"Envy not greatness: for thou mak'st thereby Thyself the worse, and so the distance greater."
Greatness quotes
Greatness
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Greatness quotes (page 27 of 94)
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"It is to be lamented that great characters are seldom without a blot."
"You have something special, you have GREATNESS within you!"
"I used to fight the pain, but recently this became clear to me: pain is not my enemy; it is my call to greatness. But when dealing with the Iron, one must be careful to interpret the pain correctly. Most injuries involving the Iron come from ego. I once spent a few weeks lifting weight that my body wasn’t ready for and spent a few months not picking up anything heavier than a fork. Try to lift what you’re not prepared to and the Iron will teach you a little lesson in restraint and self-control."
"It is the privilege of greatness to confer intense happiness with insignificant gifts."
"More and more it seems to me that the philosopher, being of necessity a man of tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, has always found himself, and had to find himself, in contradiction to his today: his enemy was ever the ideal of today. So far all these extraordinary furtherers of men whom one calls philosophers, though they themselves have rarely felt like friends of wisdom but rather like disagreeable fools and dangerous question marks, have found their task, their hard, unwanted, inescapable task, but eventually also the greatness of their task, in being the bad conscience of their time."
"There is sense in hoping for recognition in a distant future only when we take it for granted that mankind will remain essentially unchanged, and that whatever is great is not for one age only but will be looked upon as great for all time."
"Everyone has a potential for greatness."
"I was sorry to have my name mentioned as one of the great authors, because they have a sad habit of dying off. Chaucer is dead, Spencer is dead, so is Milton, so is Shakespeare, and I’m not feeling so well myself."
"Neither wealth or greatness render us happy."
"Service to others leads to greatness."
"The world cannot do without great men, but great men are very troublesome to the world."
"At most, the greatest persons are but great wens, and excrescences; men of wit and delightful conversation, but as morals for ornament, except they be so incorporated into the body of the world that they contribute something to the sustentation of the whole."
"Greatness is the aggregation of minuteness; nor can its sublimity be felt truthfully by any mind unaccustomed to the affectionate watching of what is least."
"Great abilities, when employed as God directs, do but make the owners of them greater and more painful servants to their neighbors."
"Some great men owe most of their greatness to the ability of detecting in those they destine for their tools the exact quality of strength that matters for their work."
"The greatest man is he who forms the taste of a nation; the next greatest is he who corrupts it."
"A great thing can only be done by a great person; and they do it without effort."
"Greatness is not a teachable nor gainable thing, but the expression of the mind of a God-made great man."
"The book you don't read won't help."