Motivational Quotes

Greatness

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

- Gardner, Edward

Best Quotes about Greatness

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

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

Ruskin, John

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

Shakespeare, William

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

Neither wealth or greatness render us happy.

La Fontaine, Jean De

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.

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

Renan, Ernest

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

Syrus, Publilius

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

Hazlitt, William

13.

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

Darrow, Clarence

14.

Great and good are seldom the same man.

Fuller, Thomas

15.

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

16.

No one ever became great by imitation.

Johnson, Samuel

17.

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

18.

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

Shakespeare, William

19.

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

Montesquieu, Charles De

20.

No great thing is created suddenly.

Epictetus

21.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

26.

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

27.

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

Swift, Jonathan

28.

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

29.

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

Gardner, Edward

30.

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

Charles, Ray

31.

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

Horace

32.

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

33.

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

Franklin, Benjamin

34.

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

Higginson, Thomas Wentworth

35.

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

Tolstoy, Count Leo

36.

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.

37.

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

Halsey, William F.

38.

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

Booth, William

39.

Great men always pay deference to greater.

Landor, Walter Savage

40.

The herd seek out the great, not for their sake but for their influence; and the great welcome them out of vanity or need.