Motivational Quotes

Greatness

Being too good is apt to be uninteresting.

- Truman, Harry S

Best Quotes about Greatness

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

Johnson, Samuel

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

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

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

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

Ruskin, John

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

Byron, Lord

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

Great and good are seldom the same man.

Fuller, Thomas

10.

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

Swift, Jonathan

11.

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

Franklin, Benjamin

12.

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.

13.

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

14.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

15.

In my opinion, most of the great men of the past were only there for the beer --the wealth, prestige and grandeur that went with the power.

Taylor, A. J. P.

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

Picabia, Francis

19.

I want to be great, something special.

Leonard, Sugar Ray

20.

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

Shakespeare, William

21.

What millions died that Caesar might be great?

Campell, Joseph

22.

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

23.

Great woman belong to history and to self sacrifice.

Hunt, Leigh

24.

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

Hazlitt, William

25.

Neither wealth or greatness render us happy.

La Fontaine, Jean De

26.

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

27.

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

28.

Great men always pay deference to greater.

Landor, Walter Savage

29.

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

Baudrillard, Jean

30.

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.

31.

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

Bowen, Elizabeth

32.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

33.

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

Winfrey, Oprah

34.

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

35.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

36.

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

37.

The essence of greatness is neglect of the self.

Froude, James A.

38.

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

Charles, Ray

39.

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

Rostand, Jean

40.

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

Higginson, Thomas Wentworth

41.

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

Darrow, Clarence

42.

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

43.

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

Montesquieu, Charles De

44.

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

45.

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

Halsey, William F.

46.

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

Renan, Ernest

47.

After a fellow gets famous it does not take long for someone to bob up that used to sit next to him in school.

Hubbard, Kin

48.

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

Tolstoy, Count Leo

49.

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

50.

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

Syrus, Publilius