Great men are sincere. [ Emerson ]

Great souls are harmonious. [ Joseph Roux ]

Every great man is a unique. [ Emerson ]

Greatness is its own torment. [ Theodore Parker ]

The most useful is the greatest. [ Theodore Parker ]

Greatness appeals to the future. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]

A great man is made so for others. [ Thomas Wilson ]

Great is not great to the greater. [ Sir P. Sidney ]

To be great is to be misunderstood. [ Emerson ]

In a great soul everything is great. [ Pascal ]

A great mind becomes a great fortune. [ Seneca ]

All great men are partially inspired. [ Cicero ]

The tomb is the pedestal of greatness. [ Landor ]

Great men should not have great faults. [ La Rochefoucauld ]

Reproach is a concomitant of greatness. [ South ]

For he that once is good, is ever great. [ Ben Jonson ]

Are not great men the models of nations? [ Owen Meredith ]

The greatness that would make us grave,
Is but an empty thing.
What more than mirth would mortals have?
The cheerful man's a king. [ Bickerstaff ]

Greatness is nothing unless it be lasting. [ Napoleon ]

Love is not to be reason'd down or lost
In high ambition or a thirst of greatness. [ Addison ]

No man ever yet became great by imitation. [ Johnson ]

He has, I know not what
Of greatness in his looks, and of high fate
That almost awes me. [ Dryden ]

None think the great unhappy but the great. [ Young ]

Greatness, thou gaudy torment of our souls,
The wise man's fetter and the rage of fools. [ Otway ]

The world knows nothing of its greatest men. [ Henry Taylor ]

No really great man ever thought himself so. [ Hazlitt ]

Heaven knows, I had no such intent;
But that necessity so bowed the state.
That I and greatness were compelled to kiss. [ Shakespeare ]

The first step to greatness is to be honest. [ Johnson ]

Greatness, as we daily see it, is unsociable. [ Landor ]

All great men come out of the middle classes. [ Emerson ]

What millions died that Caesar might be great! [ Campbell ]

Although my cares do hang upon my soul
Like mines of lead, the greatness of my spirit
Shall shake the sullen weight off. [ Clapthorne ]

Greatness envy not; for thou mak'st thereby
Thyself the worse, and so the distance greater. [ Herbert ]

Greatness and goodness are not means, but ends. [ Coleridge ]

Greatness, with private men
Esteem'd a blessing, is to me a curse;
And we, whom from our high births they conclude
The only free men, are the only slaves:
Happy the golden mean. [ Massinger ]

Not that the heavens the little can make great,
But many a man has lived an age too late. [ R. H. Stoddard ]

No might nor greatness in mortality
Can censure escape; brick-wounding calumny
The whitest virtue strikes: what king so strong
Can tie the gall up in the slanderous tongue? [ William Shakespeare ]

Oh, greatness! thou art but a flattering dream,
A watery bubble, lighter than the air. [ Tracy ]

There is but one method, and that is hard labor. [ Sydney Smith ]

Greatness, once fallen out with fortune,
Must fall out with men too; what the declined is,
He shall as soon read in the eyes of others
As feel in his own fall. [ William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida ]

Great souls attract sorrow as mountains do storms. [ Richter ]

The civilities of the great are never thrown away. [ Johnson ]

A man in pursuit of greatness feels no little wants. [ Emerson ]

Greatness, once and for ever, has done with opinion. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]

The laborer is the author of all greatness and wealth. [ U. S. Grant ]

It is goodness, not greatness, that will; do you good. [ Proverb ]

It is the curse of greatness to be its own destruction. [ Nabb ]

Great men are never sufficiently shown but in struggles. [ Burke ]

Great men stand like solitary towers in the city of God. [ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ]

Nothing is great but the inexhaustible wealth of nature. [ Emerson ]

A great man is one who affects the mind of his generation. [ Beaconsfield ]

Rightly to be great is not to stir without great argument. [ William Shakespeare ]

Greatness doth not approach him who is forever looking down. [ Hitopadesa ]

Greatness may be present in lives whose range is very small. [ Phil. Brooks ]

The great man is the man who does a thing for the first time. [ Alexander Smith ]

It is the prerogative of great men only to have great defects. [ Rochefoucauld ]

