WHAT IS GREATNESS?

 

 WHAT IS GREATNESS?

Greatness is an extraordinary quality of head, heart, mind and soul. Literally, it may stand for bigness, largeness, extensiveness, vastness, immensity, hugeness, enormity, spaciousness , bulk, size, mass and  length.

 

Metaphorically, its implications are as  different as grandness, grandeur, magnificence, impressiveness, gloriousness, eminence, renown, nobility, proficiency, profundity and skillfulness.

 

A really great man, says Otto von Bismarck, a German statesman and diplomat (115-1896), is known by three signs --- generosity in the design, humanity in execution, moderation in success.

 

According to the American clergy William Ellery Channing (1780-1842) : The greatest man is he who chooses the right with invincible resolution; who resists the sorest temptations from within  and without; who bears the heaviest burdens cheerfully; who is calmest in storms, and most fearless under menace and frowns; and whose reliance on truth, on virtue, and on God, is most unfaltering.

 

The English poet and essayist Joseph Addison (1672-1719) had this to say: A contemplation of God’s works, a generous concern for the good of mankind, and the unfeigned exercise of humility --- these only, denominate men great and glorious.

 

In recent times, men like Mahatma Gandhi may be included in the list of great men of the world. He is the truest illustration of the following lines from A Psalm of Life, a poem written by the American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) :

 

Lives of great men all remind us

We can make our lives sublime,

And, departing leave behind us

Footprints on the sands of time;

 

Footprints, that perhaps another,

Sailing o’er life’s solemn main,

A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,

Seeing, shall take hear again.

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G.R.Kanwal

30^th March 2025