Greatness Quotes

You don't have to be great to start, but you have to start to be great.

I am king. I am lord. I am praiseworthy. I am important. I am magnificent. I am foremost. I am a hero. I am a warrior. I am a lion, and I am virile.

Solomon, I have surpassed thee.

What millions died – that Caesar might be great!

Son, seek out a kingdom equal to and worthy of thyself, for Macedonia is too little for you.

Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on earth.

No one ever became great except through many and great mistakes.

The people think of wealth and power as the greatest fate, But in this world a spell of health is the best state. What men call sovereignty is a worldly strife and constant war. Worship of God is the highest throne, the happiest of all estates.

The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks. See the line from a sufficient distance, and it straightens itself to the average tendency. Your genuine action will explain itself, and will explain your other genuine actions. Your conformity explains nothing. Act singly, and what you have already done singly will justify you now. Greatness appeals to the future.

To live alone is the fate of all great souls.

Whenever God means to make a man great, he always breaks him in pieces first.

I think it is possible for ordinary people to choose to be extraordinary.

The price of greatness is responsibility.

America is great precisely because it is an open society, and an open society recognizes that nobody is the ultimate arbiter — and that we may be wrong at times, even if we are powerful. We must be open to criticism and respect divergent and different views and interests.

A great man is one who deliberately causes something important to a happen, the probability of which seemed low before he took up the task. A great man is a man who gives history a turn which it could scarcely have taken without him. They give history a twist which nobody would have predicted. Great men leave permanent effects.

Victorian values…were the values when our country became great.

The good is the enemy of the best.

Men who have greatness within them don't go into politics.

God is infinite, so His universe must be too. Thus is the excellence of God magnified and the greatness of His kingdom made manifest; He is glorified not in one, but in countless suns; not in a single earth, a single world, but in a thousand thousand, I say in an infinity of worlds.

No one achieves greatness by becoming a generalist. You don't hone a skill by diluting your attention to its development. The only way to get to the next level is focus.

Great men, unknown to their generation, have their fame among the great who have preceded them, and all true worldly fame subsides from their high estimate beyond the stars.

Just do what must be done. This may not be happiness, but it is greatness.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery that mediocrity can pay to greatness.

We grow great by dreams. All big men are dreamers.

Failure is a stepping-stone to greatness.