The great man is to be the servant of mankind, not they of him. [ Theodore Parker ]

It is the age that forms the man, not the man that forms the age. [ Macaulay ]

To be great one must be positive, and gain strength through foes. [ Donn Piatt ]

The less people speak of their greatness, the more we think of it. [ Lord Bacon ]

Greatness of any kind has no greater foe than a habit of drinking. [ Walter Scott ]

The great are great only because we are on our knees. Let us rise! [ Prud'homme ]

Everything great is not always good, but all good things are great. [ Demosthenes ]

Great men are among the best gifts which God bestows upon a people. [ George S. Hillard ]

It is but the littleness of man that seeth no greatness in trifles. [ Wendell Phillips ]

Greatness, once fallen out with fortune, must fall out with men too. [ William Shakespeare ]

That man lives greatly, whatever his fate or fame, who greatly dies. [ Young ]

It is to be lamented that great characters are seldom without a blot. [ George Washington ]

A great man is made up of qualities that meet or make great occasions. [ Lowell ]

It is not in the nature of true greatness to be exclusive and arrogant. [ Beecher ]

The age does not believe in great men, because it does not possess any. [ Beaconsfield ]

That man is great who can use the brains of others to carry on his work. [ Donn Piatt ]

Greatness lies, not in being strong, but in the right using of strength. [ Beecher ]

There is as much greatness in owning a good turn, as in the doing of it. [ Proverb ]

Great men are more distinguished by range and extent than by originality. [ Emerson ]

True greatness is sovereign wisdom. We are never deceived by our virtues. [ Lamartine ]

We have not the love of greatness, but the love of the love of greatness. [ Carlyle ]

We believe that out of the public school grows the greatness of a nation. [ Mark Twain, "Public Education Association" Speech ]

What your heart thinks great is great. The soul's emphasis is always right. [ Emerson ]

Nothing is more simple than greatness; indeed, to be simple is to be great. [ Emerson ]

Honesty is not only the first step toward greatness, it is greatness itself. [ C. N. Bovee ]

It is, alas! the poor prerogative of greatness, to be wretched and unpitied. [ Congreve ]

Great men are rarely isolated mountain-peaks; they are the summits of ranges. [ T. W. Higginson ]

The greatest man is he who chooses right with the most invincible resolution. [ Seneca ]

He is great who is what he is from nature, and who never reminds us of others. [ Emerson ]

Since we cannot attain to greatness, let us revenge ourselves by railing at it. [ Montaigne ]

The young writer should remember that bigness is not greatness, nor fury force. [ George William Curtis ]

In order to do great things, it is necessary to live as if one was never to die. [ Vauvenargues ]

The great would not think themselves demigods if the little did not worship them. [ Boiste ]

It is not by his faults, but by his excellences, that we must measure a great man. [ George Henry Lewes ]

There was never yet a truly great man that was not at the same time truly virtuous. [ Benjamin Franklin ]

Great men lose somewhat of their greatness by being near us; ordinary men gain much. [ Landor ]

What is ambition but desire of greatness? And what is greatness but extent of power? [ Higgons ]

Strength with men is insensibility, greatness is pride, and calmness is indifference. [ George Sand ]

No great thought, no great object, satisfies the mind at first view, nor at the last. [ Abel Stevens ]

Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them. [ William Shakespeare ]

Copiousness and simplicity, variety and unity, constitute real greatness of character. [ Lavater ]

Great truths are portions of the soul of man; Great souls are the portions of eternity. [ Lowell ]

The world cannot do without great men, but great men are very troublesome to the world. [ Goethe ]

No sadder proof can be given by a man of his own littleness than disbelief in great men. [ Carlyle ]

Excellence and greatness of soul are most conspicuously displayed in contempt of riches.

