Motivational Quotes

Greatness

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

- Schopenhauer, Arthur

Best Quotes about Greatness

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

Charles, Ray

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

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

Higginson, Thomas Wentworth

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

It is not difficult to get away into retirement; and there live upon your own convictions; nor is it difficult to mix with men and follow their convictions; but to enter into the world; and there live firmly and fearlessly according to your own conscience; that is Christian greatness.

Greatness does not approach him who is forever looking down.

Hitopadesa

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

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

Swift, Jonathan

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

Horace

10.

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

Byron, Lord

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

14.

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.

15.

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.

16.

What millions died that Caesar might be great?

Campell, Joseph

17.

Nobody's ever the greatest anything.

Polak, Maralyn

18.

Greatness be nothing unless it be lasting.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

19.

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

20.

I want to be great, something special.

Leonard, Sugar Ray

21.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

22.

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

Rostand, Jean

23.

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

Hoffer, Eric

24.

Great men always pay deference to greater.

Landor, Walter Savage

25.

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

26.

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

Winfrey, Oprah

27.

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.

28.

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

Halsey, William F.

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

Baudrillard, Jean

32.

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

Franklin, Benjamin

33.

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

Picabia, Francis

34.

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

Hazlitt, William

35.

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

Shakespeare, William

36.

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

Ruskin, John

37.

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

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.

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

40.

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

41.

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

42.

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

Johnson, Samuel

43.

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

Darrow, Clarence

44.

Great and good are seldom the same man.

Fuller, Thomas

45.

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