Greatness quotes
1.9K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Explore further
Browse quotes that often appear alongside greatness — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
Quote collection
Follow a thought to its author, or read the full quote page.
"The great make its feel, first of all, the indifference of circumstances. They call into activity the higher perceptions, and subdue the low habits of comfort and luxury; but the higher perceptions find their objects everywhere; only the low habits need palaces and banquets."
"The search after the great men is the dream of youth, and the most serious occupation of manhood."
"A chief event of life is the day in which we have encountered a mind that startled us."
"The measure of a master is his success in bringing all men around to his opinion twenty years later."
"All that Adam had, all that Caesar could, you have and can do.... Build, therefore, your own world."
"Great men are more distinguished by range and extent than by originality."
"There was never a man born so wise or good, but one or more companions came into the world with him, who delight in his faculty, and report it. I cannot see without awe, that no man thinks alone and no man acts alone, but the divine assessors who came up with him into life,--now under one disguise, now under another,--like a police in citizen's clothes, walk with him, step for step, through all kingdoms of time."
"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."
"Great men do not content us. It is their solitude, not their force, that makes them conspicuous."
"Every great man is a unique. The Scipionism of Scipio is precisely that part he could not borrow."
"What makes greatness is starting something that lives after you."
"Do not be dismayed, daughters, at the number of things that you have to consider before setting out on this divine journey, which is the royal road to heaven. By taking this road we gain such precious treasures that it is no wonder if the cost seems to us a high one. The time will come when we shall realize that all we have paid has been nothing at all by comparison with the greatness of our prizes."
"No one ever became great by imitation."
"He was dull in a new way, and that made many think him great."
"Those writers who lie on the watch for novelty can have little hope of greatness; for great things cannot have escaped former observation."
"Greatness is its own torment."
"There never was a great truth but it was reverenced; never a great institution, nor a great man, that did not, sooner or later, receive the reverence of mankind."
"The most useful is the greatest."
"In all the world there is nothing so remarkable as a great man, nothing so rare, nothing which so well repays study."
"The greatness of the human being consists in this: that it is capable of the universe."
