Quotes About Greatness

I want to be known as 'The Big Shakespeare.' It was Shakespeare that said, 'Some men are born great, some achieve greatness, some have greatness thrust upon them.'

Three things are necessary to make every man great,every nation great1.Conviction of the powers of goodness.2.Absence of jealousy and suspicion.3.Helping all who are trying to be and do good.

Man's unhappiness, as I construe, comes of his greatness; it is because there is an Infinite in him, which with all his cunning he cannot quite bury under the Finite.

No good writer was ever long neglected; no great man overlooked by men equally great. Impatience is a proof of inferior strength, and a destroyer of what little there may be.

If my resolution to be a great man was half so strong as it is to despise the shame of being a little one.

Democracy represents the disbelief in all great men and in all elite societies: everybody is everybody's equal.

Great men are among the best gifts which God bestows upon a people.

Certainly there are great men whose age circumscribes them so completely that we lose interest.

Great men, unknown to their generation, have their fame among the great who have preceded them, and all true worldly fame subsides from their high estimate beyond the stars.

The world cannot live at the level of its great men.

The nearer we approach great men, the clearer we see that they are men.

The world cannot do without great men, but great men are very troublesome to the world.

Great men, great events, great epochs, it has been said, grow as we recede from them; and the rate at which they grow in the estimation of men is in some sort a measure of their greatness.

Great men undertake great things because they are great; fools, because they think them easy.

All great men are partially inspired.

He who hangs on the errors of the ignorant multitude, must not be counted among great men.

In tragedy great men are more truly great than in history. We see them only in the crises which unfold them.

The search after the great men is the dream of youth, and the most serious occupation of manhood.

Great men are more distinguished by range and extent than by originality.

Measured by any standard, white or black, Washington must be regarded today as one of the great men of this country: and in the future he will be so honored.

Obama likes to quote great men but will never be a great man himself. I can't stand it when our leader goes around apologizing for who we are.

He [Napoleon] was as great as a man can be without morality.

Speaking generally, no man appears great to his contemporaries, for the same reason that no man is great to his servants--both know too much of him.

It's not the intensity of the man, but the duration of his intensity that makes the man great.