Quotes About Greatness

Sed omnia praeclara tam difficilia quam rara sunt" (but everything great is just as difficult to realize as it is rare to find) reads the last sentence of the Ethics of Spinoza.

Sed omnia praeclara tam difficilia quam rara sunt (but everything great is just as difficult to realize as it is rare to find) reads the last sentence of the Ethics of Spinoza.

a few were given the chance to attain human greatness even through their apparent worldly failure and death, an accomplishment which in ordinary circumstances they would never have achieved.

everything great is just as difficult to realize as it is rare to find)

But everything great is just as difficult to realize as it is rare to find

sublimemque feres ad sidera caeli magnanimum Aenean vv. 258, libro I

Anyone who has the temerity to write about Jane Austen is aware of [two] facts: first, that of all great writers she is the most difficult to catch in the act of greatness; second, that there are twenty-five elderly gentlemen living in the neighbourhood of London who resent any slight upon her genius as if it were an insult to the chastity of their aunts.

I've cared for heaps of people, but not to marry them' she said. 'I suppose I'm too fastidious. all my life I've wanted somebody I could look up to, somebody great and big and splendid. Most men are so small.' 'What d;you mean by splendid?' Hewet asked. 'People are-nothing more.

Jane Austen) is the most difficult to catch in the act of greatness.

The commentator may be excused for repeating what he has stressed in his own books and lectures, namely that offensive is frequently but a synonym for unusual; and a great work of art is of course always original, and thus by its very nature should come more or less as a shocking surprise.

Life is a great sunrise. I do not see why death should not be a greater one.

Is it better because Europeans are better, nobler, greater, and more gifted than other folk? It is not. Europe has never produced and never will in our day bring forth a single human soul who cannot be matched and over-matched in every line of human endeavor by Asia and Africa. Run the gamut, if you will, and let us have the Europeans who in sober truth overmatch Nefertari, Mohammed, Rameses and Askia, Confucius, Buddha, and Jesus Christ.

[The sage] never strives himself for the great, and thereby the great is achieved.

The men who are great live with that which is substantial, they do not stay with that which is superficial they abide with realities, they remain not with what is showy. The one they discard, the other they hold.

All weekend he'd wandered awestruck, trying to take it all in: the fluted pillars of the enormous library, the red brick of the buildings against the bright green of the lawns, the sweet chalk smell that lingered in each lecture hall. The purposeful stride he saw in everyone's walk, as if they knew they were destined for greatness.

A person becomes great not by sitting on some high seat, but through higher qualities. A crow does not become an eagle by simply sitting on the top of a palatial building.

A man is great by deeds, not by birth.

Most great men and women are not perfectly rounded in their personalities, but are instead people whose one driving enthusiasm is so great it makes their faults seem insignificant.

A harmless hilarity and a buoyant cheerfulness are not infrequent concomitants of genius; and we are never more deceived than when we mistake gravity for greatness, solemnity for science, and pomposity for erudition.

In life we shall find many men that are great, and some that are good, but very few men that are both great and good.

Greatness is a road leading towards the unknown

Nothing great will ever be achieved without great men, and men are great only if they are determined to be so.

France cannot be France without greatness.

Love is the strongest force the world possesses, and yet it is the Greatness of a road leading towards the unknown.