Motivational Quotes

Greatness

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

Best Quotes about Greatness

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.

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

Hoffer, Eric

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

Winfrey, Oprah

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

Montesquieu, Charles De

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

Neither wealth or greatness render us happy.

La Fontaine, Jean De

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

Franklin, Benjamin

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

I want to be great, something special.

Leonard, Sugar Ray

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

Baudrillard, Jean

13.

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

Horace

14.

Greatness be nothing unless it be lasting.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

15.

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

Darrow, Clarence

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

Syrus, Publilius

20.

The essence of greatness is neglect of the self.

Froude, James A.

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

Bowen, Elizabeth

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

Hazlitt, William

30.

Nobody's ever the greatest anything.

Polak, Maralyn

31.

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

32.

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

Renan, Ernest

33.

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

Halsey, William F.

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

37.

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.

38.

No one ever became great by imitation.

Johnson, Samuel

39.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

40.

Great woman belong to history and to self sacrifice.

Hunt, Leigh

41.

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

Ruskin, John

42.

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

43.

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

Swift, Jonathan

44.

No great thing is created suddenly.

Epictetus

45.

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

Charles, Ray

46.

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

Gardner, Edward

47.

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

Higginson, Thomas Wentworth

48.

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.

49.

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.

50.

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

Tolstoy, Count Leo