Motivational Quotes

Greatness

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

- Ruskin, John

Best Quotes about 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

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

Halsey, William F.

Nobody's ever the greatest anything.

Polak, Maralyn

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.

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

Hazlitt, William

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

Renan, Ernest

No one ever became great by imitation.

Johnson, Samuel

Greatness be nothing unless it be lasting.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

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

Carlyle, Thomas

10.

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.

11.

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

12.

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

Ruskin, John

13.

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

Montesquieu, Charles De

14.

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

Baudrillard, Jean

15.

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

Winfrey, Oprah

16.

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

Higginson, Thomas Wentworth

17.

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

Shakespeare, William

18.

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

Horace

19.

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

Byron, Lord

20.

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

21.

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.

22.

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

Rostand, Jean

23.

Great woman belong to history and to self sacrifice.

Hunt, Leigh

24.

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

Darrow, Clarence

25.

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

Charles, Ray

26.

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

27.

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

Tolstoy, Count Leo

28.

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

29.

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

Gardner, Edward

30.

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

Watson, James

31.

Great men always pay deference to greater.

Landor, Walter Savage

32.

Well, I wouldn't say that I was in the great class, but I had a great time while I was trying to be great.

Truman, Harry S

33.

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

34.

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

35.

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

36.

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

37.

The essence of greatness is neglect of the self.

Froude, James A.

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.

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

Johnson, Samuel

40.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

41.

Neither wealth or greatness render us happy.

La Fontaine, Jean De

42.

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

43.

Great and good are seldom the same man.

Fuller, Thomas

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

Hoffer, Eric

47.

Greatness does not approach him who is forever looking down.

Hitopadesa

48.

No great thing is created suddenly.

Epictetus

49.

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

50.

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

Franklin, Benjamin