falls so low, that he can see nothing higher than himself.

Theodore Parker

A lack of common sense usually ends in some heroic feat, much like the soldier who dives onto the grenade so that others may live.

Criss Jami

He who would write heroic poems should make his whole life a heroic poem.

Thomas Carlyle

The reason progress is slow is that we always expect other men to be the heroes and to live the heroic lives. But we all have hero stuff in us. In our sphere of life we can always live more heroically and triumphantly and grow in heroic stature.

Wilferd Peterson

Poetry, at all times, exercises two distinct functions: it may reveal, it may unveil to every eye, the ideal aspects of common thingsor it may actually add to the number of motives poetic and uncommon in themselves, by the imaginative creation of things that are ideal from their very birth.

Walter Pater

Good habits are not made on birthdays, nor Christian character at the new year. The vision may dawn, the dream may waken, the heart may leap with a new inspiration on some mountain-top, but the test, the triumph, is at the foot of the mountain, on the level plain. The workshop of character is every-day life. The uneventful and commonplace hour is where the battle is won or lost.

Maltbie Davenport Babcock

I suspect it was...the old story of the implacable necessity of a man having honour within his own natural spirit. A man cannot live and temper his mettle without such honour. There is deep in him a sense of the heroic quest; and our modern way of life, with its emphasis on security, its distrust of the unknown and its elevation of abstract collective values has repressed the heroic impulse to a degree that may produce the most dangerous consequences.