Motivational Quotes

Greatness

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

- Ruskin, John

Best Quotes about Greatness

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

Bowen, Elizabeth

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

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

Carlyle, Thomas

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

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

Darrow, Clarence

Great woman belong to history and to self sacrifice.

Hunt, Leigh

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

Horace

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Syrus, Publilius

10.

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

Hoffer, Eric

11.

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

Booth, William

12.

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

13.

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

Rostand, Jean

14.

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

Swift, Jonathan

15.

Great men always pay deference to greater.

Landor, Walter Savage

16.

The essence of greatness is neglect of the self.

Froude, James A.

17.

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

18.

Great and good are seldom the same man.

Fuller, Thomas

19.

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

Byron, Lord

20.

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.

21.

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

Halsey, William F.

22.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

23.

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

Ruskin, John

24.

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

Franklin, Benjamin

25.

No great thing is created suddenly.

Epictetus

26.

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

27.

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

Winfrey, Oprah

28.

Being too good is apt to be uninteresting.

Truman, Harry S

29.

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.

30.

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

Montesquieu, Charles De

31.

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

Tolstoy, Count Leo

32.

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

Renan, Ernest

33.

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.

34.

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

Baudrillard, Jean

35.

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

36.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

37.

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

38.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

39.

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

40.

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

Watson, James

41.

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

42.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

43.

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

Higginson, Thomas Wentworth

44.

Greatness does not approach him who is forever looking down.

Hitopadesa

45.

No one ever became great by imitation.

Johnson, Samuel

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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.

49.

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

50.

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

Picabia, Francis