Quotes about Greatness

Otheresteem is--quite simply--a word to describe the view you have of another person. Even more, the feeling that view brings out in you. The value you can find in that person. Otheresteem is high when you like what you see in the other, both in the present and the imaginable future. You find that person to be capable of improvement, worthy of it.

If you would create something, you must be something.

He is greatest whose strength carries up the most hearts by the attraction of his own.

The soul that sees beauty may sometimes walk alone.

Words alone cannot fully convey the realities of the soul or the greatness of the human spirit.

The contemporary form of true greatness lies in a civilization founded on the spirituality of work.

Suffering becomes beautiful when anyone bears great calamities with cheerfulness, not through insensibility but through greatness of mind.

Our destiny is greatness and we must return to its fulfillment.

Never underestimate the power of dreams and the influence of the human spirit. We are all the same in this notion: The potential for greatness lives within each of us.

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.

Man's greatness lies in his power of thought.

Keep me away from the wisdom which does not cry, the philosophy which does not laugh and the greatness which does not bow before children.

It is incumbent upon us to understand our greatness and believe in it so that we do not cheapen and profane ourselves.

Integrity is the first step to true greatness. Men love to praise, but are slow to practice it. To maintain it in high places costs self-denial; in all places it is liable to opposition, but its end is glorious, and the universe will yet do it homage.

Human relations are built on feeling, not on reason or knowledge. And feeling is not an exact science; like all spiritual qualities, it has the vagueness of greatness about it.

Greatness, in the last analysis, is largely bravery - courage in escaping from old ideas and old standards and respectable ways of doing things.

Greatness lies, not in being strong, but in the right using of strength; and strength is not used rightly when it serves only to carry a man above his fellows for his own solitary glory. He is the greatest whose strength carries up the most hearts by the attraction of his own.

Greatness is a spiritual condition.

Greatness and goodness are not means, but ends.

Great men are rare, poets are rarer, but the great man who is a poet, transfiguring his greatness, is the rarest of all events.

Few will have the greatness to bend history itself; but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total; of all those acts will be written the history of this generation.

Do not trust people. They are capable of greatness.

As machines become more and more efficient and perfect, so it will become clear that imperfection is the greatness of man.

As human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world - that is the myth of the atomic age - as in being able to remake ourselves.

All greatness of character is dependent on individuality. The man who has no other existence than that which he partakes in common with all around him, will never have any other than an existence of mediocrity.

You are not here merely to make a living. You are here in order to enable the world to live more amply, with greater vision, with a finer spirit of hope and achievement. You are here to enrich the world, and you impoverish yourself if you forget the errand.

Some things have not changed since the dawn of history, and bid fair to last out time itself. One of these things is the capacity for greatness in man—his capacity for being often the master of the event —and sometimes even more—the changer of the course of history itself. This capacity for greatness is a very precious gift, and we are under a danger in our day of stifling it.

A man who has once perceived, however temporarily and however briefly, what makes greatness of soul, can no longer be happy if he allows himself to be petty, self-seeking, troubled by trivial misfortunes, dreading what fate may have in store for him. The man capable of greatness of soul will open wide the windows of his mind, letting the winds blow freely upon it from every portion of the universe.

He will see himself and life and the world as truly as our human limitations will permit; realizing the brevity and minuteness of human life, he will realize also that in individual minds is concentrated whatever of value the known universe contains. And he will see that the man whose mind mirrors the world becomes in a sense as great as the world. In emancipation from the fears that beset the slave of circumstance he will experience a profound joy, and through all the vicissitudes of his outward life he will remain in the depths of his being a happy man.

Recipe for greatness — To bear up under loss, to fight the bitterness of defeat and the weakness of grief, to be victor over anger, to smile when tears are close, to resist evil men and base instincts, to hate hate and to love love, to go on when it would seem good to die, to seek ever after the glory and the dream, to look up with unquenchable faith in something evermore about to be, that is what any man can do, and so be great.

Great men are true men, the men in whom nature has succeeded. They are not extraordinary - they are in the true order. It is the other species of men who are not what they ought to be.