You will become as small as your controlling desire; as great as your dominant aspiration.
~ James Allen

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

Greatness is a spiritual condition.
~ Matthew Arnold

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

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

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

The dullard's envy of brilliant men is always assuaged by the suspicion that they will come to a bad end.
~ Sir Max Beerbohm

Great men are not always wise.
~ Bible

Great people are meteors designed to burn so that the earth may be lighted.
~ Napoleon Bonaparte

Greatness be nothing unless it be lasting.
~ Napoleon Bonaparte

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

The greatness of a man's power is the measure of his surrender.
~ William Booth

All your youth you want to have your greatness taken for granted; when you find it taken for granted, you are unnerved.
~ Elizabeth Bowen

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

Great men are the guideposts and landmarks in the state.
~ Edmund Burke

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

Sighing that Nature formed but one such man, and broke the die.
~ Lord Byron

What millions died that Caesar might be great?
~ Joseph Campell

All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning.
~ Albert Camus

No great man lives in vain. The history of the world is but the biography of great men.
~ Thomas Carlyle