Greatness Quotes

Fame is a jealous mistressAnd will brook no rival.

~ Thiruvalluvar

Every step gets him closer to greatness...or disaster.

~ Jody Feldman

The excitement of opportunity and challenge inspires us to push for greatness.

~ Lorii Myers

Always to be right, always to trample forward, and never to doubt, are not these the great qualities with which dullness takes the lead in the world?

~ William Makepeace Thackeray

A man's shortcomings are taken from his epoch, his virtues and greatness belong to himself.

~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

A great chessplayer is not a great man, for he leaves the world as he found it.

~ William Hazlitt

Those touchy mediocrities who sit trembling lest someone's work prove greater than their own - they have no inkling of the loneliness that comes when you reach the top. The loneliness for an equal - for a mind to respect and an achievement to admire...They envy achievement, and their dream of greatness is a world where all men have become their acknowledged inferiors. They don't know that that dream is the infallible proof of mediocrity, because that sort of world is what the man of achievement would not be able to bear.

~ Ayn Rand

Denys (Finch-Hatton) has been written about before and he will be written about again. If someone has not already said it, someone will say that he was a great man who never achieved greatness, and this will not only be trite, but wrong; he was a great man who never achieved arrogance.

~ Beryl Markham

There is no one great man. Only millions of men and women in possession of tiny pieces of greatness, which when put together, when assembled in the aggregate make the whole. I am a piece of a very large jigsaw puzzle. One of the corner pieces. The one you go for first - important for a time, different from most of the others. But then, in the end, in the big picture, just one of many.

~ Mark Dunn

If a man has a capacity for great thoughts, he is likely to overtake them before he is decrepit.

~ George Eliot

Greatness is an opiate.

~ Toba Beta

I believe that we are all born for greatness yet most of us mire in the mediocrity of life. We become complacent or worse, discouraged and stagnate. We damn ourselves by not progressing.

~ Toni Sorenson

Don't die a pauper, don't die a commoner and a weakling.

~ Jaachynma N.e. Agu

PERFECT VIRTUE PRODUCES NOTHING, because it needs nothing. Production comes out of desire, production comes because you are imperfect. You create something as a substitute because you feel unfulfilled. When you are absolutely fulfilled, why should you create, how can you create? Then you yourself have become the glory of creation, then the inner being itself is so perfect, nothing is needed.PERFECT VIRTUE PRODUCES NOTHING. If the world is virtuous, all utilitarian goals will be lost. If the world is really virtuous there will be play and no production. Then the whole thing will just become a game. You enjoy it, but you don’t need it. A perfect sage is absolutely useless.

~ Osho

Every day, in every moment, you get to exercise choices that will determine whether or not you will become a great person, living a great life. Greatness is not something predetermined, predestined, or carved into your fate by forces beyond your control. GREATNESS IS ALWAYS IN THE MOMENT OF THE DECISION. But you have to start.

~ Jeff Olson

The world did not appreciate Abraham Lincoln until he died. His great figure has been looming higher each succeeding decade. We understand Jesus better than any other generation..A great man is like a mountain, you cannot appreciate when standing at its base.

~ Charles Jefferson

The greatest thing in all the world is loving. The second greatest in all the world is learning.

~ George H. Morrison

DO! Don’t be concerned about what you are doing – do it so wholeheartedly that the very doing becomes a bliss. And don’t think of great things, there is no such thing as great or small. Don’t think that you are to do great things, play great music, paint great paintings, that you are to become a Picasso or a Van Gogh, or something else – a great writer, a Shakespeare, or a Milton. There is nothing – no great things, no small things. There are great men and small men but things are not great and small. And a great man is one who brings his greatness to every small thing that he is doing: he eats in a great way, he walks in a great way, he sleeps in a great way. He brings the quality of greatness to everything.And what is greatness? Nature.... Nothing is greater than nature.

~ Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh

A Mother Has the Best of all Smiles; She is a Wonderful Friend, Lover & Adviser.

~ Agu

It’s not one of our finest hours.

~ Brian Cook

The pursuit of goodness leads to greatness, but the pursuit of greatness, whether by a man or a nation, leads to ruin…. [G]ood men build; great men destroy. They destroy because they try to control something other than themselves and that always leads to destruction.

~ John Kramer

Whereas goodness makes greatness teachable, greatness makes goodness touchable.

~ Orrin Woodward

You are treading your path of greatness: now it must call up all your courage that there is no longer a path behind you!You are treading your path of greatness: no one shall steal after you here! Your foot itself has extinguished the path behind you, and above that path stands written: Impossibility.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

You don't need to become great 1st to step into your greatness. Have you left your comfort zone and ventured out to unleash your greatness?

~ Assegid Habtewold

You're a greatness material! You're great in your own unique ways. Have you found the source of your greatness?

~ Assegid Habtewold

Challenges prepare us for something greater! Only when it's done with love, can this greatness change us and fulfill our highest good!

~ Angie Karan

It is only wishful thinking that makes a sheep seek that a lion feeds on grass just to make it comfortable.

~ Magnus Nwagu Amudi

Every star, turning in the black depth of heaven, burns for no better reason than that humanity raised its face to look. Every great deed needs to be witnessed. Go out there and do something great.

~ Mark Lawrence

Greatness comes not in possessing security, but in withstanding insecurity.

~ Jeffrey Fry

Learn the difference between good and great and then chose greatness.

~ Jeffrey Fry

Don’t limit yourself by what you’ve achieved. All your past achievements are only stepping stones for the greatness to come.

~ Lashawnda Jones

Good fortune will elevate even petty minds, and gives them the appearance of a certain greatness and stateliness, as from their high place they look down upon the world; but the truly noble and resolved spirit raises itself, and becomes more conspicuous in times of disaster and ill fortune...

~ Plutarch

Seek not greatness, but seek truth and you will find both.

~ Horace Mann

Maybe real-life Mom didn't vacuum the house flawlessly arrayed in pearls and a pleated shirt like the mother on leave it to beaver. Maybe she flirted with the milkman or waited for the kids to go to bed so she could hammer back a couple of mugs of vodka pretending it was tea. But she was there to greet us when we came home from school in the afternoon. She made us dinner, kept watch on us through the kitchen window, put Band-Aids on our scrapes and bruises. She was Mom and that was no small thing.

~ Andrew Klavan

When you strive for greatness, chaos is guaranteed to show up.

~ Gary Keller

If we can say no to all our worries, nothing can stop our greatness in life.

~ Bamigboye Olurotimi

Greatness needs courage (above all) and willpower, charisma, intelligence and creativity but it also demands characteristics that we often associate with the least admirable people: reckless risk-taking, brutal determination, sexual thrill-seeking, brazen showmanship, obsession close to fixation and something approaching insanity. In other words, the qualities required for greatness and wickedness, for heroism and monstrosity are not too far distant from each other. The Norwegians alone have a word for this: stormannsgalskap – the madness of great men.

~ Simon Sebag Montefiore

My trials may not be as hard as yours or as painful as yours but hey, I've gone through tough times as well! And yes God's love may be invisible, but I know the wonder of invisible Love... God is the Greatest!

~ Aireen C. Pontillo

No one is useless in this world, I might not do the greats you do, endure greatly as you do but at some point we have something in common, we both NEED one another.

~ Kabelo Mabona

Never mind the rule, 'If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all,' because that's not the route to take. Instead, look into the mirror and say those things to yourself. Then yell those things at yourself. And multiply how much that hurts by 10. And decide, should I still say these things? And walk away.

~ Rachel Eovacious