GREATNESS
Quotes
1
To be a great champion you must believe you are the best. If you’re not, pretend you are.
— Muhammad Ali
2
A great man shows his greatness by the way he treats little men.
— Thomas Carlyle
3
A certain excessiveness seems a necessary element in all greatness.
— Harvey Cushing
4
It is better to deserve honors and not have them than to have them and not deserve them.
— Mark Twain
5
The greater the man, the greater the crime.
— Thomas Fuller
6
Greatness is a zigzag streak of lightning in the brain.
— Herbert Asquith
7
. . . be not afraid of greatness: some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.
— William Shakespeare
8
Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some hire public relations officers.
— Daniel J. Boorstin
9
The first test of a truly great man is his humility.
— John Ruskin
10
Few great men could pass personnel.
— Paul Goodman
11
No man is truly great who is great only in his own lifetime. The test of greatness is the page of history.
— William Hazlitt
12
Nothing grows well in the shade of a big tree.
— Constantin Brancusi
13
To do great things is difficult, but to command great things is more difficult.
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
14
It is not the strength, but the duration, of great sentiments that makes great men.
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
15
There may now exist great men for things that do not exist.
— Samuel Burchardt
16
No great man ever complains of want of opportunity.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
17
The nobler a man, the harder it is for him to suspect inferiority in others.
— Cicero
18
Men of genius do not excel in any profession because they labor in it, but they labor in it because they excel.
— William Hazlitt
19
It is the gods’ custom to bring low all things of surpassing greatness.
— Herodotus
20
The superior man is distressed by his want of ability.
— Confucius
21
Greatness is a spiritual condition worthy to excite love, interest, and admiration, and the outward proof of possessing greatness is that we excite love, interest, and admiration.
— Matthew Arnold
22
There is no such thing as a little country. The greatness of a people is no more determined by their number than the greatness of a man is determined by his height.
— Victor Hugo
23
We are both great men, but I have succeeded better in keeping it a profound secret than he has.
— Bill Nye
24
To be great is to be misunderstood.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
25
Great men are meteors designed to burn so that the earth may be lighted.
— Napoleon Bonaparte
26
Nothing great will ever be achieved without great men, and men are great only if they are determined to be so.
— Charles de Gaulle
27
Meeting Franklin Roosevelt was like opening your first bottle of champagne; knowing him was like drinking it.
— Winston Churchill
Saying
One does not become great by claiming greatness.
— African saying
Joke
The exercise during history class one day was for each of the students to list whom they considered to be the eleven greatest Americans. After half an hour, everyone had turned in their papers except Irwin, who was still scratching his head and thinking furiously. “What’s up?” asked the teacher. “Can’t you come up with eleven great Americans?”
“I’ve got all but one,” the student explained hastily. “It’s the quarterback I can’t decide on.”