Selected greatness quotes

1. As an astronomer in the true sense of the term, Sir John Herschel stood before all his contemporaries. Nay, he stood almost alone.

2. Politics and the fate of mankind are formed by men without ideals and without greatness. Those who have greatness within them do not go in for politics.

3. A great city is not to be confounded with a populous one.

4. Great men are always of a nature originally melancholy.

5. The really great people are the ones who know how to make the little people feel great.

6. Goodness does not consist in greatness, but greatness in goodness.

7. Great men are seldom over-scrupulous in the arrangement of their attire.

8. Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some hire public relations officers.

9. It is the mark of great people to treat trifles as trifles and important matters as important.

10. He had no failings which were not owing to a noble cause; to an ardent, generous, perhaps an immoderate passion for fame; a passion which is the instinct of all great souls.

11. It is the nature of all greatness not to be exact.

12. People do not decide to become extraordinary. They decide to accomplish extraordinary things.

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

14. America has never been an empire. We may be the only great power in history that had the chance, and refused - preferring greatness to power and justice to glory.

15. If men cease to believe that they will one day become gods then they will surely become worms.

16. The best people renounce all for one goal, the eternal fame of mortals; but most people stuff themselves like cattle.

17. That was always the difference between Muhammad Ali and the rest of us. He came, he saw, and if he didn't entirely conquer - he came as close as anybody we are likely to see in the lifetime of this doomed generation.

18. I thought I might teach philosophy but the atmosphere of a college faculty repelled me; the few islands of greatness seemed to be washed by seas of pettiness and mediocrity.

19. No man can produce great things who is not thoroughly sincere in dealing with himself.

20. To live for a time close to great minds is the best kind of education.

21. Don't be afraid to give up the good to go for the great.

22. A mere copier of nature can never produce any thing great, can never raise and enlarge the conceptions, or warm the heart of the spectator.

23. For us, with the rule of right and wrong given us by Christ, there is nothing for which we have no standard. And there is no greatness where there is not simplicity, goodness, and truth.

24. How could you be a Great Man if history brought you no Great Events, or brought you to them at the wrong time, too young, too old?

25. Greatness is a spiritual condition worthy to excite love, interest, and admiration; and the outward proof of possessing greatness is that we excite love, interest, and admiration.

26. I am the greatest, I said that even before I knew I was.

27. We come nearest to the great when we are great in humility.

28. Though thou loved her as thyself, As a self of purer clay, Tho' her parting dims the day, Stealing grace from all alive, Heartily know, When half-gods go, The gods arrive.

29. No man was ever yet a great poet, without being at the same time a profound philosopher.

30. The only great spirit of our time.

31. The boy who is going to make a great man must not make up his mind merely to overcome a thousand obstacles, but to win in spite of a thousand repulses and defeats.

32. All greatness is unconscious, or it is little and naught.

33. No sadder proof can be given by a man of his own littleness than disbelief in great men.

34. The world is always full of brilliant youth which fades into grey and embittered middle age: the first flowering takes everything. The great men are those who have developed slowly, or who have been able to survive the glamour of their early florescence and to go on learning from life.

35. The price of greatness is responsibility.

36. One who aspires to greatness should read and study, pursuing the True Way with such a firm resolve that he is perfectly straightforward and open, rises above the superficialities of conventional behavior, and refuses to be satisfied with the petty or commonplace.

37. Were Love exempt from the militations of Necessity, he were greater than God and the World.

38. 'The greatest voice of all time'.

39. Whatever the word 'great' means, Dickens was what it means.

40. 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.

41. ...that made Lee arguably the greatest martial artist of his time, or any other.

42. He was not just the best ballroom dancer, or tap dancer, he was simply the greatest, most imaginative, dancer of our time

43. 'I believe that my brother was a great man. But, unlike most other great men, his greatness did not come from diminishing those around him. He made himself great, in part, by finding the best in those around him.' ~ James Chapin

44. We have found a race that builds for the sheer joy of building, that creates beauty, that writes books, that invents the lives of never-known people to delight other who know they are being lied to, a race that devises immortal gods to worship and celebrates it's own mortality with immense pomp and glory. Death is the foundation of all that is great about humanity

45. If there is not the war, you don't get the great general; if there is not a great occasion, you don't get a great statesman; if Lincoln had lived in a time of peace, no one would have known his name.