Nothing can make a man truly great but being truly good and partaking of God's holiness. [ Matthew Henry ]

If for anything he loved greatness, it was because therein he might exercise his goodness. [ Sir P. Sidney ]

Nature stretches out her arms to embrace man; only let his thoughts be of equal greatness. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]

A great man knows the value of greatness: he dares not hazard it, he will not squander it. [ Landor ]

Distinction is an eminence that is attained but too frequently at the expense of a fireside. [ Simms ]

Nature never sends a great man into the planet, without confiding the secret to another soul. [ Emerson ]

Great men do not content us. It is their solitude, not their force, that makes them conspicuous. [ Emerson ]

The truly great rest in the knowledge of their own deserts, nor seek the conformation of the world. [ Alexander Smith ]

Great warriors, like great earthquakes, are principally remembered for the mischief they have done. [ Bovee ]

That man is great who rises to the emergencies of the occasion, and becomes master of the situation. [ Donn Piatt ]

The tomb is the pedestal of greatness. I make a distinction between God's great and the king's great. [ Landor ]

The true greatness of nations is in those qualities which constitute the greatness of the individual. [ Charles Sumner ]

They that stand high have many blasts to shake them; and if they fall, they dash themselves to pieces. [ William Shakespeare ]

Greatness is not a teachable nor gainable thing, but the expression of the mind of a God-made great man. [ Ruskin ]

Philosophy may raise us above grandeur, but nothing can elevate us above the ennui which accompanies it. [ Mme. de Maintenon ]

He who comes up to his own idea of greatness must always have had a very low standard of it in his mind. [ Hazlitt ]

The difference between Socrates and Jesus Christ? The great Conscious; the immeasurably great Unconscious. [ Carlyle ]

It is not the greatness of a man's means that makes him independent, so much as the smallness of his wants. [ W. Cobbett ]

The true prosperity and greatness of a nation is to be found in the elevation and education of its laborers. [ U. S. Grant ]

Great men are they who see that spiritual is stronger than any material force, that thoughts rule the world. [ Emerson ]

Great souls are always loyally submissive, reverent to what is over them: only small mean souls are otherwise. [ Carlyle ]

A solemn and religious regard to spiritual and eternal things is an indispensable element of all true greatness. [ Daniel Webster ]

A solid and substantial greatness of soul looks down with neglect on the censures and applauses of the multitude. [ Addison ]

The great are only great because we carry them on our shoulders; when we throw them off they sprawl on the ground. [ Montandre ]

The great men of the earth are but the markingstones on the road of humanity; they are the priests of its religion. [ Mazzini ]

In all the world there is nothing so remarkable as a great man. nothing so rare, nothing which so well repays study. [ Theodore Parker ]

Avoid greatness; in a cottage there may be found more real happiness than kings or their favorites enjoy in palaces. [ Horace ]

Like the air-invested heron, great persons should conduct themselves; and the higher they be, the less they should show. [ Sir P. Sidney ]

In life, we shall find many men that are great, and some men that are good, but very few men that are both great and good. [ Colton ]

Earthly greatness is a nice thing, and requires so much chariness in the managing, as the contentment of it cannot requite. [ Hall ]

A really great man is known by three signs - generosity in the design, humanity in the execution, and moderation in success. [ Bismarck ]

Great souls are not those who have fewer passions and more virtues than the common, but those only who have greater designs. [ La Rochefoucauld ]

The greatness of action includes immoral as well as moral greatness - Cortes and Napoleon, as well as Luther and Washington. [ Whipple ]

Our souls must become expanded by the contemplation of Nature's grandeur, before we can fully comprehend the greatness of man. [ Heine ]

Great names stand not alone for great deeds; they stand also for great virtues, and, doing them worship, we elevate ourselves. [ Henry Giles ]

Greatness is like a laced coat from Monmouth Street, which fortune lends us for a day to wear, tomorrow puts it on another's back. [ Fielding ]

Great abilities, when employed as God directs, do but make the owners of them greater and more painful servants to their neighbors. [ Swift ]

If it is a pleasure to be envied and shot at, to be maligned standing and to be despised falling, then it is a pleasure to be great. [ South ]

That Mirabeau understood how to act with others, and by others--this was his genius, this was his originality, this was his greatness. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]

Great minds do indeed react on the society which has made them what they are; but they only pay with interest what they have received. [ Macaulay ]

No great intellectual thing was ever done by great effort; a great thing can only be done by a great man, and be does it without effort. [ Ruskin ]

The use of great men is to serve the little men, to take care of the human race, and act as practical interpreters of justice and truth. [ Theodore Parker ]

