150 Greatness Quotes

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

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

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.

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

The only great spirit of our time.

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.

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

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

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.

The price of greatness is responsibility.

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.

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

'The greatest voice of all time'.

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

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.

I truly believe greatness is in all of us. Don't let anyone talk us out of our truth.

A retentative memory may be a good thing, but the ability to forget is the true token of greatness.

It is better to fail in originality, than to succeed in imitation. He who has never failed somewhere, that man can not be great. Failure is the true test of greatness. And if it be said, that continual success is a proof that a man wisely knows his powers,-it is only to be added, that, in that case, he knows them to be small. Let us believe it, then, once for all, that there is no hope for us in these smooth pleasing writers that know their powers.

Many are the fools who say that Jesus stood in His own path and opposed Himself; that He knew not His own mind, and in the absence of that knowledge confounded Himself. Many indeed are the owls who know no song unlike their own hooting. You and I know the jugglers of words who would honor only a greater juggler, men who carry their heads in baskets to the market-place and sell them to the first bidder. We know the pygmies who abuse the sky-man. And we know what the weed would say of the oak tree and the cedar. I pity them that they cannot rise to the heights.

Men do no great things, only small things with great love.

Ender Wiggin was not larger than life, Bean knew. He was exactly life-sized, and so his larger-than-life burden was too much for him. And yet he was bearing it. So far.

For greatness after all, in spite of its name, appears to be not so much a certain size as a certain quality in human lives. It may be present in lives whose range is very small.

A good poet is someone who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times; a dozen or two dozen times and he is great.

Great men are the inspired (speaking and acting) texts of that divine Book of Revelations, wherof a chapter is completed from epoch to epoch, and by some named History.

I note the derogatory rumors concerning my use of alcoholic stimulants and lavish living. It is the penalty of greatness.

To endure is greater than to dare; to tire out hostile fortune; to be daunted by no difficulty; to keep heart when all have lost it; to go through intrigue spotless; and to forgo even ambition when the end is gained-who can say this is not greatness?

I liked Charentz straight off, but more important than this was the feeling that I had that he was a truly great man. Human greatness is a rather difficult thing to account for, and more often than not one is mistaken in one's hunches about somebody one has met. Charentz seemed great to me, I think, because he was made of a mixture of proud virtues and amusing flaws. On the one hand, his independence of spirit was balanced by a humorous worldliness, his acute intelligence by a curiosity that frequently made him seem naive, his profoundly gentle manners by a kind of mocking mischievousness which might easily be mistaken for rudeness. But he was never rude, he was witty, and the purpose of his wit was to keep himself from the terrible condition of pomposity.

Generations to come, it may well be, will scarce believe that such a man as this one ever in flesh and blood walked upon this Earth.

The grandeur of man is great in that he knows himself to be miserable.

I'm looking for the teacher who is unaffected enough to be great, and great enough to be unaffected.

Let us forget the other names of American statesmen, that have been stamped upon these hills, but still call the loftiest - WASHINGTON. Mountains are Earth's undecaying monuments. They must stand while she endures, and never should be consecrated to the mere great men of their own age and country, but to the mighty ones alone, whose glory is universal, and whom all time will render illustrious.

Dr. Rajendra Prasad was a true Bodhisatva. His humility brought tears to my eyes.

The wisest man could ask no more of Fate Than to be simple, modest, manly, true, Safe from the Many-honored by the Few; To count as naught in World or Church or State; But inwardly in secret to be great.

When you're as great as I am, it's hard to be humble.

To create today is to create dangerously. . . Danger makes men classical, and all greatness, after all, is rooted in risk.

There is no greatness without a passion to be great, whether it's the aspiration of an athlete or an artist, a scientist, a parent, or a businessperson.

He was the best driver who ever lived.

La virtud es cosa de veras, todo lo demas de burlas. La capacidad y grandeza se ha de medir por la virtud, no por la fortuna. Ella sola se basta a si misma. Vivo el hombre, le haze amable; y muerto, memorable.

All these examples of wretchedness prove his greatness. It is the wretchedness of a great lord, the wretchedness of a dispossessed king. (425)

Thought constitutes the greatness of man.

Penser fait la grandeur de l'homme.

Bruce, well I can basically say this. I have been around a lot of great martial arts fighters. Worked out with them. Fought them in tournaments. In my opinion Bruce Lee was the greatest martial artist who ever lived. To me thats my opinion. I think Bruce Lee is the greatest martial artist ever. I don't think anybody is in his class.

If Bruce Lee wasn't the greatest martial artist of all time, then certainly he is the number one candidate.

Bruce was like the Michael Jordan or Muhammad Ali in his prime, somebody who stood above everyone else. It's not that the other martial artists weren't good. It's just that this guy was great.

