greatness

1.

Being too good is apt to be uninteresting.

- Truman, Harry S

2.

This Rock has become an object of veneration in the United States. I have seen bits of it carefully preserved in several towns in the Union. Does this sufficiently show that all human power and greatness is in the soul of man? Here is a stone which the feet of a few outcasts pressed for an instant; and the stone becomes famous; it is treasured by a great nation; its very dust is shared as a relic.

- Alexis DeTocqueville

3.

...greatness sympathises with greatness, and littleness shrinks into itself.

- William Hazlitt

4.

A human action becomes genuinely important when it springs from the soil of a clear-sighted awareness of the temporality and the ephemerally of everything human. It is only this awareness that can breathe any greatness into an action.

- Havel, Vaclav

5.

I know starting careers in troubled times is a challenge, but it is also a privilege. Because it's moments like these that force us to try harder, dig deeper and to discover gifts we never knew we had. To find the greatness that lies within each of us. So don't ever shy away from that endeavor. Don't stop adding to your body of work. I can promise that you will be the better for that continued effort as will be this nation that we all love.

- Barack Obama

6.

I look upon those pitiful concretions of lime and clay which spring up, in mildewed forwardness, out of the kneaded fields about our capital... not merely with the careless disgust of an offended eye, not merely with sorrow for a desecrated landscape, but with a painful foreboding that the roots of our national greatness must be deeply cankered when they are thus loosely struck in their native ground. The crowded tenements of a struggling and restless population differ only from the tents of the Arab or the Gipsy by their less healthy openness to the air of heaven, and less happy choice of their spot of earth; by their sacrifice of liberty without the gain of rest, and of stability without the luxury of change.

- Ruskin, John

7.

To endure is greater than to dare; to tire out hostile fortune; to be daunted by no difficulty; to keep heart when all have lost it; to go through intrigue spotless; to forego even ambition when the end is gained -- who can say this is not greatness?

- Thackeray, William M.

8.

It is the privilege of posterity to set matters right between those antagonists who, by their rivalry for greatness, divided a whole age.

- Addison, Joseph

9.

I have touched the highest point of all my greatness, and from that full meridian of my glory I haste now to my setting.

- Shakespeare, William

10.

There are people who possess not so much genius as a certain talent for perceiving the desires of the century, or even of the decade, before it has done so itself.

- Lichtenberg, Georg C.

11.

The secret of greatness is simple: do better work than any other man in your field - and keep on doing it.

- Wilfred A. Peterson

12.

SYCOPHANT, n. One who approaches Greatness on his belly so that he may not be commanded to turn and be kicked. He is sometimes an editor. As the lean leech, its victim found, is pleased To fix itself upon a part diseased Till, its black hide distended with bad blood, It drops to die of surfeit in the mud, So the base sycophant with joy descries His neighbor's weak spot and his mouth applies, Gorges and prospers like the leech, although, Unlike that reptile, he will not let go. Gelasma, if it paid you to devote Your talent to the service of a goat, Showing by forceful logic that its beard Is more than Aaron's fit to be revered; If to the task of honoring its smell Profit had prompted you, and love as well, The world would benefit at last by you And wealthy malefactors weep anew -- Your favor for a moment's space denied And to the nobler object turned aside. Is't not enough that thrifty millionaires Who loot in freight and spoliate in fares, Or, cursed with consciences that bid them fly To safer villainies of darker dye, Forswearing robbery and fain, instead, To steal (they call it "cornering") our bread May see you groveling their boots to lick And begging for the favor of a kick? Still must you follow to the bitter end Your sycophantic disposition's trend, And in your eagerness to please the rich Hunt hungry sinners to their final ditch? In Morgan's praise you smite the sounding wire, And sing hosannas to great Havemeyher! What's Satan done that him you should eschew? He too is reeking rich -- deducting _you_.

- Ambrose Bierce

13.

The greatest men of a nation are those it puts to death.

- Renan, Ernest

14.

There never was a truly great man that was not at the same time truly virtuous.

- Franklin, Benjamin

15.

All your youth you want to have your greatness taken for granted; when you find it taken for granted, you are unnerved.

- Bowen, Elizabeth

16.

The world isn't kept running because it's a paying proposition. (God doesn't make a cent on the deal.) The world goes on because a few men in every generation believe in it utterly, accept it unquestioningly; they underwrite it with their lives.

- Miller, Henry

17.

The essence of independence has been to think and act according to standards from within, not without. Inevitably anyone with an independent mind must become "one who resists or opposes authority or established conventions": a rebel. If enough people come to agree with, and follow, the Rebel, we now have a Devil. Until, of course, still more people agree. And then, finally, we have --- Greatness.

- Aleister Crowley

18.

The truest greatness lies in being kind, the truest wisdom in a happy mind.

- Wilcox, Ella Wheeler

19.

It is always the adventurers who do great things, not the sovereigns of great empires.

- Montesquieu, Charles De

20.

Integrity is the first step to true greatness. Men love to praise, but are slow to practice it. To maintain it in high places costs self-denial; in all places it is liable to opposition, but its end is glorious, and the universe will yet do it homage.

- Simmons, Charles