Motivational Quotes

Greatness

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

- Renan, Ernest

Best Quotes about Greatness

No one ever became great by imitation.

Johnson, Samuel

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

Horace

I want to be great, something special.

Leonard, Sugar Ray

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

Tolstoy, Count Leo

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

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

Rostand, Jean

Some have greatness thrust upon them, but not lately.

Dane, Frank

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

Charles, Ray

Greatness does not approach him who is forever looking down.

Hitopadesa

10.

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

11.

Great men always pay deference to greater.

Landor, Walter Savage

12.

Great and good are seldom the same man.

Fuller, Thomas

13.

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

Darrow, Clarence

14.

The essence of greatness is neglect of the self.

Froude, James A.

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

Winfrey, Oprah

20.

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

Shakespeare, William

21.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

22.

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.

23.

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

24.

Being too good is apt to be uninteresting.

Truman, Harry S

25.

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

Byron, Lord

26.

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

Gardner, Edward

27.

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

28.

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

Higginson, Thomas Wentworth

29.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

30.

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

Swift, Jonathan

31.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

32.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

33.

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.

34.

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

Shakespeare, William

35.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

36.

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

37.

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

Ruskin, John

38.

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

Bowen, Elizabeth

39.

Nobody's ever the greatest anything.

Polak, Maralyn

40.

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.

41.

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

Montesquieu, Charles De

42.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

43.

Neither wealth or greatness render us happy.

La Fontaine, Jean De

44.

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

Watson, James

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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

Syrus, Publilius