Famous Quotes & Sayings

Herman Melville

Failure is the true test of greatness

Herman Melville

It is better to fail in originality, than to succeed in imitation. He who has never failed somewhere, that man can not be great. Failure is the true test of greatness.

Henry David Thoreau

The great poem must have the stamp of greatness as well as its essence.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Great men never make bad use of their superiority. They see it and feel it and are not less modest. The more they have, the more they know their own deficiencies.

Jillian Michaels

Many are so preoccupied with what others think it defines their existence. When we fixate externally, it keeps us from truly knowing ourselves and our destiny. Most [people] fear looking inward for worry they won't find greatness, but when you stop allowing others to define your worth, you'll see—greatness exists in us all, waiting to be
 expressed

Jerry Falwell

You do not determine a man's greatness by his talent or wealth, as the world does, but rather by what it takes to discourage him.

Jeremy Brett

The most important thing when you're working with greatness is to learn from it, not challenge it.

Jean Rostand

Greatness, in order to gain recognition, must all too often consent to ape greatness.

Jean de La Fontaine

Neither wealth or greatness render us happy.

Harpo Marx

The passing of an ordinary man is sad. The passing of a great man is tragic, and doubly tragic when the greatness passes before the man does.

Harriet Beecher Stowe

What makes saintliness in my view, as distinguished from ordinary goodness, is a certain quality of magnanimity and greatness of soul that brings life within the circle of the heroic.

Ignatius of Antioch

Our task is not one of producing persuasive propaganda; Christianity shows its greatness when it is hated by the world.

Jaleel White

The conventions of an almighty agency tapping you for greatness and signing you up and telling you this is going to be the next big thing; that has not been my career.

Frank Herbert

Greatness is a transitory experience. It is never consistent. It depends in part upon the myth-making imagination of humankind. The person who experiences greatness must have a feeling for the myth he or she is in. That person must reflect what is projected upon him or her.

Frank Herbert

The person who experiences greatness must have a feeling for the myth he is in.

Igor Stravinsky

Nothing is likely about masterpieces, least of all whether there will be any.

Francois de La Rochefoucauld

To achieve greatness one should live as if they will never die.

Giordano Bruno

God is infinite, so His universe must be too. Thus is the excellence of God magnified and the greatness of His kingdom made manifest; He is glorified not in one, but in countless suns; not in a single earth, a single world, but in a thousand thousand, I say in an infinity of worlds.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

For I think it is the case with genius that it is not when quiescent so very much above mediocrity as the difference between the two might lead us to think, but that it has the power and privilege of rising from that level to a height utterly far from mediocrity: in other words that its greatness is that it can be so great.

Harry S Truman

Being too good is apt to be uninteresting.

Georg Brandes

Greatness has nothing to do with results or with success.

Friedrich Nietzsche

There are people who are so presumptuous that they know no other way to praise a greatness that they publicly admire than by representing it as a preliminary stage and bridge leading to themselves.

Friedrich Nietzsche

The discipline of suffering, of great suffering- do you not know that only this discipline has created all enhancements of man so far? That tension of the soul in unhappiness which cultivates its strength, its shudders face to face with great ruin, its inventiveness and courage in enduring, preserving, interpreting, and exploiting suffering, and whatever has been granted to it of profundity, secret, mask, spirit, cunning, greatness- was it not granted to it through suffering, through the discipline of great suffering?

Alexander Smith

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

Alexander Smith

The greatness of an artist or a writer does not depend on what he has in common with other artists and writers, but on what he has peculiar to himself.

Aaron Rodgers

I know I'm capable of greatness, and I'm expecting to reach that level.

A. S. Byatt

Biographies are no longer written to explain or explore the greatness of the great. They redress balances, explore secret weaknesses, demolish legends.

Adam Smith

Upstart greatness is everywhere less respected than ancient greatness.

Adam Smith

That wealth and greatness are often regarded with the respect and admiration which are due only to wisdom and virtue; and that the contempt, of which vice and folly are the only proper objects, is most often unjustly bestowed upon poverty and weakness, has been the complaint of moralists in all ages.

Abraham Joshua Heschel

A prophet's true greatness is his ability to hold God and man in a single thought.

David Limbaugh

A president who believed that America's greatness is recoverable and expandable - a chief executive determined to lead us back to national restoration - would reject the crippling notions of national impotency that Obama has embraced.

David Benioff

‎I was cursed with the pessimism of both the Russians and the Jews two of the gloomiest tribes in the world. Still if there wasn't greatness in me maybe I had the talent to recognize it in others even in the most irritating others.

Darrell Issa

Remember, America's greatness is based on creating wealth like the rest of the world has never known, and then, making sure it's shared throughout a middle class and even the underprivileged.