Motivational Quotes

Greatness

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

- Renan, Ernest

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

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

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

Darrow, Clarence

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

Winfrey, Oprah

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.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

Great woman belong to history and to self sacrifice.

Hunt, Leigh

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

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

10.

No one ever became great by imitation.

Johnson, Samuel

11.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

12.

Greatness be nothing unless it be lasting.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

13.

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

Halsey, William F.

14.

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

Booth, William

15.

No great thing is created suddenly.

Epictetus

16.

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

Tolstoy, Count Leo

17.

I want to be great, something special.

Leonard, Sugar Ray

18.

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

Syrus, Publilius

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

22.

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

23.

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

24.

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

Ruskin, John

25.

The essence of greatness is neglect of the self.

Froude, James A.

26.

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

Johnson, Samuel

27.

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

Watson, James

28.

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

Montesquieu, Charles De

29.

What millions died that Caesar might be great?

Campell, Joseph

30.

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

31.

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

Hazlitt, William

32.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

33.

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.

34.

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

35.

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

36.

Great and good are seldom the same man.

Fuller, Thomas

37.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

38.

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

Renan, Ernest

39.

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

Baudrillard, Jean

40.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

41.

Nobody's ever the greatest anything.

Polak, Maralyn

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

45.

Being too good is apt to be uninteresting.

Truman, Harry S

46.

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

Byron, Lord

47.

Some have greatness thrust upon them, but not lately.

Dane, Frank

48.

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

49.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

50.

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

Swift, Jonathan