46. If he does that, he will be the greatest man in the world.

47. I never read the life of any important person without discovering that he knew more and could do more than I could ever hope to know or do in half a dozen lifetimes.

48. Keep me away from the wisdom which does not cry, the philosophy which does not laugh and the greatness which does not bow before children.

49. The greatest author ever produced in Latin America.

50. 'Was there ever such thing as great Shakespeare? Only one must not say so! But what think you - what - was there not sad stuff?'

51. When America ceases to remember his greatness, America will no longer be great.

52. He was as great as a man can be without morality.

53. In the end, the state of the Union comes down to the character of the people. I sought for the greatness and genius of America in her commodious harbors and her ample rivers, and it was not there. In the fertile fields and boundless prairies, and it was not there. In her rich mines and her vast world commerce, and it was not there. Not until I went into the churches of America and heard her pulpits, aflame with righteousness, did I understand the secret of her genius and power. America is great because she is good, and if America ever ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.

54. Everyone has inside of him a piece of good news. The good news is that you don't know how great you can be! How much you can love! What you can accomplish! And what your potential is!

55. Great countries are those that produce great people.

56. Nothing great is done without great men, and they are great because they wanted it.

57. France cannot be France without greatness.

58. Illustrious acts high raptures do infuse, And every conqueror creates a muse.

59. Il n'appartient qu'aux grands hommes d'avoir de grands defauts.

60. Who can attain to anything great if he does not feel in himself the force and will to inflict great pain? The ability to suffer is a small matter: in that line, weak women and even slaves often attain masterliness. But not to perish from internal distress and doubt when one inflicts great suffering and hears the cry of it - that is great, that belongs to greatness.

61. Du grosses Gestirn! Was ware dein Gluck, wenn du nicht Die hattest, welchen du leuchtest!

62. Ihr seht nach oben, wenn ihr nach Erhebung verlangt. Und ich sehe hinab, weil ich erhoben bin.

63. Ich weiss um den Hass und Neid eures Herzens. Ihr seid nicht gross genug, um Hass und Neid nicht zu kennen. So seid denn gross genug, euch ihrer nicht zu schamen!

64. Woher kommen die hochsten Berge? so fragte ich einst. Da lernte ich, da? sie aus dem Meere kommen. Dies Zeugnis ist in ihr Gestein geschrieben und in die Wande ihrer Gipfel. Aus dem Tiefsten mu? das Hochste zu seiner Hohe kommen.

65. 'Pele called me the greatest footballer in the world. That is the ultimate salute to my life.'

66. There are thousands willing to do great things for one willing to do a small thing.

67. Greatness lies, not in being strong, but in the right using of strength; and strength is not used rightly when it serves only to carry a man above his fellows for his own solitary glory. He is the greatest whose strength carries up the most hearts by the attraction of his own.

68. If any man seeks for greatness, let him forget greatness and ask for truth, and he will find both.

69. Men of action, above all those whose actions are guided by love, live forever. Other famous men, those of much talk and few deeds, soon evaporate. Action is the dignity of greatness.

70. Familiarity with any great thing removes our awe of it. The great general is only terrible to the enemy; the great poet is frequently scolded by his wife; the children of the great statesman clamber about his knees with perfect trust and impunity; the great actor who is called before the curtain by admiring audiences is often waylaid at the stage door by his creditors.

71. La plus grande chose du monde, c'est de savoir etre a soi.

72. Greatness is nothing unless it be lasting.

73. Sometimes it falls upon a generation to be great. You can be that great generation.

74. Be warned in time, James, and remain, as I, do, incomprehensible: to be great is to be misunderstood.

75. Anybody can make history. Only a great man can write it.

76. The greatest men the world has produced have known but little. They had a few facts, mingled with mistakes without number. In some departments they towered above their fellows, while in others they fell below the common level of mankind.

77. A human action becomes genuinely important when it springs from the soil of a clear-sighted awareness of the temporality and the ephemerality of everything human. It is only this awareness that can breathe any greatness into an action.

78. Clemens was sole, incomparable, the Lincoln of our literature.

79. Before Mozart, all ambition turns to despair.

80. 'She was the greatest performer. No one has been her equal.' ~ Mickey Rooney