Motivational Quotes

Greatness

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

- Franklin, Benjamin

Best Quotes about Greatness

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.

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

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

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

Nobody's ever the greatest anything.

Polak, Maralyn

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

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

Franklin, Benjamin

Neither wealth or greatness render us happy.

La Fontaine, 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

10.

Great woman belong to history and to self sacrifice.

Hunt, Leigh

11.

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

12.

Being too good is apt to be uninteresting.

Truman, Harry S

13.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

14.

Some have greatness thrust upon them, but not lately.

Dane, Frank

15.

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

Shakespeare, William

16.

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

Darrow, Clarence

17.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

18.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

19.

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.

20.

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.

21.

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

Swift, Jonathan

22.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

23.

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

Montesquieu, Charles De

24.

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

25.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

26.

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

Tolstoy, Count Leo

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.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

29.

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

30.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

31.

Greatness be nothing unless it be lasting.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

32.

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

33.

Great men always pay deference to greater.

Landor, Walter Savage

34.

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

Johnson, Samuel

35.

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

Hoffer, Eric

36.

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

Halsey, William F.

37.

The essence of greatness is neglect of the self.

Froude, James A.

38.

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.

39.

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

Higginson, Thomas Wentworth

40.

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.

41.

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

Renan, Ernest

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

Baudrillard, Jean

46.

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

Shakespeare, William

47.

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

Booth, William

48.

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

49.

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

Syrus, Publilius

50.

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