Great Quotes and Greatness Sayings
What does it mean to be great? Is it a trait passed down from your family and friends? Or, is it something you find in yourself?
If you want to learn more about what it takes to achieve greatness, read what other people say about the topic in these inspirational great quotes.
Best Quotes about Greatness
1.) Your greatness is revealed not by the lights that shine upon you, but by the light that shines within you.
Ray A. Davis
2.) The greater the artist, the greater the doubt. Perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize.
Robert Hughes
3.) No one has ever achieved greatness without dreams.
Roy T. Bennett
4.) Greatness, generally speaking, is an unusual quantity of a usual quality grafted upon a common man.
William Allen White
5.) Greatness is a property for which no man can receive credit too soon; it must be possessed long before it is acknowledged.
Emerson
6.) I was never afraid of failure, for I would sooner fail than not be among the greatest.
John Keats
7.) Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.
Mark Twain
See Positive Quotes.
Good Quotes on Being Great
The past is to be respected and acknowledged but not worshipped; it is our future in which we will find our greatness.
Pierre Trudeau
When you live positively it is impossible to not also be living for something greater than yourself.
Bryant McGill
The final proof of greatness lies in being able to endure criticism without resentment.
Elbert Hubbard
A great person is one who affects the mind of their generation.
Benjamin Disraeli
He knew now that it was his own will to happiness which must make the next move. But if he was to do so, he realized that he must come to terms with time, that to have time was at once the most magnificent and the most dangerous of experiments. Idleness is fatal only to the mediocre.
Albert Camus
Greatness is a transitory experience. It is never consistent. It depends in part upon the myth-making imagination of humankind. The person who experiences greatness must have a feeling for the myth he is in. He must reflect what is projected upon him. And he must have a strong sense of the sardonic. This is what uncouples him from belief in his own pretensions. The sardonic is all that permits him to move within himself. Without this quality, even occasional greatness will destroy a man.
Frank Herbert
Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.
Albert Einstein
Funny Great Quotes
It’s hard to be a diamond in a rhinestone world.
Dolly Parton
Work is the greatest thing in the world, so we should always save some of it for tomorrow.
Don Herold
Until you’re ready to look foolish, you’ll never have the possibility of being great.
Cher
If a little is great, and a lot is better, then way too much is just about right!
Mae West
A prudent man will always try to follow in the footsteps of great men and imitate those who have been truly outstanding so that if he is not quite as skillful as they, at least some of their ability may rub off on him.
Niccolò Machiavelli
People who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.
Isaac Asimov
Wherever you find a great man, you will find a great mother or a great wife standing behind him — or so they used to say. It would be interesting to know how many great women have had great fathers and husbands behind them.
Dorothy L. Sayers
Short Great Quotes
In our time no one has the conception of what is great. It is up to me to show them.
Napoleon Bonaparte
Self-belief and hard work will always earn you success.
Virat Kohli
To be great is to be misunderstood.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
It takes a great man to be a good listener.
Calvin Coolidge
Good and great are seldom in the same man.
Winston S. Churchill
Don’t be afraid to give up the good to go for the great.
John D. Rockefeller
Creativity means believing you have greatness.
Dr. Wayne W. Dyer
A great man is always willing to be little.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Famous Quotations on Greatness
Great men are not born great, they grow great
Mario Puzo
If we are to be really great people, we must strive in good faith to play a great part in the world. We cannot avoid meeting great issues. All that we can determine for ourselves is whether we shall meet them well or ill.
Theodore Roosevelt
The world offers you comfort. But you were not made for comfort. You were made for greatness.
Pope Benedict XVI
Not everybody can be famous, but everybody can be great, because greatness is determined by service.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Kindness is the essence of greatness and the fundamental characteristic of the noblest men and women I have known.
Joseph B. Wirthlin
Be not afraid of greatness. Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and others have greatness thrust upon them.
William Shakespeare
Greatness Insights
The starting place for your greatness is desire. The desire to succeed, to serve others, to keep on going no matter what.
Assegid Habtewold
As human beings, we all have the potential for greatness. Unfortunately, there are many things in life that hold us back like agonizing personal experiences, hurts, disappointments and major setbacks that form in us limiting beliefs about ourselves.
Clarence Chan
The words you speak can uplift and inspire people to love, laugh and achieve great things. Your words can also instill a sense of fear, hatred, and even hopelessness in the person who is on the receiving end.
