Motivational Quotes

Greatness

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

Best Quotes about Greatness

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

Swift, Jonathan

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Baudrillard, Jean

No one ever became great by imitation.

Johnson, Samuel

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

Booth, William

Great and good are seldom the same man.

Fuller, Thomas

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

Watson, James

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

Byron, Lord

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

Charles, Ray

10.

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

Tolstoy, Count Leo

11.

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

Horace

12.

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

Hoffer, Eric

13.

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

Halsey, William F.

14.

I want to be great, something special.

Leonard, Sugar Ray

15.

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

16.

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

17.

Bruyere, Jean De La

18.

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.

19.

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

20.

Great men always pay deference to greater.

Landor, Walter Savage

21.

Some have greatness thrust upon them, but not lately.

Dane, Frank

22.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

23.

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

24.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

25.

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

26.

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

27.

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

Picabia, Francis

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

Gardner, Edward

31.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

32.

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

33.

Neither wealth or greatness render us happy.

La Fontaine, Jean De

34.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

35.

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

Montesquieu, Charles De

36.

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

37.

The essence of greatness is neglect of the self.

Froude, James A.

38.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

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.

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

Syrus, Publilius

41.

Nobody's ever the greatest anything.

Polak, Maralyn

42.

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.

43.

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

Renan, Ernest

44.

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

45.

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

46.

Greatness does not approach him who is forever looking down.

Hitopadesa

47.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

48.

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

Darrow, Clarence

49.

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

Bowen, Elizabeth

50.

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