Quotes about Greatness

The need to be a great artist makes it hard to be an artist. The need to produce a great work of art makes it hard to produce any art at all.

The greatness of a man's power is the measure of his surrender.

No man is great enough or wise enough for any of us to surrender our destiny to. The only way in which anyone can lead us is to restore to us the belief in our own guidance.

The recalling of beautiful things, whether they are your own experiences or the acheivements of others, is a creative act. Simple ideas can be restated by rote; but profound ideas must be recreated by will and imagination.

All great experience has a guarded entrance and a windowless facade.

The extent to which we live from day to day, from week to week, intent on details and oblivious to larger presences, is a gauge of our impoverishment in time.

Fast drivers can see no further than slow drivers, but they must look further down the road to time their reactions safely. Similarly, people with great projects afoot habitually look further and more clearly into the future than people who are mired in day-to-day concerns.

A secret of the masters isn't a secret kept by the masters; it's a secret that nonmasters—everyone but very accomplished adepts—unknowingly conspire to keep from themselves even though the secret is available in broad daylight.

There is no such thing as an ordinary person, and no human being has ever fully seen or appreciated another. We are too vast.

Men nearly always follow the tracks made by others and proceed in their affairs by imitation, even though they cannot entirely keep to the tracks of others or emulate the prowess of their models. So a prudent man should always follow in the footsteps of great men and imitate those who have been outstanding.

Man's Unhappiness... comes of his Greatness; it is because there is an Infinite in him, with which all his cunning he cannot quite bury under the Finite... Try him with half of a Universe, of an Omnipotence, he sets to quarreling with the proprietor of the other half, and declares himself the most maltreated of men. Always there is a black spot in our sunshine: It is... the Shadow of Ourselves.

England...the greatest and the most glorious and beautiful land on earth.

Neither genius, fame, nor love show the greatness of the soul. Only kindness can do that.

"Wherever there is greatness,  great government or power,
even great feeling or compassion,
Error also is great.We progress and mature by fault"

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. - 'Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.' - 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.

The blind cannot see the sun.

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

Someone who has reduced his mind and life and soul and personality to meager or minor things -- someone marked by "mikropsychia" or in Latin "pusillanimitas" -- has a petty-souled outlook on life that no one but him ingrained in him. It is not great wealth or great power that makes a man "great," but "makropsychia" or "magnanimitas," great-souledness, a distinctively aristic virtue, a primal determination to rupture the finite and reductivist structures that habits and mechanical intellect tend to erect in our lives. The lust of most people to live in a trivialized and finitized or ordinarized world is patent; it is a way of achieving security, making oneself safe from threats, challenges, criticisms. And the lust of aristoi to live in a world of greatness, of monumental issues and questions that are made of the kind of bronze that will endure for ages to come, that is also patent: it is a way for capacious souls to furnish their minds with just the right scale or magnitude of challenges, of intellectual and moral instruments with the right heft for their wills to wield.

behind every great man is a great idea.

You must ask, "What do we mean by great results?" Your goals don't have to be quantifiable, but they do have to be describable. Some leaders try to insist, "The only acceptable goals are measurable," but that's actually an undisciplined statement. Lots of goals—beauty, quality, life change, love—are worthy but not quantifiable. But you do have to be able to tell if you're making progress.

Most times a person grows up gradually, but I found myself in a hurry... Hoping to find an answer, I uncovered an article about the common goldfish. "Kept in a small bowl, the goldfish will remain small. With more space, the fish will double, triple, or quadruple in size." It occurred to me then that I was intended for larger things. After all, a giant man can't have an ordinary-sized life.

The greatness of a man's power is the measure of his surrender

Between knowing and doing there is a great gap. Those who are willing to cross the gap find their greatness.   

Great work is done by people who are not afraid to be great.

Make each day your masterpiece.

In my stars I am above thee; but be not afraid of greatness: some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.

A man's dreams are an index to his greatness.

Greatness follows those who lead the way.

Seclusion is the price of greatness.

I AM GOD's GREAT IDEA, AND I AM READY TO UNFOLD MY GREATNESS! I take this bold statement of Truth with me every day, and I allow it to become my reality.  I have dared to envision a preferable future.  I get excited just thinking that no matter what I want for myself, it is only a tiny glimpse of what God has in store for me.