Motivational Quotes

Greatness

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

Best Quotes about Greatness

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Picabia, Francis

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

Swift, Jonathan

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

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

Renan, Ernest

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

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.

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

10.

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

Tolstoy, Count Leo

11.

No great thing is created suddenly.

Epictetus

12.

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

Shakespeare, William

13.

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

14.

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

Rostand, Jean

15.

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

16.

What millions died that Caesar might be great?

Campell, Joseph

17.

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

Watson, James

18.

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

Bowen, Elizabeth

19.

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

Franklin, Benjamin

20.

No one ever became great by imitation.

Johnson, Samuel

21.

Great and good are seldom the same man.

Fuller, Thomas

22.

Greatness be nothing unless it be lasting.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

23.

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

24.

Being too good is apt to be uninteresting.

Truman, Harry S

25.

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

Byron, Lord

26.

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

27.

Greatness does not approach him who is forever looking down.

Hitopadesa

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

31.

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

32.

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.

33.

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.

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.

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

36.

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

Gardner, Edward

37.

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

Shakespeare, William

38.

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

39.

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.

40.

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

Winfrey, Oprah

41.

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

Darrow, Clarence

42.

Great men always pay deference to greater.

Landor, Walter Savage

43.

The essence of greatness is neglect of the self.

Froude, James A.

44.

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

45.

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

46.

Some have greatness thrust upon them, but not lately.

Dane, Frank

47.

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

48.

Neither wealth or greatness render us happy.