Motivational Quotes

Greatness

Greatness does not approach him who is forever looking down.

- Hitopadesa

Best Quotes about Greatness

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

No great thing is created suddenly.

Epictetus

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.

The essence of greatness is neglect of the self.

Froude, James A.

Great men always pay deference to greater.

Landor, Walter Savage

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

Higginson, Thomas Wentworth

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

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

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

10.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

11.

Nobody's ever the greatest anything.

Polak, Maralyn

12.

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

13.

Great woman belong to history and to self sacrifice.

Hunt, Leigh

14.

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

15.

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

Booth, William

16.

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

Picabia, Francis

17.

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

18.

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

Renan, Ernest

19.

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

Baudrillard, Jean

20.

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

Shakespeare, William

21.

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

22.

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

Shakespeare, William

23.

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

24.

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

Darrow, Clarence

25.

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

Gardner, Edward

26.

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

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.

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

Hoffer, Eric

29.

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

30.

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

Tolstoy, Count Leo

31.

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

32.

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

33.

Great and good are seldom the same man.

Fuller, Thomas

34.

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

35.

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

Halsey, William F.

36.

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

Swift, Jonathan

37.

What millions died that Caesar might be great?

Campell, Joseph

38.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

39.

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

Bowen, Elizabeth

40.

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.

41.

I want to be great, something special.

Leonard, Sugar Ray

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.

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

Byron, Lord

44.

Neither wealth or greatness render us happy.

La Fontaine, Jean De

45.

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

Winfrey, Oprah

46.

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

Rostand, Jean

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

Montesquieu, Charles De

50.

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

Horace