Famous Quotes & Sayings

Janelle Monae

Perfection is the enemy of greatness

Janelle Monae

Perfection is often the enemy of greatness

Jane Porter

none are fit judges of greatness but those who are capable of it.

Jane Porter

People do not always understand the motives of sublime conduct, and when they are astonished they are very apt to think they ought to be alarmed The truth is none are fit judges of greatness but those who are capable of it.

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

Every civilization depends on the quality of the individuals it produces. If you over-organize humans, over-legalize them, suppress their urge to greatness-they cannot work and their civilization collapses.

Frank Herbert

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

George Herbert

A great ship asks deep water.

Jean de la Bruyere

False greatness is unsociable and remote: conscious of its own frailty, it hides, or at least averts its face, and reveals itself only enough to create an illusion and not be recognized as the meanness that it really is. True greatness is free, kind, familiar and popular; it lets itself be touched and handled, it loses nothing by being seen at close quarters; the better one knows it, the more one admires it.

Jean de la Bruyere

The nearer we come to great men the more clearly we see that they are only men. They rarely seem great to their valets.

Jean de la Bruyere

The Great slight the men of wit, who have nothing but wit; the men of wit despise the Great, who have nothing but greatness; the good man pities them both, if with greatness or wit they have not virtue.

Jean de la Bruyere

A position of eminence makes a great person greater and a small person less.

Jean Baudrillard

We shall never resolve the enigma of the relation between the negative foundations of greatness and that greatness itself.

Buzz Aldrin

American greatness was elevated significantly after Sputnik.

Myles Munroe

Great leadership is not attained by pursuing greatness but by persevering through great tests.

Myles Munroe

The greatness of a man is measured by the way he treats the little man. Compassion for the weak is a sign of greatness

Mike Schmidt

I can't stand satisfaction. To me, greatness comes from that quest for perfection.

Igor Stravinsky

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

Giorgio Morandi

You cannot demonstrate your own greatness by remaining at one extreme, but by reaching out to both extremes at the same time, and filling the intermediate space.

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.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

The world is charged with the grandeur of God. It will flame out, like shining from shook foil; It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil Crushed.

Harry S Truman

There isn't any question about Washington's greatness. If his administration had been a failure, there would have been no United States. A lesser man couldn't have done it.... Washington was both a great administrator and a great leader, a truly great man in every way.

Harry S Truman

Being too good is apt to be uninteresting.

J. K. Rowling

You could be great, you know, it’s all here in your head, and Slytherin will help you on the way to greatness, no doubt about that.

Greg Louganis

I am a firm believer that you don't achieve greatness on your own. There is always someone there to lend a hand

Georg Brandes

Greatness has nothing to do with results or with success.

Georg C. Lichtenberg

There are people who possess not so much genius as a certain talent for perceiving the desires of the century, or even of the decade, before it has done so itself.

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?

Friedrich Nietzsche

The genius-in work and in deed-is necessarily a squanderer: the fact that he spends himself constitutes his greatness.

Friedrich Nietzsche

It is the privilege of greatness to confer intense happiness with insignificant gifts.

Friedrich Nietzsche

There is sense in hoping for recognition in a distant future only when we take it for granted that mankind will remain essentially unchanged, and that whatever is great is not for one age only but will be looked upon as great for all time.