Greatness Quotes

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.

It is important, therefore, to hold fast to this: that poetry is at bottom a criticism of life; that the greatness of a poet lies in his powerful and beautiful application of ideas to life to the question: How to live.

It is yet a higher speech of his than the other, It is true greatness to have in one the frailty of a man and the security of a god.

Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some hire public relations officers.

For greatness after all, in spite of its name, appears to be not so much a certain size as a certain quality in human lives. It may be present in lives whose range is very small.

And I said in underbreath All our life is mixed with death, And who knoweth which is best? And I smiled to think God's greatness Flowed around our incompleteness, Round our restlessness, His rest.

The task of leadership is not to put greatness into humanity, but to elicit it, for the greatness is already there.

For those of us who have been thrown into hell, mysterious melodies and the torturing images of a vanished beauty will always bring us, in the midst of crime and folly, the echo of that harmonious insurrection which bears witness, throughout the centuries, to the greatness of humanity.

All greatness is unconscious, or it is little and naught.

Man's unhappiness, as I construe, comes of his greatness; it is because there is an Infinite in him, which with all his cunning he cannot quite bury under the Finite.

Real greatness has nothing to do with a mans sphere. It does not lie in the magnitude of his outward agency, in the extent of the effects which he produces. The greatest men may do comparatively little.

To "go to extremes" is ever symptomatic of genius and greatness.

Spanking Jack was so comely, so pleasant, so jolly, Though winds blew great guns, still he d whistle and sing; Jack loved his friend, and was true to his Molly, And if honour gives greatness, was great as a king.

The measure of greatness in a scientific idea is the extent to which it stimulates thought and opens up new lines of research.