It is the privilege of posterity to set matters right between those antagonists who, by their rivalry for greatness, divided a whole age. [ Addison ]

Those writers who lie on the watch for novelty can have little hope of greatness; for great things cannot have escaped former observation. [ Johnson ]

Greatness stands upon a precipice, and if prosperity carries a man never so little beyond his poise, it overbears and dashes him to pieces. [ Seneca ]

By a certain fate, great acts, and great eloquence have most commonly gone hand in hand, equalling and honoring each other in the same ages. [ Milton ]

O, be sick, great greatness, and bid thy ceremony give thee cure! Thinkest thou the fiery fever will go out with titles blown from adulation? [ William Shakespeare ]

There is a better thing than the great man who is always speaking, and that is the great man who only speaks when he has a great word to say. [ William Winter ]

Speaking generally, no man appears great to his contemporaries, for the same reason that no man is great to his servants - both know too much of him. [ Colton ]

Be substantially great in thyself, and more than thou appearest unto others; and let the world be deceived in thee, as they are in the lights of heaven. [ Sir Thomas Browne ]

A contemplation of God's works, a generous concern for the good of mankind, and the unfeigned exercise of humility only, denominate men great and glorious. [ Addison ]

The good man, even though overwhelmed by misfortune, loses never his inborn greatness of soul. Camphor-wood burnt in the fire becomes all the more fragrant. [ Sataka ]

There is a greatness in being generous, and there is only simple justice in satisfying creditors. Generosity is the part of the soul raised above the vulgar. [ Goldsmith ]

There is something on earth greater than arbitrary power. The thunder, the lightning, and the earthquake are terrific, but the judgment of the people is more. [ Daniel Webster ]

Greatness lies not in being strong, but in the right using of strength. He is greatest whose strength carries up the most hearts by the attraction of his own. [ Ward Beecher ]

There never was a great truth but it was reverenced: never a great institution, nor a great man, that did not, sooner or later, receive the reverence of mankind. [ Theodore Parker ]

Greatness, in any period and under any circumstances, has always been rare. It is of elemental birth, and is independent alike of its time and its circumstances. [ W. Winter ]

It is, in a great measure, by raising up and endowing great minds that God secures the advance of human affairs, and the accomplishment of His own plans on earth. [ Albert Barnes ]

The objects of avarice and ambition differ only in their greatness. A miser is as furious about a halfpenny as the man of ambition about the conquest of a kingdom. [ Adam Smith ]

The truly strong and sound mind is the mind that can embrace equally great things and small. I would have a man great in great things, and elegant in little things. [ Johnson ]

There is no man so great as not to have some littleness more predominant than all his greatness. Our virtues are the dupes, and often only the plaything of our follies. [ Bulwer-Lytton ]

Greatness is a spiritual condition worthy to excite love, interest, and admiration; and the outward proof of greatness is that we excite love, interest, and admiration. [ Matthew Arnold ]

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. [ Carlyle ]

The truly great are to be found everywhere; nor is it easy to say in what condition they spring up most plentifully. Real greatness has nothing to do with a man's sphere. [ William Ellery Channing ]

The way to acquire lasting esteem is not by the fewness of a writer's faults, but the greatness of his beauties, and our noblest works are generally most replete with both. [ Goldsmith ]

For as much as to understand and to be mighty are great qualities, the higher that they be, they are so much the less to be esteemed if goodness also abound not in the possessor. [ Sir P. Sidney ]

He only is great who has the habits of greatness; who, after performing what none in ten thousand could accomplish, passes on like Samson, and tells neither father nor mother of it. [ Lavater ]

A great man, I take it, is a man so inspired and permeated with the ideas of God and the Christly spirit as to be too magnanimous for vengeance, and too unselfish to seek his own ends. [ David Thomas ]

He that can heroically endure adversity will bear prosperity with equal greatness of soul; for the mind that cannot be dejected by the former is not likely to be transported by the latter. [ Fielding ]

Greatness of mind is not shown by admitting small things, but by making small things great under its influence. He who can take no interest in what is small will take false interest in what is great. [ John Ruskin ]

This is the part of a great man, after he has maturely weighed all circumstances, to punish the guilty, to spare the many, and in every state of fortune not to depart from an upright, virtuous conduct. [ Cicero ]

