107 quotes about Greatness



You will become as small as your controlling desire; as great as your dominant aspiration.
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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.
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Greatness is a spiritual condition.
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The first element of greatness is fundamental humbleness (this should not be confused with servility); the second is freedom from self; the third is intrepid courage, which, taken in its widest interpretation, generally goes with truth; and the fourth --the power to love --although I have put it last, is the rarest.
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We shall never resolve the enigma of the relation between the negative foundations of greatness and that greatness itself.
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Because you are a great lord, you believe yourself to be a great genius. You took the trouble to be born, but no more.
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The dullard's envy of brilliant men is always assuaged by the suspicion that they will come to a bad end.
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Great men are not always wise.
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The herd seek out the great, not for their sake but for their influence; and the great welcome them out of vanity or need.
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Great people are meteors designed to burn so that the earth may be lighted.
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Greatness be nothing unless it be lasting.
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The greatness of a man's power is the measure of his surrender.
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All your youth you want to have your greatness taken for granted; when you find it taken for granted, you are unnerved.
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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.
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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.
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The great must submit to the dominion of prudence and of virtue, or none will long submit to the dominion of the great.
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Great men are the guideposts and landmarks in the state.
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Sighing that Nature formed but one such man, and broke the die.
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What millions died that Caesar might be great?
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All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning.
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The difference between Socrates and Jesus? The great conscious and the immeasurably great unconscious.
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No great man lives in vain. The history of the world is but the biography of great men.
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All great men are gifted with intuition. They know without reasoning or analysis, what they need to know.
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I never wanted to be famous. I only wanted to be great.
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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.
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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.
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Great and good are seldom the same man.
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The price of greatness is responsibility.
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Greatness and goodness are not means, but ends.
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Some have greatness thrust upon them, but not lately.
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He's the greatest man who ever came out of Plymouth, Vermont. [On Calvin Coolidge]
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It is a melancholy truth that even great men have their poor relations.
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Man is only truly great when he acts from his passions.
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A great person is one who affects the mind of their generation.
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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.
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I can write good songs. I can sing 'em, and I mean it, I mean it deeply, and I pour everything into that. Other than that, I suck.
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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?
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No great man ever complains of want of opportunity.
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Not he is great who can alter matter, but he who can alter my state of mind.
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The essence of greatness is the perception that virtue is enough.
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The measure of a master is his success in bringing all men around to his opinion twenty years later.
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The search after the great men is the dream of youth, and the most serious occupation of manhood.
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To be great is to be misunderstood.
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A great man stands on God. A small man on a great man.
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Great people are they who see that spiritual is stronger than any material force, that thoughts rule the world.
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He is great who is what he is from nature, and who never reminds us of others.
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No great thing is created suddenly.
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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.
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There never was a truly great man that was not at the same time truly virtuous.
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The essence of greatness is neglect of the self.
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It's not what you take but what you leave behind that defines greatness.
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The lights of stars that were extinguished ages ago still reaches us. So it is with great men who died centuries ago, but still reach us with the radiations of their personalities.
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There are no great men, only great challenges that ordinary men are forced by circumstances to meet.
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No man is truly great who is great only in his lifetime. The test of greatness is the page of history.
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There would be no great men if there were no little ones.
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Great men are rarely isolated mountain-peaks; they are the summits of ranges.
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Greatness does not approach him who is forever looking down.
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A great man's greatest good luck is to die at the right time.
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To have a great man for a friend seems pleasant to those who have never tried it; those who have, fear it.
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After a fellow gets famous it does not take long for someone to bob up that used to sit next to him in school.
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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.
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Great woman belong to history and to self sacrifice.
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He was dull in a new way, and that made many think him great.
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No one ever became great by imitation.
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The superiority of some men is merely local. They are great because their associates are little.
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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.
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A position of eminence makes a great person greater and a small person less.
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Neither wealth or greatness render us happy.
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To achieve greatness one should live as if they will never die.
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Great men always pay deference to greater.
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I want to be great, something special.
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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.
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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.
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Whatever you are, be a good one.
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In our society those who are in reality superior in intelligence can be accepted by their fellows only if they pretend they are not.
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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.
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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.
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It is always the adventurers who do great things, not the sovereigns of great empires.
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Let us never forget that the greatest man is never more than an animal disguised as a god.
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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.
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Nobody's ever the greatest anything.
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The first step toward greatness is to be honest.
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The greatest men of a nation are those it puts to death.