Motivational Quotes

Greatness

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

- Shakespeare, William

Best Quotes about Greatness

Greatness be nothing unless it be lasting.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

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

Bowen, Elizabeth

Nobody's ever the greatest anything.

Polak, Maralyn

I want to be great, something special.

Leonard, Sugar Ray

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

Tolstoy, Count Leo

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

Montesquieu, Charles De

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

Syrus, Publilius

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

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

10.

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

11.

No one ever became great by imitation.

Johnson, Samuel

12.

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

Higginson, Thomas Wentworth

13.

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

Booth, William

14.

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

Picabia, Francis

15.

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.

16.

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

17.

Some have greatness thrust upon them, but not lately.

Dane, Frank

18.

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

Byron, Lord

19.

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

20.

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

Johnson, Samuel

21.

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.

22.

Great men always pay deference to greater.

Landor, Walter Savage

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.

Greatness does not approach him who is forever looking down.

Hitopadesa

25.

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

Watson, James

26.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

27.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

28.

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

Swift, Jonathan

29.

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.

30.

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

Darrow, Clarence

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

34.

No great thing is created suddenly.

Epictetus

35.

What millions died that Caesar might be great?

Campell, Joseph

36.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

37.

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

38.

Neither wealth or greatness render us happy.

La Fontaine, Jean De

39.

Great woman belong to history and to self sacrifice.

Hunt, Leigh

40.

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

Hazlitt, William

41.

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

Gardner, Edward

42.

Being too good is apt to be uninteresting.

Truman, Harry S

43.

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

44.

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.

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

Shakespeare, William

48.

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

Franklin, Benjamin

49.

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

50.

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