Quotes About Greatness

Win a lottery-prize and you are a cleaver man. Winners are adulated. To be born with a caul is everything; luck is what matters. Be fortunate and you will be thought great.

We are unjust towards these great men who attempt the future, when they fail.

you are looking at a plain man and I am looking at a great man. Each of us may benefit.

Those who do deeds sovereignly great are always sure of being served by somebody in the multitude.

As the bishop was rather short of stature, he could not reach it. Madame Magloire, said he, fetch me a chair. My greatness [grandeur] does not reach as far as that shelf.

Todo lo que es grande inspira un horror sagrado. Es fácil admirar las medianías y las colinas; pero lo que es grandísimo, genio o monte, asamblea u obra maestra, visto de cerca espanta.

New York was a city that showed off its greatness, sought to make tourists look at man's accomplishments with awe. D.C. knew that man's greatness lay not in stone and steel, but rather in ideas and decisions.

A nation is great not by its size alone. It is the will, the cohesion, the stamina, the discipline of its people and the quality of their leaders which ensure it an honourable place in history.

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.

To love in spite of all is the secret of greatness. And may very well be the greatest secret in this universe.

A culture is only as great as its dreams, and its dreams are dreamed by artists.

A great mind is above insults, injustice, grief, and raillery, and would be invulnerable were it not open to compassion.

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.

Those who give too much attention to trifling things become generally incapable of great things.

To be a great man it is necessary to turn to account all opportunities.

Only great men have great faults.

We may appear great in an employment below our merit; but we often appear little in an employment that is too great for us.

To praise great actions is in some sense to share them.

God alone is true; God alone is great; alone is God.

I used to walk down the street like I was a fucking star... I want people to walk around delusional about how great they can be - and then to fight so hard for it every day that the lie becomes the truth.

Mountains appear more lofty the nearer they are approached, but great men resemble them not in this particular.

He led, and Ziri knew firsthand how his fearlessness spread like wildfire in the fray. It was what made him great.

It was his manner - the warmth of him, like steam rising from tea. One looked at him and thought, Here is a great man, and also a good one, though few men are ever both.

Some men are born for great things, and others to help great men do great things.