“In many respects, he was doomed to a certain loneliness of excellence. Few men that ever lived have had his stern and tyrannous sense of duty, his womanly tenderness of heart, his wakeful and inflexible conscience, which was so easy towards others and so merciless towards himself. Therefore when the time came for all of these qualities at once to be put to the most strenuous proof, the whole course of his development and tendency of his nature made it inevitable that his suffering should be of the keenest and his final triumph over himself should be of the most complete and signal character. in that struggle his youth of reveries and day dreams passed away. Such furnace blasts of proof, such pangs of transformation seem necessary for exceptional natures.”
— John Hay, All the Great Prizes: The Life of John Hay, from Lincoln to Roosevelt
Tagged: Will
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All the Great Prizes: The Life of John Hay, from Lincoln to Roosevelt

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