Motivational Quotes

Greatness

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

- Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Best Quotes about Greatness

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

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

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

Being too good is apt to be uninteresting.

Truman, Harry S

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

Watson, James

Some have greatness thrust upon them, but not lately.

Dane, Frank

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

Gardner, Edward

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.

10.

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

11.

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

Darrow, Clarence

12.

Neither wealth or greatness render us happy.

La Fontaine, Jean De

13.

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

Renan, Ernest

14.

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

Hoffer, Eric

15.

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

Shakespeare, William

16.

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

Bowen, Elizabeth

17.

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

Picabia, Francis

18.

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

Johnson, Samuel

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.

No great thing is created suddenly.

Epictetus

21.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

22.

The essence of greatness is neglect of the self.

Froude, James A.

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.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

25.

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

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.

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.

28.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

29.

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

Booth, William

30.

I want to be great, something special.

Leonard, Sugar Ray

31.

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

Winfrey, Oprah

32.

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

Hazlitt, William

33.

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

34.

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

35.

Great men always pay deference to greater.

Landor, Walter Savage

36.

Greatness be nothing unless it be lasting.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

37.

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

Syrus, Publilius

38.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

39.

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

Ruskin, John

40.

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

41.

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

Baudrillard, Jean

42.

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

43.

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

44.

No one ever became great by imitation.

Johnson, Samuel

45.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

46.

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

47.

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.

48.

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

Franklin, Benjamin

49.

Great and good are seldom the same man.

Fuller, Thomas

50.

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

Higginson, Thomas Wentworth