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The first step toward greatness is to be honest.
-Proverb
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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.
-Henri Frederic Amiel
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Greatness is a spiritual condition.
-Matthew Arnold
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The first element of greatness is fundamental humbleness (this should not be confused with servility); the second is freedom from self; the third is intrepid courage, which, taken in its widest interpretation, generally goes with truth; and the fourth --the power to love --although I have put it last, is the rarest.
-Margot Asquith
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We shall never resolve the enigma of the relation between the negative foundations of greatness and that greatness itself.
-Jean Baudrillard
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Because you are a great lord, you believe yourself to be a great genius. You took the trouble to be born, but no more.
-Pierre De Beaumarchais
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The dullard's envy of brilliant men is always assuaged by the suspicion that they will come to a bad end.
-Max Beerbohm
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Great men are not always wise.
-Bible
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The true greatness of a nation is not measured by the vastness of its territory, or by the multitude of its people, or by the profusion of its exports and imports; but by the extent to which it has contributed to the life and thought and progress of the world. A man's greatness is not estimated by the size of his body or of his purse; not by his family connections or social position, however high these may be. He may bulk large in public estimation today, but tomorrow he will be forgotten like a dream, and his very servants may secure a higher position and a name lasting possibly a little longer.
A man's greatness is estimated by his influence, not over the votes and empty cheers of a changing and passing crowd, but by his abiding, inspiring influence in their bidden thoughts, upon their ways of thinking, and consequently of acting. That is why the Wycliffes, Shakespeares, Miltons, Newtons, Wesleys, and Gladstones of English history live, and will live, in everlasting memory, while lesser men are remembered only through them, and the crowd of demagogues, pretenders, and self-seekers are named, if ever named, only to point a moral, or adorn a tale.
So with nations. A great nation is not one which, like Russia, has an enormous territory ; or, like China, has an enormous population. It is the nation which gives mankind new modes of thought, new ideals of life, new hopes, new aspirations; which lifts the world out of the rut, and sets it going on a cleaner and brighter road.
-L. E. Blaze, Lecture at the D. B. U. Hall, November 26, 1926
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The herd seek out the great, not for their sake but for their influence; and the great welcome them out of vanity or need.
-Napoleon Bonaparte
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Great people are meteors designed to burn so that the earth may be lighted.
-Napoleon Bonaparte
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Greatness be nothing unless it be lasting.
-Napoleon Bonaparte
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The greatness of a man's power is the measure of his surrender.
-William Booth
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All your youth you want to have your greatness taken for granted; when you find it taken for granted, you are unnerved.
-Elizabeth Bowen
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No one who has come to true greatness has not felt in some degree that his life belongs to the people, and what God has given them he gives it for mankind.
-Phillips Brooks
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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
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Difficulty, my brethren, is the nurse of greatness
-William Cullen Bryant
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The great must submit to the dominion of prudence and of virtue, or none will long submit to the dominion of the great.
-Edmund Burke
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Great men are the guideposts and landmarks in the state.
-Edmund Burke
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Sighing that Nature formed but one such man, and broke the die.
-Lord (George Gordon) Byron
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What millions died that Caesar might be great?
-Joseph Campell
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All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning.
-Albert Camus
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The difference between Socrates and Jesus? The great conscious and the immeasurably great unconscious.
-Thomas Carlyle
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No great man lives in vain. The history of the world is but the biography of great men.
-Thomas Carlyle
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All great men are gifted with intuition. They know without reasoning or analysis, what they need to know.
-Alexis Carrel
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Books about Greatness & Great Things
