Smallness

“ It is that the chief proof of man’s real greatness lies in his perception of his own smallness. ”

“ Smallness in a child stimulates our affection, in a dwarf, pity or aversion. Now we give expression to our emotion more readily in the intercourse of every-day life than we do in writing, and the emotions of the masses are perhaps nearer the surface and more readily stirred than are those of the classes, and many things excite them which would leave unruffled the feelings of those who are more conventional. The stirring of these emotions finds expression in the use of the diminutive ending, which indirectly, as we have seen, suggests sympathy, affection, pity, or contempt. ”

“ Grouping various things as small in comparison either with those of their kind or with those of other kinds, and similarly grouping some objects as comparatively great, we get the opposite abstract notions of smallness and greatness. ”

“ Absolute smallness of hand is not essential to beauty, which requires that the proper proportions should be observed in the human figure. With proper care the hand may be retained beautiful, soft and shapely, and [Pg 367] yet perform its fair share of labor. ”

“ If the first, smallness is either coextensive with the whole one, or contains the whole, and, if coextensive with the one, is equal to the one, or if containing the one will be greater than the one. But smallness thus performs the function of equality or of greatness, which is impossible. Again, if the inherence be in a part, the same contradiction follows: smallness will be equal to the part or greater than the part; therefore smallness will not inhere in anything, and except the idea of smallness there will be nothing small. Neither will greatness ”

“ A small man weighs one hundred and twenty five pounds. How many men of that size, or near that size, can you recall, who have figured among the solid, great men in the world's history? We can recall two or three brilliant poets, perhaps as many celebrated orators, who were small men; but when we look among the men who have illustrated the great, grand, solid, enduring traits of human character, in any of the important departments of life, we find that, almost without exception, they are above the average size. ”

“ Nothing but size! But, to most people, size is everything; wherefore to them the small shells and their beauty are not. Their minuteness hides them as though they were in a far-off and uninhabited isle. ”

“ There are some peculiarities of this "Follow Me" road here. There comes a strangely new sense of proportion. As you follow close up behind the Man ahead, you will grow smaller, and He will grow larger. No, that's not an accurate statement; you won't grow any smaller, you will only find out how small you are. He won't grow any larger, you will simply be finding out, and then finding out more, how large He is. It'll seem strange to most of us, finding out our real size, or lack of the size we always supposed we were. ”

“ It is just the same size, shape, colour; it weighs exactly the same as it did when alive. What is the thing not to be seen, touched, weighed, described, or understood, which it has lost, which we call life? ”

“ This accounts for the fact that objects appear to us so different according as we conceive of their distance, and that we are often deceived in the size of bodies because we have no mode of determining their distance.
But it appears also that our ideas of distance are gained, not by the eye alone, but by the eye and the sense of feeling united. A child by the sense of feeling learns the size of his cup or his playthings. ”

“ I love size, bigness, grand moral structure; it does one good to breathe the same air with some people; it is like resting on a hill-top and enjoying a wide beautiful view. I don't mind at all being a pigmy among giants. ”

“ What incites me continually is the sense of how small I am, not that which a few moments ago seemed my best incentive—the picture of myself as large. That on the whole has had comparatively little influence. Of course I do not assert that we are altogether without visions of a larger life. ”

“ Height, size, and worldly greatness, though in themselves they have no resemblance, produce emotions in the mind that have a resemblance; and, led by this resemblance, we naturally express worldly greatness by height or size. One feels a certain uneasiness in looking down to a great depth: and hence depth is made to express any thing disagreeable by excess ”

“ For I ask, Is it not possible for a young lad to know that his whole body is bigger than his little finger, but by virtue of this axiom, that THE WHOLE IS BIGGER THAN A PART; nor be assured of it, till he has learned that maxim? ”

“ To settle the first of these problems, that of the connection between the size of the piece and the size of the hunger or the sex of the child, is seemingly again a question of analysis, of finding identical units, but a moment's thought shows that the case is not so simple; that the larger child should have the larger piece is by no means self-evident. This is in principle doubtless the logic, to him that hath shall be given. ”

“ The Length, and Breadth, I never saw,
And Heighth of Love Divine.
Where am I now, or what my Hope?
What can my Weakness do?
Jesu! to Thee my Soul looks up,
'Tis Thou must make it new.
Thine is the Work, and Thine alone. ”

“ I was always hearing that I was pale and thin and small. ”

“ I could feel myself shrinking, shrinking away, and it frightened me terribly, so that I lighted on the ground to think over what was happening. In a few seconds I had shrunk to the size you now see me ”

“ We shake down if we become small; we shake up if we become great. And when we have reached the place our size determines, we stay there so long as we stay that size.
If we wish to change our place, we must first change our size. If we wish to go down, we must grow smaller and we shall shake down. If we wish to go up, we must grow greater, and we shall shake up. ”

“ I have abolished all size—even my own size does not exist. If all the work that is being done by the hands of my hands had literally to be done by men, there would not be standing room for them on the globe—comfortable 118standing room. ”

“ The thoughts of size, shape, hardness, and so on, which we group together and call material chairs, trees, mountains, and other objects, are but ‘relative realities,’ pointing to the absolute reality, infinite mind and its eternal ideas and thoughts. ”

“ It has been discovered that bodies attract each other in proportion to their size,—that is to say, the quantity of matter that they contain. On the other hand, the farther bodies are from each other the less they attract each other. ”

