Motivational Quotes

Greatness

Great people are meteors designed to burn so that the earth may be lighted.

- Bonaparte, Napoleon

Best Quotes about Greatness

Be not afraid of greatness; some are born great, some achieve greatness, and others have greatness thrust upon them.

Shakespeare, William

The greatness of a man's power is the measure of his surrender.

Booth, William

The search after the great men is the dream of youth, and the most serious occupation of manhood.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

You know, sometimes, when they say you're ahead of your time, it's just a polite way of saying you have a real bad sense of timing.

Mcgovern, George

He's the greatest man who ever came out of Plymouth, Vermont. [On Calvin Coolidge]

Darrow, Clarence

To achieve greatness one should live as if they will never die.

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

To have a great man for a friend seems pleasant to those who have never tried it; those who have, fear it.

Horace

I want to be great, something special.

Leonard, Sugar Ray

I never wanted to be famous. I only wanted to be great.

Charles, Ray

10.

No one who has come to true greatness has not felt in some degree that his life belongs to the people, and what God has given them he gives it for mankind.

Brooks, Phillips

11.

Do not despise the bottom rungs in the ascent to greatness.

Syrus, Publilius

12.

Despite everybody who has been born and has died, the world has just gone on. I mean, look at Napoleon --but we went right on. Look at Harpo Marx --the world went around, it didn't stop for a second. It's sad but true. John Kennedy, right?

Dylan, Bob

13.

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

Bowen, Elizabeth

14.

The essence of greatness is neglect of the self.

Froude, James A.

15.

False greatness is unsociable and remote: conscious of its own frailty, it hides, or at least averts its face, and reveals itself only enough to create an illusion and not be recognized as the meanness that it really is. True greatness is free, kind, familiar and popular; it lets itself be touched and handled, it loses nothing by being seen at close quarters; the better one knows it, the more one admires it.

Bruyere, Jean De La

16.

There is a sacred horror about everything grand. It is easy to admire mediocrity and hills; but whatever is too lofty, a genius as well as a mountain, an assembly as well as a masterpiece, seen too near, is appalling.

Hugo, Victor

17.

No man is truly great who is great only in his lifetime. The test of greatness is the page of history.

Hazlitt, William

18.

A position of eminence makes a great person greater and a small person less.

La Bruyere, Jean De

19.

Some have greatness thrust upon them, but not lately.

Dane, Frank

20.

Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and others have greatness thrust upon them. [Twelfth Night]

Shakespeare, William

21.

Greatness, in order to gain recognition, must all too often consent to ape greatness.

Rostand, Jean

22.

It's not what you take but what you leave behind that defines greatness.

Gardner, Edward

23.

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

Renan, Ernest

24.

Because you are a great lord, you believe yourself to be a great genius. You took the trouble to be born, but no more.

Beaumarchais, Pierre De

25.

There is a great man who makes every man feel small. But the real great man is the man who makes every man feel great.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

26.

I never knew a man come to greatness or eminence who lay abed late in the morning.

Swift, Jonathan

27.

Let us never forget that the greatest man is never more than an animal disguised as a god.

Picabia, Francis

28.

Everybody can be great... because anybody can serve. You don't have to have a college degree to serve. You don't have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. you only need a heart full of grace. a soul generated by love.

King Jr. Martin Luther

29.

It is necessary to be slightly under employed if you are to do something significant.

Watson, James

30.

Well, I wouldn't say that I was in the great class, but I had a great time while I was trying to be great.

Truman, Harry S

31.

Great woman belong to history and to self sacrifice.

Hunt, Leigh

32.

Great people are they who see that spiritual is stronger than any material force, that thoughts rule the world.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

33.

Great men never make bad use of their superiority. They see it and feel it and are not less modest. The more they have, the more they know their own deficiencies.

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

34.

What millions died that Caesar might be great?

Campell, Joseph

35.

No great thing is created suddenly.

Epictetus

36.

Greatness be nothing unless it be lasting.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

37.

Traditionally the great men of our country have sprung from poor environments; that being so, it would appear we have long suffered from a severe lack of poverty.

Lieberman, Gerald F.

38.

Great men are like eagles, and build their nest on some lofty solitude.

Schopenhauer, Arthur

39.

Great merit, or great failings, will make you respected or despised; but trifles, little attentions, mere nothings, either done or neglected, will make you either liked or disliked in the general run of the world.

Chesterfield, Lord

40.

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.

41.

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

42.

Great and good are seldom the same man.

Fuller, Thomas

43.

No one ever became great by imitation.

Johnson, Samuel

44.

A great thing can only be done by a great person; and they do it without effort.

Ruskin, John

45.

Those who intend on becoming great should love neither themselves or their own things, but only what is just, whether it happens to be done by themselves or others.

Plato

46.

Sighing that Nature formed but one such man, and broke the die.

Byron, Lord

47.

The superiority of some men is merely local. They are great because their associates are little.

Johnson, Samuel

48.

I distrust Great Men. They produce a desert of uniformity around them and often a pool of blood too, and I always feel a little man's pleasure when they come a cropper.

Forster, Edward M.

49.

Great men always pay deference to greater.

Landor, Walter Savage

50.

Great men are rarely isolated mountain-peaks; they are the summits of ranges.

Higginson, Thomas Wentworth