Motivational Quotes

Greatness

Neither wealth or greatness render us happy.

- La Fontaine, Jean De

Best Quotes about Greatness

Great woman belong to history and to self sacrifice.

Hunt, Leigh

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

Darrow, Clarence

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.

I want to be great, something special.

Leonard, Sugar Ray

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

Winfrey, Oprah

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Swift, Jonathan

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

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

10.

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

Rostand, Jean

11.

No great thing is created suddenly.

Epictetus

12.

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.

13.

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

Shakespeare, William

14.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

15.

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

16.

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

17.

No one ever became great by imitation.

Johnson, Samuel

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

Johnson, Samuel

21.

Being too good is apt to be uninteresting.

Truman, Harry S

22.

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

Shakespeare, William

23.

Great and good are seldom the same man.

Fuller, Thomas

24.

Greatness be nothing unless it be lasting.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

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.

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

Higginson, Thomas Wentworth

27.

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

Booth, William

28.

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

Bowen, Elizabeth

29.

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

Watson, James

30.

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

Hazlitt, William

31.

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

Ruskin, John

32.

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

33.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

34.

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

Franklin, Benjamin

35.

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

Baudrillard, Jean

36.

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

Renan, Ernest

37.

Nobody's ever the greatest anything.

Polak, Maralyn

38.

Greatness does not approach him who is forever looking down.

Hitopadesa

39.

What millions died that Caesar might be great?

Campell, Joseph

40.

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

41.

The essence of greatness is neglect of the self.

Froude, James A.

42.

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

43.

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

Syrus, Publilius

44.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

45.

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

Halsey, William F.

46.

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

Montesquieu, Charles De

47.

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

Horace

48.

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

Hoffer, Eric

49.

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.

50.

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

Tolstoy, Count Leo