Motivational Quotes

Greatness

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

- Bowen, Elizabeth

Best Quotes about Greatness

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

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

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

Bowen, Elizabeth

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

Darrow, Clarence

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

Picabia, Francis

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.

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

Baudrillard, Jean

No great thing is created suddenly.

Epictetus

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

Carlyle, Thomas

10.

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

Hoffer, Eric

11.

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.

12.

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

Higginson, Thomas Wentworth

13.

No one ever became great by imitation.

Johnson, Samuel

14.

Nobody's ever the greatest anything.

Polak, Maralyn

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

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.

Great men always pay deference to greater.

Landor, Walter Savage

20.

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

Booth, William

21.

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

22.

Being too good is apt to be uninteresting.

Truman, Harry S

23.

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

24.

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

Tolstoy, Count Leo

25.

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

Swift, Jonathan

26.

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

27.

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

Gardner, Edward

28.

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

29.

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.

30.

Great woman belong to history and to self sacrifice.

Hunt, Leigh

31.

Some have greatness thrust upon them, but not lately.

Dane, Frank

32.

The essence of greatness is neglect of the self.

Froude, James A.

33.

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

34.

I want to be great, something special.

Leonard, Sugar Ray

35.

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

36.

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

Franklin, Benjamin

37.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

38.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

39.

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

Rostand, Jean

40.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

41.

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

Winfrey, Oprah

42.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

43.

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.

44.

What millions died that Caesar might be great?

Campell, Joseph

45.

Neither wealth or greatness render us happy.

La Fontaine, Jean De

46.

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

47.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

48.

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

Renan, Ernest

49.

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

Shakespeare, William

50.

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