Motivational Quotes

Greatness

Nobody's ever the greatest anything.

- Polak, Maralyn

Best Quotes about Greatness

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

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

Franklin, Benjamin

Greatness does not approach him who is forever looking down.

Hitopadesa

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

Tolstoy, Count Leo

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

Halsey, William F.

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

Rostand, Jean

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

Gardner, Edward

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

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.

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

Swift, Jonathan

12.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

13.

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

Charles, Ray

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

17.

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.

18.

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

Ruskin, John

19.

No one ever became great by imitation.

Johnson, Samuel

20.

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

21.

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

22.

Great men always pay deference to greater.

Landor, Walter Savage

23.

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

24.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

25.

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

Renan, Ernest

26.

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.

27.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

28.

The essence of greatness is neglect of the self.

Froude, James A.

29.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

30.

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

Winfrey, Oprah

31.

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

Syrus, Publilius

32.

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

33.

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

Horace

34.

Neither wealth or greatness render us happy.

La Fontaine, Jean De

35.

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

36.

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

Hoffer, Eric

37.

Greatness be nothing unless it be lasting.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

38.

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

Shakespeare, William

39.

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

40.

Nobody's ever the greatest anything.

Polak, Maralyn

41.

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

Bowen, Elizabeth

42.

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

Higginson, Thomas Wentworth

43.

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

44.

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.

45.

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

Picabia, Francis

46.

Being too good is apt to be uninteresting.

Truman, Harry S

47.

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

Watson, James

48.

No great thing is created suddenly.

Epictetus

49.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

50.

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