Motivational Quotes

Greatness

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

Best Quotes about Greatness

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

Picabia, Francis

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

Johnson, Samuel

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

Booth, William

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

Byron, Lord

Neither wealth or greatness render us happy.

La Fontaine, Jean De

What millions died that Caesar might be great?

Campell, Joseph

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

Syrus, Publilius

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

Ruskin, John

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

10.

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

11.

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

Horace

12.

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

13.

Being too good is apt to be uninteresting.

Truman, Harry S

14.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

15.

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

Rostand, Jean

16.

The essence of greatness is neglect of the self.

Froude, James A.

17.

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

Franklin, Benjamin

18.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

19.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

20.

Some have greatness thrust upon them, but not lately.

Dane, Frank

21.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

22.

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

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.

Great woman belong to history and to self sacrifice.

Hunt, Leigh

25.

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

Winfrey, Oprah

26.

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

Darrow, Clarence

27.

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

Hazlitt, William

28.

Greatness does not approach him who is forever looking down.

Hitopadesa

29.

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

Bowen, Elizabeth

30.

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

31.

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.

32.

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

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.

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

35.

Hugo, Victor

36.

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

Tolstoy, Count Leo

37.

Great and good are seldom the same man.

Fuller, Thomas

38.

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

Baudrillard, Jean

39.

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

Shakespeare, William

40.

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.

41.

Great men always pay deference to greater.

Landor, Walter Savage

42.

No great thing is created suddenly.

Epictetus

43.

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.

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

Gardner, Edward

47.

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

Halsey, William F.

48.

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