Greatness Quotes
“Creativity means believing you
have greatness.” Dr. Wayne W. Dyer
“There are no great men, only great challenges that ordinary men are
forced by circumstances to meet.” William F. Halsey
“Greatness does not approach him who is forever looking down.” Hitopadesa
“No great man ever complains of want of opportunity.” Ralph Waldo
Emerson
“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.”
Henri Frederic Amiel
“Be not afraid of greatness; some are born great, some achieve greatness,
and others have greatness thrust upon them.” William Shakespeare
“No great man lives in vain. The history of the world
is but the biography of great men.”
Thomas Carlyle
“Man is only truly great when he acts from his passions.” Benjamin
Disreali
“In our society those who are in reality superior in intelligence can be
accepted by their fellows only if they pretend they are not.” Marya
Mannes
“Great men are like eagles, and build their nest
on some lofty solitude.” Arthur Schopenhauer
“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.” Harry S. Truman
“The price of greatness is responsibility.” Winston Churchill
“I can’t believe that God put us on this earth to be ordinary.” Lou
Holtz
“The ultimate is not to win,
but to reach within the depths of your capabilities and to compete against
yourself.” Billy Mills
“It is the privilege of posterity to set matters right between those
antagonists who, by their rivalry for greatness, divided a whole age.” Joseph
Addison
“Don?t wait until you?re a man to be great. Be a ?great? boy.” Anonymous
“Show me a man who cannot bother to do little things and I’ll show you a
man who cannot be trusted to do big things.” Lawrence D. Bell
“Greatness after all, ion 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.” Phillips Brooks
“Put all your eggs in one basket and watch that basket.” Andrew
Carnegie
“The price of greatness is responsibility.” Sir Winston Leonard
Spencer Churchill
“Man is only truly great when he acts from the passions.” Benjamin
Disreali
“Every great man is unique.” Ralpho Waldo Emerson
“Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood,
and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton,
and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be
misunderstood.” Ralph Waldo Emerson
“To be great is to be misunderstood.” Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Let us consider the nature of true greatness in men. The people who can
catch hold of men?s minds and feelings and inspire them to do things bigger
than themselves are the people who are remembered in history. . . . those who
stir feelings and imagination and make men struggle toward perfection.” Henry
Eyring
“Do not confuse notoriety and fame with greatness. . . . For you see,
greatness is a measure of one’s spirit, not a result of one’s rank in human
affairs.” Sherman Finesilver
“True greatness is the most ready to recognize and most willing to obey
those simple outward laws which have been sanctioned by the experience of
mankind.” Froude
“A great man will not trample upon a worm, nor
sneak to an emperor.” Thomas Fuller
“Recipe for greatness ? To bear up under loss, to fight the bitterness of
defeat and the weakness of grief, to be victor over anger, to smile when tears
are close, to resist evil men and base instincts, to hate hate and to love
love, to go on when it would seem good to die, to seek ever after the glory and
the dream, to look up with unquenchable faith in something evermore about to
be, that is what any man can do, and so be great.” Zane Grey
“There would be no great ones if there were no little ones.” George
Herber
“A great man’s greatest good luck is to die at the right time.” Eric
Hoffer
“The man who is anybody and who does anything is surely going to be
criticized, vilified, and misunderstood. This is a part of the penalty for
greatness, and every great man understands it; and understands, too, that it is
no proof of greatness. The final proof of greatness
lies in being able to endure contumely without resentment.” Elbert
Green Hubbard
“Greatness of name in the father oft-times overwhelms the son; they stand
too near one another. The shadow kills the growth: so much, that we see the grandchild come more and oftener to be heir of the
first.” Ben Johnson
“I think this is the most extraordinary collection of
talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered at the White House,
with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.” John
Fitzgerald Kennedy
” . . . I want it said of me by those who knew me best, that I always
plucked a thistle and planted a flower where I thought a flower would
grow.” Abraham Lincoln
“If any man seeks for greatness, let him forget greatness and ask for
truth, and he will find both.” Horace Mann
“The great man is he who does not lose his child’s heart. ” Mencius
“I’d rather be a great bad poet than a good bad poet.” Ogden Nash
“So when a great man dies
For years beyond our ken
The light he leaves behind him lies
Upon the paths of men.”
Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi
“If we are to be really great people, we must strive in good faith to play
a great part in the world. We cannot avoid meeting great issues. All that we
can determine for ourselves is whether we shall meet them well or ill.” Theodore
Roosevelt
“Every great man is always being helped by everybody, for his gift is to
get good out of all things and all persons.” John Ruskin
“A man who has once perceived, however temporarily and however briefly,
what makes greatness of soul, can no longer be happy if he allows himself to be
petty, self-seeking, troubled by trivial misfortunes, dreading what fate may
have in store for him. The man capable of greatness of soul will open wide the
windows of his mind, letting the winds blow freely upon it from every portion
of the universe.
He will see himself and life and the world as truly as our human limitations
will permit; realizing the brevity and minuteness of human life, he will
realize also that in individual minds is concentrated whatever of value the
known universe contains. And he will see that the man whose mind mirrors the world becomes in a sense as great as the world.
In emancipation from the fears that beset the slave of circumstance he will
experience a profound joy, and through all the vicissitudes of his outward life
he will remain in the depths of his being a happy man.”
Bertrand Arthur William Russell
“A desire for bigness has hurt many folks. Putting oneself in the
limelight at the expense of others is a wrong idea of greatness. The secret of
greatness rather than bigness is to acclimate oneself to one’s place of service
and be true to one’s own convictions. A life of this kind of service will
forever remain the measure of one’s true greatness.”
Richard W. Shelly, Jr.
“Some things have not changed since the dawn of
history, and bid fair to last out time itself. One of these things is the
capacity for greatness in man?his capacity for being often the master of the
event ?and sometimes even more?the changer of the course of history itself.
This capacity for greatness is a very precious gift, and we are under a danger
in our day of stifling it.”
Dr. William Clyde de Vane
“To achieve great things we must live as if we
were never going to die.”
Marquis de Vauvenargues
“You are not here merely to make a living. You are here in order to enable
the world to live more amply, with greater vision, with a finer spirit of hope
and achievement. You are here to enrich the world, and
you impoverish yourself if you forget the errand.” Woodrow Wilson
“Excellence is not a destination; it is a continuous journey that never
ends.” Brian Tracy
“You can do anything you wish to do, have anything you wish to have, be
anything you wish to be.” Robert Collier
“Since most of us spend our lives doing ordinary tasks, the most important
thing is to carry them out extraordinarily well.” Henry David Thoreau
“We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we
give.” Winston Churchill
“What lies behind us and what lies before us are small matters compared to
what lies within us.” Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, small minds
discuss people.” Hyman Rickover
“Before you can inspire with emotion, you must be swamped with it
yourself. Before you can move their tears, your own must flow. To convince
them, you must yourself believe.” Winston Churchill
“Great crisis produce great men and great deeds of courage.” John
F. Kennedy
“He should sweep streets so well that all the host of heaven and earth
will pause to say, ‘Here lives a great street-sweeper who did his job
well'” Martin Luther King Jr.
“He who reigns within himself and rules his passions, desires, and fears
is more than a king.” John Milton
“Only in growth, reform and change, paradoxically enough, is true security
to be found.” Anne Morrow Lindbergh
“He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.” Friedrich
Nietzsche