Those people who are always improving never become great Greatness is an eminence, the ascent to which is steep and lofty, and which a man must seize on at once by natural boldness and vigor, and not by patient, wary steps. [ Hazlitt ]

Greatness can only be rightly estimated when minuteness is justly reverenced. 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. [ John Ruskin ]

Whatever may be the means, or whatever the more immediate end of any kind of art, all of it that is good agrees in this, that it is the expression of one soul talking to another, and is precious according to the greatness of the soul that utters it. [ Ruskin ]

The true greatness and the true happiness of a country consist in wisdom; in that enlarged and comprehensive wisdom which includes education, knowledge, religion, virtue, freedom, with every influence which advances and every institution which supports them. [ Henry Giles ]

The business of the biographer is often to pass slightly over those performances and incidents which produce vulgar greatness, to lead the thoughts into domestic privacies, and display the minute details of daily life, where exterior appendages are cast aside, and men excel each other only by prudence and virtue. [ Dr. Johnson ]

Man is so great that his greatness appears even in the consciousness of his misery. A tree does not know itself to be miserable. It is true that it is misery indeed to know one's self to be miserable; but then it is greatness also. In this way, all man's miseries go. to prove his greatness. They are the miseries of a mighty potentate, of a dethroned monarch. [ Pascal ]

It is a folly for an eminent man to think of escaping censure, and a weakness to be affected with it. All the illustrious persons of antiquity, and indeed of every age in the world, have passed through this fiery persecution. There is no defense against reproach but obscurity; it is a kind of concomitant to greatness, as satires and invectives were an essential part of a Roman triumph. [ Addison ]

Lord Bacon told Sir Edward Coke when he boasted, The less you speak of your greatness, the more I shall think of it. Mirrors are the accompaniments of dandies, not heroes. The men of history were not perpetually looking in the glass to make sure of their own size. Absorbed in their work they did it, and did it so well that the wondering world saw them to be great, and labeled them accordingly. [ Rev. S. Coley ]

There have been many men who left behind them that which hundreds of years have not worn out. The earth has Socrates and Plato to this day. The world is richer yet by Moses and the old prophets than by the wisest statesmen. We are indebted to the past. We stand in the greatness of ages that are gone rather than in that of our own. But of how many of us shall it be said that, being dead, we yet speak? [ Beecher ]

You can throw yourselves away. You can become of no use in the universe except for a warning. You can lose your souls. Oh, what a loss is that! The perversion and degradation of every high and immortal power for an eternity! And shall this be true of any one of you? Will you be lost when One has come from heaven, traveling in the greatness of His strength, and with garments dyed in blood, on purpose to guide you home - home to a Father's house - to an eternal home? [ Mark Hopkins ]

He who expects from a great name in politics, in philosophy, in art, equal greatness in other things, is little versed in human nature. Our strength lies in our weakness. The learned in books are ignorant of the world. He who is ignorant of books is often well acquainted with other things; for life is of the same length in the learned and unlearned; the mind cannot be idle; if it is not taken up with one thing, it attends to another through choice or necessity; and the degree of previous capacity in one class or another is a mere lottery. [ Hazlitt ]

Greatness is not a teachable nor gainable thing, but the expression of the mind of a God-made man: teach, or preach, or labour as you will, everlasting difference is set between one man's capacity and another's; and this God-given supremacy is the priceless thing, always just as rare in the world at one time as another.... And nearly the best thing that men can generally do is to set themselves, not to the attainment, but the discovery of this: learning to know gold, when we see it, from iron-glance, and diamond from flint-sand, being for most of us a more profitable employment than trying to make diamonds of our own charcoal. [ John Ruskin ]

My friends, if you had but the power of looking into the future you might see that great things may come of little things. There is the great ocean, holding the navies of the world, which comes from little drops of water no larger than a woman's tears. There are the great constellations in the sky, made up of little bits of stars. Oh, if you could consider his future you might see that he might become the greatest poet of the universe, the greatest warrior the world has ever known, greater than Caesar, than Hannibal, than--er--er" (turning to the father) - What's his name? The father hesitated, then whispered back: His name? Well, his name is Mary Ann. [ Mark Twain, Educations and Citizenship ]