Motivational Quotes

Greatness

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

Best Quotes about Greatness

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

Montesquieu, Charles De

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

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.

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

Higginson, Thomas Wentworth

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

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

Baudrillard, Jean

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

Great men always pay deference to greater.

Landor, Walter Savage

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

Johnson, Samuel

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.

I want to be great, something special.

Leonard, Sugar Ray

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.

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

14.

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

Horace

15.

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

Winfrey, Oprah

16.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

20.

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

21.

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

Franklin, Benjamin

22.

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

Rostand, Jean

23.

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

Booth, William

24.

Being too good is apt to be uninteresting.

Truman, Harry S

25.

The essence of greatness is neglect of the self.

Froude, James A.

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

Byron, Lord

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

Shakespeare, William

32.

Some have greatness thrust upon them, but not lately.

Dane, Frank

33.

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.

34.

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

35.

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

36.

Greatness be nothing unless it be lasting.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

37.

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

Halsey, William F.

38.

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

39.

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

Picabia, Francis

40.

Neither wealth or greatness render us happy.

La Fontaine, Jean De

41.

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

Shakespeare, William

42.

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

43.

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

Renan, Ernest

44.

Nobody's ever the greatest anything.

Polak, Maralyn

45.

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

46.

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

Gardner, Edward

47.

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

Darrow, Clarence

48.

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.

49.

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.

50.

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

Swift, Jonathan