Motivational Quotes

Greatness

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.

Best Quotes about Greatness

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.

I want to be great, something special.

Leonard, Sugar Ray

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

Swift, Jonathan

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

Winfrey, Oprah

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.

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

Picabia, Francis

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

Tolstoy, Count Leo

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

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

Rostand, Jean

10.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

11.

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

12.

Great and good are seldom the same man.

Fuller, Thomas

13.

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

Renan, Ernest

14.

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

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.

Nobody's ever the greatest anything.

Polak, Maralyn

17.

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

Hazlitt, William

18.

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

19.

Being too good is apt to be uninteresting.

Truman, Harry S

20.

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

Watson, James

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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.

24.

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

Shakespeare, William

25.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

26.

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

27.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

28.

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

Darrow, Clarence

29.

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

Syrus, Publilius

30.

The essence of greatness is neglect of the self.

Froude, James A.

31.

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

Gardner, Edward

32.

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

Booth, William

33.

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

Charles, Ray

34.

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

Horace

35.

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

Higginson, Thomas Wentworth

36.

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

Baudrillard, Jean

37.

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

38.

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

39.

What millions died that Caesar might be great?

Campell, Joseph

40.

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

Bowen, Elizabeth

41.

Greatness be nothing unless it be lasting.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

42.

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

Montesquieu, Charles De

43.

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.

44.

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

Johnson, Samuel

45.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

46.

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

47.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

48.

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

49.

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

Shakespeare, William

50.

Neither wealth or greatness render us happy.

La Fontaine, Jean De