Tous les grands poetes deviennent naturellement, fatalement, critiques.

a great man is gone. Tall as the truth was who; and wore his : life like a : sky.

Great let me call him, for he conquered me.

God has taken away the greatest man of his generation, for Dr. Livingstone stood alone.

It is yet a higher speech of his than the other, 'It is true greatness to have in one the frailty of a man and the security of a god.'

I've been accused of saying I was the greatest architect in the world and if I had said so, I don't think it would be very arrogant, because I don't believe there are many [great architects] - if any. For 500 years what we call architecture has been phony.

He's the greatest architect of the nineteenth century.

He's the greatest dancer who ever lived--greater than Nijinsky.

Had Washington been born in the days of idolatry, he would be worshiped as a god. If there are spots on his characters, they are like spots on the sun, only discernible by the magnifying powers of a telescope.

Le propre d'un grand homme est de derouter les calculs ordinaires. Il est sublime et attendrissant, naif et gigantesque.

Ingmar Bergman is probably the greatest living filmmaker.

One man stands head and shoulders above his contemporary scholars: head and shoulders, some hold, above the Middle Ages: John Scotus Erigena.

When the sun of culture is low, even dwarves will cast long shadows. (Wenn die Sonne der Kultur tief steht, werfen selbst Zwerge lange Schatten, famous German aphorism which is contributed to Karl Kraus, yet there seems no reliable source)

I simply think she is one of the greatest figures in British music over the last 30 years. There are an awful lot of people in the business wandering around claiming to be artists, but she is one of the few who can genuinely make that claim... I don't think there is any competition, she's on a different level and quite outside them all.

Shrine of the mighty! can it be That this is all remains of thee?

Where is he, the champion and the child Of all that's great or little, wise or wild; Whose game was empires, and whose stakes were thrones; Whose table earth - whose dice were human bones?

Generations to come, it may be, will scarcely believe that such a one, as this, ever in flesh and blood walked upon this earth.

Burke is so great because, almost alone in England, he brings thought to bear upon politics, he saturates politics with thought.

His grandeur he deriv'd from heaven alone, For he was great e'er fortune made him so And wars like mists that rise against the sun Made him but greater seem, not greater grow. No borrow'd bays his temple did adorn, But to our Crown he did fresh jewels bring; Nor was his virtue poison'd soon as born, With the too early thoughts of being King.

Generally he respected, or at least pretended a love to, all ingenious persons in any arts, whom he arranged to be sent or brought to him. But the niggardliness and incompetence of his reward shewed that this man was a personated act of greatness, and that Private Cromwell yet governed Prince Oliver.

Philip Johnson on Frank Lloyd Wright - He's the greatest architect of the nineteenth century.

To be in the presence of a great work of architecture is such a satisfaction that you can go hungry for days. To create a feeling such as mine in Chartres Cathedral when I was 13 is the aim of architecture.

When future historians are writing about the 20th century Senate, Senator Robert Byrd will surely be remembered as one of the giants who followed in the footsteps of Henry Clay and Daniel Webster.

It has been said that great men are like eagles. They do not flock together. You find them one at a time, soaring alone, using their skill and their strengths to reach new heights and to seek new horizons. Such a man and such an eagle is Robert Byrd.

'The guy's as talented as any quarterback who has ever played the game.'

To the Arab Nation it was as a birth from darkness into light; Arabia first became alive by means of it. A poor shepherd people, roaming unnoticed in its deserts since the creation of the world: a Hero-Prophet was sent down to them with a word they could believe: see, the unnoticed becomes world-notable, the small has grown world-great; within one century afterwards, Arabia is at Grenada on this hand, at Delhi on that; - glancing in valor and splendor and the light of genius, Arabia shines through long ages over a great section of the world. Belief is great, life-giving. The history of a Nation becomes fruitful, soul-elevating, great, so soon as it believes.

'Huxley, I believe, was the greatest Englishman of the nineteenth century.'

Apotheosis is not The origin of the major man. He comes, Compact in invincible foils, from reason, Lighted at midnight by the studious eye, Swaddled in revery, the object of The hum of thoughts evaded in the mind...

You are Great, Little Man, when you are not small and petty. You are great when you carry on your trade lovingly, when you enjoy carving and building and painting and decorating and sowing, when you enjoy the blue sky and the deer and the dew and music and dancing, your growing children and the beautiful body of your woman or your man, when you learn to understand and think about life.

Have you made greatness your companion, Although it be for children that you sigh: These are the clouds about the fallen sun, The majesty that shuts his burning eye.

He really, really inspired me. He was so great. Wonderful. One of the best, but more than that. Kurt was one of the absolute best of all time for me.