A Quote by Wilhelm Reich

The Little Man does not know that he is little, and he is afraid of knowing it. He covers up his smallness and narrowness with illusions of strength and greatness...

Wilhelm Reich

Quote Topics

Afraid Covers Does Greatness His Illusions Know Knowing Little Little Man Man Smallness Strength Up

Quote Author

Wilhelm Reich
Austrian - Psychologist
March 24, 1897 - November 3, 1957

You are different from the really great man in only one thing: The great man, at one time, also was a very little man, but he developed one important ability: he learned to see where he was small in his thinking, and actions. Under the pressure of some task which was dear to him he learned better and better to sense the threat that comes from his smallness and pettiness. The great man, then, knows when and in what he is a little man.

Wilhelm Reich

Man is so great that his greatness appears even in the consciousness of his misery. A tree does not know itself to be miserable. It is true that it is misery indeed to know one's self to be miserable; but then it is greatness also. In this way, all man's miseries go to prove his greatness. They are the miseries of a mighty potentate, of a dethroned monarch.

Blaise Pascal

Greatness lies, not in being strong, but in the right using of strength; and strength is not used rightly when it serves only to carry a man above his fellows for his own solitary glory. He is the greatest whose strength carries up the most hearts by the attraction of his own.

Henry Ward Beecher

The chief proof of man's real greatness lies in his perception of his own smallness.

Arthur Conan Doyle

To say that man is a compound of strength and weakness, light and darkness, smallness and greatness, is not to indict him, it is to define him.

Denis Diderot

There is no such thing as a little country. The greatness of a people is no more determined by their numbers than the greatness of a man is by his height.

Victor Hugo

It is not the greatness of a man's means that makes him independent, so much as the smallness of his wants.

William Cobbett

A little child paddles a little boat, Drifting about, and picking white lotuses. He does not know how to hide his tracks, And duckweed's opened up along his path.

Bai Juyi

Real greatness has nothing to do with a man’s sphere. It does not lie in the magnitude of his outward agency, in the extent of the effects which he produces. The greatest men may do comparatively little.

William Ellery Channing

People who know little are usually great talkers, while men who know much say little. It is plain that an ignorant person thinks everything he does know important, and he tells it to everybody. But a well-educated man is not so ready to display his learning; he would have too much to say, and he sees that there is much more to be said, so he holds his peace.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Every man is proud of what he does well; and no man is proud of what he does not do well. With the former, his heart is in his work; and he will do twice as much of it with less fatigue. The latter performs a little imperfectly, looks at it in disgust, turns from it, and imagines himself exceedingly tired. The little he has done, comes to nothing, for want of finishing.

Abraham Lincoln

If there be a man before me who says that the wrath of God is too heavy a punishment for his little sin, I ask him, if the sin be little, why does he not give it up?

Charles Spurgeon

Till a man can judge whether they be truths or not, his understanding is but little improved, and thus men of much reading, though greatly learned, but may be little knowing.