Motivational Quotes

Greatness

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

Best Quotes about Greatness

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

Charles, Ray

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

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.

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

Shakespeare, William

Nobody's ever the greatest anything.

Polak, Maralyn

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

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

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

Booth, William

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

Johnson, Samuel

10.

Being too good is apt to be uninteresting.

Truman, Harry S

11.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

12.

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

Renan, Ernest

13.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

14.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

15.

No great thing is created suddenly.

Epictetus

16.

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

Horace

17.

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

Hoffer, Eric

18.

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

Gardner, Edward

19.

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.

20.

Great woman belong to history and to self sacrifice.

Hunt, Leigh

21.

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

22.

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

Swift, Jonathan

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

Montesquieu, Charles De

26.

To achieve greatness one should live as if they will never die.

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

27.

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

Watson, James

28.

No one ever became great by imitation.

Johnson, Samuel

29.

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

Tolstoy, Count Leo

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

Bowen, Elizabeth

33.

The essence of greatness is neglect of the self.

Froude, James A.

34.

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

Baudrillard, Jean

35.

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

36.

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.

37.

Greatness be nothing unless it be lasting.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

38.

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

Halsey, William F.

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

Rostand, Jean

43.

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

44.

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.

45.

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

Winfrey, Oprah

46.

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

47.

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

Darrow, Clarence

48.

Some have greatness thrust upon them, but not lately.