Alex Uwajeh
Nothing great will ever be achieved without great men, and men are great only if they are determined to be so.
Charles de Gaulle
Never underestimate the power of dreams and the influence of the human spirit. We are all the same in this notion: The potential for greatness lives within each of us.
Wilma Rudolph
Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Greatness Has A Cost
Witness Greatness
You were put on this earth to achieve your greatest self, to live out your purpose, and to do it courageously.
Steve Maraboli
Suddenly summoned to witness something great and horrendous, we keep fighting not to reduce it to our own smallness.
John Updike
The measure of greatness in a scientific idea is the extent to which it stimulates thought and opens up new lines of research.
Paul Dirac
Sometimes it takes great suffering to pierce the soul and open it up to greatness.
Jocelyn Murray
The greatness of humanity is not in being human but in being humane.
Mahatma Gandhi
Greatness depends on where you are coming from.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
There is no greatness where there is no simplicity, goodness, and truth.
Leo Tolstoy
You treat people with greatness, and greatness will come back to you.
Afrika Bambaataa
Always be a first-rate version of yourself and not a second-rate version of someone else.
Judy Garland
The Path To Being Great
Doing what needs to be done may not make you happy, but it will make you great.
George Bernard Shaw
Whatever your passion is, keep doing it. Don’t waste time chasing after success or comparing yourself to others. Every flower blooms at a different pace. Excel at doing what your passion is and only focus on perfecting it. Eventually people will see what you are great at doing, and if you are truly great, success will come chasing after you.
Suzy Kassem
The first step toward success is taken when you refuse to be a captive of the environment in which you first find yourself.
Mark Caine
Somewhere in the world, there is a defeat for everyone. Some are destroyed by defeat, and some made small and mean by victory. Greatness lives in one who triumphs equally over defeat and victory.
John Steinbeck
As human beings, it is our general belief that successful people are special and that they are born destined for greatness. It is just too difficult to comprehend that the main thing that separates those people from us is not anything particularly special; it is simply their mindset and habits.
G.Manifold
Men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence– whether much that is glorious– whether all that is profound– does not spring from disease of thought– from moods of mind exalted at the expense of the general intellect.
Edgar Allan Poe
Magnificent Quotes
When you’re good at something, you’ll tell everyone. When you’re great at something, they’ll tell you.
Walter Payton
Success is the sum of small efforts, repeated day-in and day-out.
Robert Collier
As regards intellectual work it remains a fact, indeed, that great decisions in the realm of thought and momentous discoveries and solutions of problems are only possible to an individual, working in solitude.
Sigmund Freud
Man’s greatness consists in his ability to do and the proper application of his powers to things needed to be done.
Frederick Douglass
The mark of a great man is one who knows when to set aside the important things in order to accomplish the vital ones.
Brandon Sanderson
If a man has any greatness in him, it comes to light, not in one flamboyant hour, but in the ledger of his daily work.
Beryl Markham
Whoever renders service to many puts himself in line for greatness–great wealth, great return, great satisfaction, a great reputation, and great joy.
Jim Rohn
Great leaders can see the greatness in others when they can’t see it themselves and lead them to their highest potential they don’t even know.
Roy T. Bennett
Great Quotes for Instagram
These great quotes work well for captions.
To seek greatness is the only righteous vengeance.
Criss Jami
Being a coach means that you care for someone else’s feelings rather than your own – and that involves harnessing someone’s potential for greatness and making that person realize that he can do something positive about his life.
Brad Peterson
Failures, repeated failures, are finger posts on the road to achievement. One fails forward toward success.
C.S. Lewis
A man’s dreams are an index to his greatness.
Zadok Rabinowitz
Discover the traits that make you great and develop those to become all you can be.
Demond Jackson
A man’s life is interesting primarily when he has failed. I well know. For it’s a sign that he tried to surpass himself.
Georges Clemenceau
We must remember that, within each difficulty, the seed for its solution is stored, and quite possibly the seed of greatness is there, too, just waiting to be found.
Vivian Eisenecher
Be careful not to mistake insecurity and inadequacy for humility! Humility has nothing to do with the insecure and inadequate! Just like arrogance has nothing to do with greatness!
C. JoyBell C.
By Emma Johnson
Emma is a quote curator and writes about quotations and literature.
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