Motivational Quotes

Greatness

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

Best Quotes about Greatness

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

Some have greatness thrust upon them, but not lately.

Dane, Frank

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

Winfrey, Oprah

Greatness does not approach him who is forever looking down.

Hitopadesa

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

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

Hazlitt, William

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

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

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

Darrow, Clarence

10.

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

Watson, James

11.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

12.

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

Halsey, William F.

13.

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

Byron, Lord

14.

I want to be great, something special.

Leonard, Sugar Ray

15.

Greatness be nothing unless it be lasting.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

16.

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.

17.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

18.

What millions died that Caesar might be great?

Campell, Joseph

19.

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

Swift, Jonathan

20.

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

21.

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

Montesquieu, Charles De

22.

The essence of greatness is neglect of the self.

Froude, James A.

23.

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

Johnson, Samuel

24.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

25.

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.

26.

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

27.

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

Tolstoy, Count Leo

28.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

29.

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

Horace

30.

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

Baudrillard, Jean

31.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

32.

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

33.

Great woman belong to history and to self sacrifice.

Hunt, Leigh

34.

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

Renan, Ernest

35.

No great thing is created suddenly.

Epictetus

36.

Traditionally the great men of our country have sprung from poor environments; that being so, it would appear we have long suffered from a severe lack of poverty.

Lieberman, Gerald F.

37.

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

38.

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

Bowen, Elizabeth

39.

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

Syrus, Publilius

40.

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

Shakespeare, William

41.

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

42.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

43.

Being too good is apt to be uninteresting.

Truman, Harry S

44.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

45.

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

Gardner, Edward

46.

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

Franklin, Benjamin

47.

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

48.

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.

49.

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

Booth, William

50.

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

Rostand, Jean