Quotes About Greatness

Not he is great who can alter matter, but he who can alter my state of mind.

Alas, I have begun my loneliest walk. But whoever is of my kind, cannot escape such an hour, the hour which says to him, 'Only now are you going your way to greatness. Peak and abyss, they are now joined together, for all things are baptized in a well of eternity, and lie beyond good and evil.

As is well known, the priests are the most evil enemies—but why? Because they are the most impotent. It is because of their impotence that in them hatred grows to monstrous and uncanny proportions, to the most spiritual and poisonous kind of hatred. The truly great haters in world history have always been priests; likewise the most ingenious haters: other kinds of spirit hardly come into consideration when compared with the spirit of priestly vengefulness.

The tension of the soul in unhappiness, which cultivates its strength; its horror at the sight of the great destruction; its inventiveness and bravery in bearing, enduring, interpreting, exploiting unhappiness, and whatever in the way of depth, mystery, mask, spirit, cleverness, greatness the heart has been granted - has it not been granted them through suffering, through the discipline of great suffering?

Democracy represents the disbelief in all great men and in all elite societies: everybody is everybody else's equal, 'At bottom we are all herd and mob.

What? A great man? I always see merely the play-actor of his own ideal.

Mankind ought constantly to be striving to produce Great Men --this and nothing else is its duty

Terribleness is part of greatness: let us not deceive ourselves.

The man who is to be great is the one who can be the most solitary, the most hidden, the most deviant, the man beyond good and evil, lord of his virtues, a man lavishly endowed with will - this is precisely what greatness is to be called: it is able to be as much a totality as something multi-faceted, as wide as it is full

It is unworthy of great spirits to spread abroad the agitation they feel

The Greeks are interesting and extremely important because they reared such a vast number of great individuals. How was this possible? This question is one which ought to be studied

Knowest thou not who is most needed by all? He who commandeth great things. To execute great things is difficult: but the more difficult task is to command great things.

What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal: what is lovable in man is that he is an over-going and a down-going.

The same causes which tend to promote the belittling of men, also force the stronger and rarer individuals upwards to greatness.

It seems that in order to inscribe themselves upon the heart of humanity with everlasting claims, all great things have first to wander about the earth as enormous and awe-inspiring caricatures:

I myself, to be sure - I have as yet seen no great man. That which is great, the acutest eye is at present insensible to it. It is the kingdom of the populace.

Man is beast and superbeast; the higher man is inhuman and superhuman: these belong together. With every increase of greatness and height in man, there is also an increase in depth and terribleness: one ought not to desire the one without the other— or rather: the more radically one desires the one, the more radically one achieves precisely the other.

In the end it must be as it is and always has been: great things remain for the great, abysses for the profound, nuances and shudders for the refined, and, in brief, all that is rare for the rare.

He who does not find greatness in God finds it nowhere. He must either deny it or create it.

Where the strong are weak, and the noble all too mild—there it builds its disgusting nest: the parasite lives where the great have small wounded recesses.

To me, the masses seem to be worth a glance only in three respects: first as blurred copies of great men, presented on bad paper with worn out printing plates, then as the resistance against the great men, and finally as working implements of the great. For the rest, let the devil and statistics carry them off!

Naked have I seen both of them, the greatest man and the smallest man. All too similar are they still to each other. Verily, even the greatest found I all too human.

A people is nature's roundabout way of getting six or seven great men. – Yes: and then of getting around them.

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