Quotes About Greatness

On the contrary—there can be no greater honor to a parent than to have a child who is greater.

Are great men ever really good? I know they can be, but we judge them by a different standard. Greatness changes them, whatever they were to start with. It's like war—does any war ever settle anything? But we can't judge that way. The test of a war isn't whether it solved things. You have to ask, Was fighting the war better than not fighting it? And I guess the same kind of test ought to be used on great men.

We can have in life but one great experience at best, and the secret of life is to reproduce that experience as often as possible.

Anybody can make history; only a great man can write it.

Every great man nowadays has his disciples, and it is usually Judas who writes the biography.

You have to have a habitual vision of greatness … you have to believe in fact that you will refuse to settle for mediocrity. You won't confuse your financial security with your personal integrity, you won't confuse your success with your greatness or your prosperity with your magnanimity … believe in fact that living is connected to giving.

To be great in our times too often means to have great prosperity and no moral magnanimity at all.

Gandhi admitted to beating his wife. He was a great man, but not a saint." He swallowed. "No one mentions that Gandhi had all that violence inside him. I think it makes him better, because it means that his way wasn't just some natural instinct he was born with. It was something he battled for, in his own mind, every day.

The first sign of greatness is when a man does not attempt to look and act great. Before you can call yourself a man at all, Kipling assures us, you must not look too good nor talk too wise.

A great man shows his greatness," said Carlyle, "by the way he treats little men.

Un gran hombre -aseguró Carlyle- demuestra su grandeza por la forma en que trata a los pequeños

Un gran hombre demuestra su grandeza por la forma en que trata a los pequeños

Strive for that greatness of spirit that measures life not by its disappointments but by its possibilities.

The man who is wise enough to know the right thing to do, who is good enough to wish to do only the right thing, and who is able and strong enough to do the right thing is a truly great man.

The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem.

I swear I begin to see the meaning of these things. It is not the earth, it is not America, who is so great, it is I who am great or to be great…

Great is life...and real and mystical...wherever and whoever, Great is death...Sure as life holds all parts together, death holds all parts together; Sure as the stars return again after they merge on the light, death is as great as life.

The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem. In the history of the earth hitherto the largest and most stirring appear tame and orderly to their ampler largeness and stir. Here at last is something in the doings of man that corresponds with the broadcast doings of the day and night. Here is not merely a nation, but a teeming nation of nations. Here is action untied from strings, necessarily blind to particulars and details, magnificently moving in vast masses.

And I say there is nothing greater than the mother of men.

Of Honor without Fame/Of Greatness without Splendor/Of Dignity without Pay);

Knowing that great conceptions are worth little without precision execution

Likewise, what emphasis should be put on great individuals versus on cultural currents has long been a matter of dispute;

My passion has been to build an enduring company where people were motivated to make great products. Everything else was secondary.

Thomas Carlyle afirmaba que «la historia del mundo no es sino la biografía de grandes hombres»