Motivational Quotes

Greatness

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.

Best Quotes about Greatness

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

Rostand, Jean

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

Hazlitt, William

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

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

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

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

Franklin, Benjamin

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

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.

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

10.

No one ever became great by imitation.

Johnson, Samuel

11.

Nobody's ever the greatest anything.

Polak, Maralyn

12.

Great woman belong to history and to self sacrifice.

Hunt, Leigh

13.

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.

14.

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

Bowen, Elizabeth

15.

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

Winfrey, Oprah

16.

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

Johnson, Samuel

17.

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

Booth, William

18.

No great thing is created suddenly.

Epictetus

19.

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

20.

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

21.

I want to be great, something special.

Leonard, Sugar Ray

22.

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

Shakespeare, William

23.

Greatness does not approach him who is forever looking down.

Hitopadesa

24.

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

Montesquieu, Charles De

25.

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

Renan, Ernest

26.

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

27.

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

Higginson, Thomas Wentworth

28.

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

29.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

30.

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.

31.

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

32.

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.

33.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

34.

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

Baudrillard, Jean

35.

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

Charles, Ray

36.

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

Syrus, Publilius

37.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

38.

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

39.

Great and good are seldom the same man.

Fuller, Thomas

40.

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

Darrow, Clarence

41.

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

Hoffer, Eric

42.

Neither wealth or greatness render us happy.