Motivational Quotes

Greatness

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

- Gardner, Edward

Best Quotes about Greatness

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.

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

Baudrillard, Jean

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

Bowen, Elizabeth

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

Syrus, Publilius

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

Carlyle, Thomas

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

Some have greatness thrust upon them, but not lately.

Dane, Frank

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

Ruskin, John

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

Montesquieu, Charles De

10.

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

Charles, Ray

11.

Nobody's ever the greatest anything.

Polak, Maralyn

12.

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

Johnson, Samuel

13.

Great men always pay deference to greater.

Landor, Walter Savage

14.

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

15.

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.

16.

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

17.

I want to be great, something special.

Leonard, Sugar Ray

18.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

19.

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

20.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

21.

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

Booth, William

22.

Great woman belong to history and to self sacrifice.

Hunt, Leigh

23.

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

Swift, Jonathan

24.

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

Watson, James

25.

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

26.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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.

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.

29.

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

Hoffer, Eric

30.

Being too good is apt to be uninteresting.

Truman, Harry S

31.

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

Tolstoy, Count Leo

32.

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

33.

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

Winfrey, Oprah

34.

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

Shakespeare, William

35.

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

Renan, Ernest

36.

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

37.

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

38.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

39.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

40.

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

Higginson, Thomas Wentworth

41.

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.

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

45.

Neither wealth or greatness render us happy.

La Fontaine, Jean De

46.

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

47.

No one ever became great by imitation.

Johnson, Samuel

48.

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.

49.

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

50.

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

Byron, Lord