Motivational Quotes

Greatness

A great person is one who affects the mind of their generation.

- Disraeli, Benjamin

Best Quotes about Greatness

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

Great and good are seldom the same man.

Fuller, Thomas

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

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

Horace

Great woman belong to history and to self sacrifice.

Hunt, Leigh

In my opinion, most of the great men of the past were only there for the beer --the wealth, prestige and grandeur that went with the power.

Taylor, A. J. P.

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

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

Picabia, Francis

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

Johnson, Samuel

10.

A great man stands on God. A small man on a great man.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

11.

At most, the greatest persons are but great wens, and excrescences; men of wit and delightful conversation, but as morals for ornament, except they be so incorporated into the body of the world that they contribute something to the sustentation of the whole.

Donne, John

12.

All my life I have always known I was born to greatness.

Winfrey, Oprah

13.

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

Shakespeare, William

14.

There is no greatness where there is not simplicity, goodness and truth.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

15.

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.

16.

It is not difficult to get away into retirement; and there live upon your own convictions; nor is it difficult to mix with men and follow their convictions; but to enter into the world; and there live firmly and fearlessly according to your own conscience; that is Christian greatness.

17.

What millions died that Caesar might be great?

Campell, Joseph

18.

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.

19.

I can write good songs. I can sing 'em, and I mean it, Imean it deeply, and I pour everything into that. Other than that, I suck.

Duritz, Adam

20.

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

Charles, Ray

21.

No one ever became great by imitation.

Johnson, Samuel

22.

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

Renan, Ernest

23.

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

24.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

25.

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

26.

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

Hazlitt, William

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

30.

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

Bowen, Elizabeth

31.

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

Higginson, Thomas Wentworth

32.

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

Rostand, Jean

33.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

34.

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

Ruskin, John

35.

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

Franklin, Benjamin

36.

The essence of greatness is neglect of the self.

Froude, James A.

37.

Great men always pay deference to greater.

Landor, Walter Savage

38.

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

Booth, William

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.

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

Watson, James

41.

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

42.

Great men are true men, the men in whom nature has succeeded. They are not extraordinary -- they are in the true order. It is the other species of men who are not what they ought to be.

Amiel, Henri Frederic

43.

The difference between Socrates and Jesus? The great conscious and the immeasurably great unconscious.

Carlyle, Thomas

44.

Neither wealth or greatness render us happy.

La Fontaine, Jean De

45.

Nobody's ever the greatest anything.

Polak, Maralyn

46.

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