An interesting take on greatness as an obstacle to kindness, since kindness requires swerving from your path.  Something to think about with our sometimes obsessive focus on focus and purpose and being ‘results-oriented’.  And if it prevents taking time out to be kind? 

He was ever a strong man, which is almost the same, times, as to say, a man with little time for kindness.  For if you stop to be kind, you must swerve often from your path.  So when folk tell me of this great man and that great man, I think to myself.  Who was stinted of joy for his glory?  How many old folk and children did his coach wheels go over?  What bridal lacked his song, and what mourner his tears, that he found time to climb so high?  

Source: Mary Webb, Precious Bane (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981), p. 80

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