Motivational Quotes

Greatness

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

- Higginson, Thomas Wentworth

Best Quotes about Greatness

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

Baudrillard, Jean

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

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

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

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

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

Hazlitt, William

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

The essence of greatness is neglect of the self.

Froude, James A.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

10.

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

Byron, Lord

11.

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

12.

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

Booth, William

13.

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

Picabia, Francis

14.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

15.

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

16.

Some have greatness thrust upon them, but not lately.

Dane, Frank

17.

Great woman belong to history and to self sacrifice.

Hunt, Leigh

18.

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

19.

Great and good are seldom the same man.

Fuller, Thomas

20.

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

21.

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

Halsey, William F.

22.

Being too good is apt to be uninteresting.

Truman, Harry S

23.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

24.

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

Winfrey, Oprah

25.

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

Hoffer, Eric

26.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

27.

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

28.

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

Johnson, Samuel

29.

Great men always pay deference to greater.

Landor, Walter Savage

30.

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

Franklin, Benjamin

31.

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

Higginson, Thomas Wentworth

32.

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

33.

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

Darrow, Clarence

34.

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.

35.

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.

36.

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

Bowen, Elizabeth

37.

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

38.

Neither wealth or greatness render us happy.

La Fontaine, Jean De

39.

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

Watson, James

40.

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

41.

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

Syrus, Publilius

42.

No one ever became great by imitation.

Johnson, Samuel

43.

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

44.

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

Shakespeare, William

45.

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.

46.

No great thing is created suddenly.

Epictetus

47.

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

48.

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.

49.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

50.

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

Tolstoy, Count Leo