Motivational Quotes

Greatness

Great and good are seldom the same man.

- Fuller, Thomas

Best Quotes about Greatness

Greatness does not approach him who is forever looking down.

Hitopadesa

No great thing is created suddenly.

Epictetus

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

Renan, Ernest

The herd seek out the great, not for their sake but for their influence; and the great welcome them out of vanity or need.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

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

Picabia, Francis

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

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

Nobody's ever the greatest anything.

Polak, Maralyn

Being too good is apt to be uninteresting.

Truman, Harry S

10.

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

Bowen, Elizabeth

11.

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

Montesquieu, Charles De

12.

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

Swift, Jonathan

13.

Great woman belong to history and to self sacrifice.

Hunt, Leigh

14.

The essence of greatness is neglect of the self.

Froude, James A.

15.

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

Higginson, Thomas Wentworth

16.

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

17.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

Baudrillard, Jean

21.

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

Booth, William

22.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

23.

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

Johnson, Samuel

24.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

25.

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.

26.

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.

27.

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

28.

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

Halsey, William F.

29.

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

Darrow, Clarence

30.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

31.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

32.

No one ever became great by imitation.

Johnson, Samuel

33.

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

Shakespeare, William

34.

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

Franklin, Benjamin

35.

Some have greatness thrust upon them, but not lately.

Dane, Frank

36.

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

Horace

37.

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

Watson, James

38.

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.

39.

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

40.

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

Hoffer, Eric

41.

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

Shakespeare, William

48.

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.

49.

I want to be great, something special.

Leonard, Sugar Ray

50.

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