“ In my complex idea of a man, or the cluster of ideas of sense to which I affix that mark, are included, certain ideas of colour, of figure, size, and so on. By the word tall, I single out a portion of those ideas, namely, the part relating to size, or rather size in one direction, and mark the separation by the sign or name. In my complex idea of a flower, colour is always one of the ingredients. ”

“ Young—as young as I am, at all events—tall, very tall (his head showing above others in a crowd) with clean-cut face, brown complexion, skin soft and clear, hands like a woman's, and large, beaming black eyes as frank as a child's. ”

“ Small Persons.—Small persons generally have exquisite mentalities, yet less power—the more precious the article, the smaller the package in which it is done up,—while great men are rarely dwarfs, though great size often co-exists with sluggishness. ”

“ At seventeen he measures six feet in height; he has the feet and the hands of a still larger man; and he comes of a blood which had far more strength than grace. But his manner is, and always has been, sweet, gentle, composed,--the very ideal of grave, tender, frank young manhood. ”

“ Doubtless it must seem a bold thing to attempt to deduce these grand results out of the meagre subject that I deal with; but I am one of those who believe that all is in little. The child is small, and he includes the man; the brain is narrow, and it harbours thought; the eye is but a point, and it covers leagues. ”

“ But if you mean to abase yourself then you are unjust to the worm. I never ask myself: Do you know how little you are? I am always nudging myself in the ribs and asking: Do you realize how big you are? ”

“ Were our eyes a hundred times quicker with regard to our surroundings, human beings would appear enormously tall to us; nay, we might conceive senses by which mortals might be felt to be of immeasurable size. ”

“ Transparent as a child, his face is the index of his mood. There—and indeed not only there, but in his whole figure, which unconsciously obeys the trend of his mind—his thoughts are inevitably reflected. ”

“ The difficulty becomes quite insurmountable if we attempt to assign precise dimensions to the details of configuration or to minute parts.
Many circumstances are opposed to the exactness of these measures. Even in the same person, one part is rarely in all respects similar to the corresponding part; we are taller in the morning than in the evening; and the proportions change at different periods of life. In different individuals, the differences are still more evident. Moreover, habits, professions, trades, all unite to oppose regularity in the proportions. ”

“ I am glad for him, blind as he is!—all the while
If they speak 'tis to praise, and they praise with a smile.
That tall Man, a Giant in bulk and in height,
Not an inch of his body is free from delight ”

“ Smaller men pretend to seek larger things which, not being found, they sit down like doctors to measure spirits descending into profound earth and, spotted all over, none the less elevating all things towards the breath of morning. ”

“ Into this room, all through the afternoon, streamed a curious medley of people. Tall men, small men, rough men, dapper men, and loudly dressed women, who for the most part seemed inclined to corpulence. ”

“ During the pause which followed I found myself thinking, that weight for weight, inches for inches, brains for brains, I knew no man who had made a better use of life than our Major. Not over clever, certainly not handsome, handicapped heavily by having to start at scratch in worldly matters, he had a distinct personality of his own, which influenced every society he entered. ”

“ If this be true of great natures, how much more evidently true is it of smaller natures! We, the people of the world, go leaning on each other; and we totter sometimes, even to falling, when a shoulder drops from underneath our hand. ”

“ The very emphasis of those objects, their importunity to the eye, the ear, the finite intelligence, was but the measure of their distance from what really is. One's personal presence, the presence, such as it is, of the most incisive things and persons around us, could only lessen by so much, that which really is. ”

“ Does the large eye see better, the large ear hear more, the large nerve feel more keenly? And, if, all other conditions being equal, they might do so, the incalculable variation of condition renders the size test of no practical value at all. ”

“ Then there is the immediate family, after that our own especial friends,—all assuming a gigantic size which puts quite out of the question an occasional bird's-eye view of the world in general. Even objects which might be in the middle distance of a less extended view are quite screened by the exaggerated size of those which seem to concern us most immediately. ”

“ By the way she kept turning round to gaze backward, you would have thought her anxious to 'see the last of' things, as small boys are when the holidays are over, and bigger boys when they go finally out into the world. ”

“ Inasmuch, then, as, other things being equal, size gives power to everything else, we are not only justified in believing, on grounds of analogy we are compelled to believe, that the same is true of the organs contained in the cranium, the thorax, and the abdomen. When they are in a sound and natural condition, their size is also the measure of their power. ”

“ It is indeed true that child life is that out of which man life is to come, but the difference is more vital than that of inches or strength. The bulb shelters a lily life, but the difference is greater than size. ”

“ Oh! that the God of heaven might please to tell them how abominable in his eyes are a weight and a weight, a stone and a stone, in the bag of weights!—one weight for themselves when they are under hatches, and another for others when they come to helm. ”

“ To the wingless a more arresting phenomenon is their dissimilarity in every particular except shape and size. ”

“ THE SKELETAL TYPES Now men, for as long as we have any knowledge of their thoughts and classifications and attitudes, have been accustomed to first think of one another, to classify and size one another as tall or short, slender or broad, thin or corpulent. ”

“ And one must be broad. I ask myself every night before I go to bed: "Have I been broad to day? Or have I failed?" Though, of course, one can be too broad, don't you think?
What I mean is, one must not be so broad that one loses one's poise in the midst of things.
Poise! That is what this age needs! ”