Motivational Quotes

Greatness

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

- La Bruyere, Jean De

Best Quotes about Greatness

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

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

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

Rostand, Jean

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

Bowen, Elizabeth

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Carlyle, Thomas

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.

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

Darrow, Clarence

10.

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

Baudrillard, Jean

11.

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

12.

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

Higginson, Thomas Wentworth

13.

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

Shakespeare, William

14.

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

15.

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.

16.

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

17.

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

Gardner, Edward

18.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

19.

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

20.

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

Syrus, Publilius

21.

Being too good is apt to be uninteresting.

Truman, Harry S

22.

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

Winfrey, Oprah

23.

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

Hazlitt, William

24.

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

Tolstoy, Count Leo

25.

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

26.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

27.

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

Montesquieu, Charles De

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.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

30.

Great men always pay deference to greater.

Landor, Walter Savage

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.

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.

33.

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

Renan, Ernest

34.

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

Byron, Lord

35.

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

Picabia, Francis

36.

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

Booth, William

37.

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

Charles, Ray

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

Franklin, Benjamin

41.

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

Ruskin, John

42.

I want to be great, something special.