Greatness

To be a great champion you must believe you are the best. If you’re not, pretend you are.

Muhammad Ali

A great man shows his greatness by the way he treats little men.

Thomas Carlyle

A certain excessiveness seems a necessary element in all greatness.

Harvey Cushing

It is better to deserve honors and not have them than to have them and not deserve them.

Mark Twain

The greater the man, the greater the crime.

Thomas Fuller

Greatness is a zigzag streak of lightning in the brain.

Herbert Asquith

. . . be not afraid of greatness: some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.

William Shakespeare

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

Daniel J. Boorstin

The first test of a truly great man is his humility.

John Ruskin

Few great men could pass personnel.

Paul Goodman

No man is truly great who is great only in his own lifetime. The test of greatness is the page of history.

William Hazlitt

Nothing grows well in the shade of a big tree.

Constantin Brancusi

To do great things is difficult, but to command great things is more difficult.

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

It is not the strength, but the duration, of great sentiments that makes great men.

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

There may now exist great men for things that do not exist.

Samuel Burchardt

No great man ever complains of want of opportunity.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The nobler a man, the harder it is for him to suspect inferiority in others.

Cicero

Men of genius do not excel in any profession because they labor in it, but they labor in it because they excel.

William Hazlitt

It is the gods’ custom to bring low all things of surpassing greatness.

Herodotus

The superior man is distressed by his want of ability.

Confucius

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.

Matthew Arnold

There is no such thing as a little country. The greatness of a people is no more determined by their number than the greatness of a man is determined by his height.

Victor Hugo

We are both great men, but I have succeeded better in keeping it a profound secret than he has.

Bill Nye

To be great is to be misunderstood.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Great men are meteors designed to burn so that the earth may be lighted.

Napoleon Bonaparte

Nothing great will ever be achieved without great men, and men are great only if they are determined to be so.

Charles de Gaulle

Meeting Franklin Roosevelt was like opening your first bottle of champagne; knowing him was like drinking it.

Winston Churchill