Motivational Quotes

Greatness

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

- Watson, James

Best Quotes about Greatness

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.

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

Shakespeare, William

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

Tolstoy, Count Leo

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

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

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

I distrust Great Men. They produce a desert of uniformity around them and often a pool of blood too, and I always feel a little man's pleasure when they come a cropper.

Forster, Edward M.

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

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

Watson, James

10.

Being too good is apt to be uninteresting.

Truman, Harry S

11.

Greatness does not approach him who is forever looking down.

Hitopadesa

12.

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

Booth, William

13.

No one ever became great by imitation.

Johnson, Samuel

14.

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

15.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

16.

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

Baudrillard, Jean

17.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

18.

No great thing is created suddenly.

Epictetus

19.

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

Gardner, Edward

20.

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

21.

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

Shakespeare, William

22.

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

Montesquieu, Charles De

23.

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

24.

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

25.

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

Byron, Lord

26.

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

27.

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

28.

Nobody's ever the greatest anything.

Polak, Maralyn

29.

Great men always pay deference to greater.

Landor, Walter Savage

30.

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

31.

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.

32.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

33.

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.

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.

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

Swift, Jonathan

36.

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

37.

Great and good are seldom the same man.

Fuller, Thomas

38.

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

Rostand, Jean

39.

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

Johnson, Samuel

40.

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

Renan, Ernest

41.

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

Hazlitt, William

42.

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

43.

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

44.

What millions died that Caesar might be great?

Campell, Joseph

45.

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

Bowen, Elizabeth

46.

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

Ruskin, John

47.

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

48.

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

Charles, Ray

49.

Great woman belong to history and to self sacrifice.

Hunt, Leigh

50.

I want to be great, something special.

Leonard, Sugar Ray