Quotes About Greatness

Truly great people emit a light that warms the hearts of those around them. When that light has been put out, a heavy shadow of despair descends.

I am a great artist and I know it, it is because I am that I have been able to endure so much suffering.

The experiential test of whether this art is great or good, or minor or abysmal is the effect it has on your own sense of the world and of yourself. Great art changes you.

All truly great art is propaganda.

Sacrifice, which is the passion of great souls, has never been the law of societies.

We recognize the action of God in great things: we exclude it in small. We forget that the Lord of eternity is also the Lord of the hour.

He is invited to do great things who receives small things greatly.

Great people have great egos; maybe that's what makes them great.

You cannot become great women if you are not also good women. Great women respond generously to their instincts to do good.

Only passions, and great passions, can raise the soul to great things. Without them there is no sublimity, either in morals or in creativity. Art returns to infancy, and virtue becomes small-minded.

Before we can know God and understand his great plan it is first necessary for us to believe that he exists and that he rewards all who diligently seek him.

We're not great friends, but I admire him. If he thinks he's the best player of the century, that's his problem.

If Brideshead Revisited is not a great book, it's so like a great book that many of us, at least while reading it, find it hard to tell the difference.

May we all be faithful in doing the day-to-day, ordinary things that prove our worthiness, for they will lead us to and qualify us for great things.

Ambition is an idol, on whose wings great minds are carried only to extreme; to be sublimely great or to be nothing.

Who's gonna dare to be great?

There is one Quality, which has somewhat so heavenly in it; that by so much the more we are possess'd of it, by so much the more we draw nearer to the Great Author of Nature.

I cannot truly imagine a truly great person who hasn't suffered.

Great and good are seldom the same man.

Literature bores me, especially great literature

I've studied a lot of great people over the years - Pete Seeger, James Brown - and tried to incorporate elements that I've admired, though I can't say I dance like James.

I really believe great actors, even with disease and age, can be great.

A little artist has all the tragic unhappiness and the sorrows of a great artist and he is not a great artist.

I always had that desire to become a great athlete.