Quotes About Greatness

If you want to earn the gratitude of your own age you must keep in step with it. But if you do that you will produce nothing great. If you have something great in view you must address yourself to posterity: only then, to be sure, you will probably remain unknown to your contemporaries; you will be like a man compelled to spend his life on a desert island and there toiling to erect a memorial so that future seafarers shall know he once existed.

To live alone is the fate of all great souls

Kant's old hat; the autographs of great men; these things are gaped at with interest and awe by many who have never read their works. They cannot do anything more than just gape. The intelligent amongst them are moved by the wish to see the objects which the great man habitually had before his eyes; and by a strange illusion, these produce the mistaken notion that with the objects they are bring back the man himself.

Isn't the greatness of great nations directly proportionate to their ability to be ruthless and genocidal? Doesn't the height of a country's "success" usually also mark the depths of its moral failure?

Isn't the greatness of great nations directly proportionate to their ability to be ruthless and genocidal? Doesn't the height of a country's success usually also mark the depths of its moral failure?

What nobody understood then is this: The only way that you achieve what you want and fulfill your dreams and become great is by demanding that sort of attention. You have to make it happen.

Ask yourself whether the dream of heaven and greatness should be left waiting for us in our graves-or whether it should be ours here and now and on this earth.

And questions give us no rest. We know not why our curse makes us seek we know not what, ever and ever. But we cannot resist it. It whispers to us that there are great things on this earth of ours, and that we can know them if we try, and that we must know them. We ask, why must we know, but it has no answer to give us. We must know that we may know.

Great men can't be ruled... The great is the rare, the difficult, the exceptional.

It takes two to make every great career: the man who is great, and the man-almost rarer-who is great enough to see greatness and say so.

Hank, this is great. Yes. He said it simply, openly. There was no flattered pleasure in his voice, and no modesty. This, she knew, was a tribute to her, the rarest one person could pay another: the tribute of feeling free to acknowledge one's own greatness, knowing that it is understood.

The nation which once held the creed that greatness is achieved by production, is now told that it is achieved by squalor.

A thing is not high if one can reach it; it is not great if one can reason it; it is not deep if one can see its bottom.

To what level of depravity has a society descended when it condemns a man simply because he is strong and great?

and the desire would never be satisfied, except by a being of equal greatness.

She had set out to break him, as if, unable to equal his value, she could surpass it by destroying it, as if the measure of his greatness would thus become the measure of hers, as if…the vandal who smashed a statue were greater than the artist who made it, as if the murderer who killed a child were greater than the mother who had given it birth.

You'll never really be great unless you aim high.

Only those could maintain certainty who were themselves of great permanence – like the stars, the mountains and the sea.

No enterprise can become or rains truly great without a core set of principles to preserve to build upon

If you want the secondary greatness of recognized talent, focus first on primary greatness of character

And, furthermore, how could they kill him who was the chosen of gods and doomed to greatness?

Can't I just like horror because it's great? Does there have to be some big explanation?

We are very very small. But we are profoundly capable of very very big things.

Until you are Tried and Tested, Your Greatness will have no meaning