Motivational Quotes

Greatness

Man is only truly great when he acts from his passions.

- Disraeli, Benjamin

Best Quotes about Greatness

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

There are no great men, only great challenges that ordinary men are forced by circumstances to meet.

Halsey, William F.

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

Charles, Ray

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

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

Horace

After a fellow gets famous it does not take long for someone to bob up that used to sit next to him in school.

Hubbard, Kin

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

The essence of greatness is neglect of the self.

Froude, James A.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

10.

Greatness does not approach him who is forever looking down.

Hitopadesa

11.

Great and good are seldom the same man.

Fuller, Thomas

12.

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

Ruskin, John

13.

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

Franklin, Benjamin

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

17.

We shall never resolve the enigma of the relation between the negative foundations of greatness and that greatness itself.

Baudrillard, Jean

18.

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.

19.

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

Shakespeare, William

20.

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

Rostand, Jean

21.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

22.

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

23.

Great woman belong to history and to self sacrifice.

Hunt, Leigh

24.

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

25.

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

Johnson, Samuel

26.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

27.

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

28.

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

Swift, Jonathan

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

Picabia, Francis

32.

No great thing is created suddenly.

Epictetus

33.

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

Higginson, Thomas Wentworth

34.

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

Shakespeare, William

35.

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

36.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

37.

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

Gardner, Edward

38.

Great men always pay deference to greater.

Landor, Walter Savage

39.

A great man's greatest good luck is to die at the right time.

Hoffer, Eric

40.

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

41.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

42.

Nobody's ever the greatest anything.

Polak, Maralyn

43.

Neither wealth or greatness render us happy.

La Fontaine, Jean De

44.

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

Syrus, Publilius

45.

Being too good is apt to be uninteresting.

Truman, Harry S

46.

What millions died that Caesar might be great?

Campell, Joseph

47.

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

48.

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

Booth, William

49.

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

Montesquieu, Charles De

50.

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

Tolstoy, Count Leo