Motivational Quotes

Greatness

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

- Rostand, Jean

Best Quotes about Greatness

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

Shakespeare, 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

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

Watson, James

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

Hazlitt, William

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Gardner, Edward

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.

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

Renan, Ernest

Some have greatness thrust upon them, but not lately.

Dane, Frank

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

Hoffer, Eric

13.

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

Ruskin, John

14.

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.

15.

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

16.

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

Charles, Ray

17.

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

Booth, William

18.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

19.

Nobody's ever the greatest anything.

Polak, Maralyn

20.

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

Picabia, Francis

21.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

22.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

23.

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

24.

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

Tolstoy, Count Leo

25.

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

Johnson, Samuel

26.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

27.

Being too good is apt to be uninteresting.

Truman, Harry S

28.

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

Montesquieu, Charles De

29.

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

Darrow, Clarence

30.

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

31.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

32.

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

Shakespeare, William

33.

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

Winfrey, Oprah

34.

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

35.

Great men always pay deference to greater.

Landor, Walter Savage

36.

Greatness be nothing unless it be lasting.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

37.

What millions died that Caesar might be great?

Campell, Joseph

38.

No great thing is created suddenly.

Epictetus

39.

The essence of greatness is neglect of the self.

Froude, James A.

40.

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

Franklin, Benjamin

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

46.

Great woman belong to history and to self sacrifice.

Hunt, Leigh

47.

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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

Bowen, Elizabeth