Motivational Quotes

Greatness

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.

Best Quotes about Greatness

I want to be great, something special.

Leonard, Sugar Ray

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

Gardner, Edward

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

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

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

Charles, Ray

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

Watson, James

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

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

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.

10.

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

11.

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

Winfrey, Oprah

12.

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

13.

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

Rostand, Jean

14.

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

15.

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

16.

The essence of greatness is neglect of the self.

Froude, James A.

17.

Greatness be nothing unless it be lasting.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

18.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

19.

No one ever became great by imitation.

Johnson, Samuel

20.

Neither wealth or greatness render us happy.

La Fontaine, Jean De

21.

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

Shakespeare, William

22.

No great thing is created suddenly.

Epictetus

23.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

24.

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

Johnson, Samuel

25.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

26.

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

Higginson, Thomas Wentworth

27.

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

Hazlitt, William

28.

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

29.

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

Montesquieu, Charles De

30.

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

31.

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

Byron, Lord

32.

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

33.

Some have greatness thrust upon them, but not lately.

Dane, Frank

34.

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

Franklin, Benjamin

35.

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

36.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

37.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

38.

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

39.

Nobody's ever the greatest anything.

Polak, Maralyn

40.

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.

41.

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

42.

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

Darrow, Clarence

43.

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

Baudrillard, Jean

44.

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

45.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

46.

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

Shakespeare, William

47.

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.

48.

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.

49.

Great men always pay deference to greater.

Landor, Walter Savage

50.

Great and good are seldom the same man.

Fuller, Thomas