Great Quotes

It is a melancholy truth that even great men have their poor relations.

There have been many great men that have flattered the people who ne'er loved them.

I've also seen that great men are often lonely. This is understandable, because they have built such high standards for themselves that they often feel alone. But that same loneliness is part of their ability to create.

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

In reading the lives of great men, I found that the first victory they won was over themselves... self-discipline with all of them came first.

Moderation has been called a virtue to limit the ambition of great men, and to console undistinguished people for their want of fortune and their lack of merit.

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

Great men are like eagles, and build their nest on some lofty solitude.

Great men are seldom over-scrupulous in the arrangement of their attire.

The world's great men have not commonly been great scholars, nor its great scholars great men.

I distrust Great Men. They produce a desert of uniformity around them and often a pool of blood too, and I always feel a little man's pleasure when they come a cropper.

It's rather splendid to think of all those great men and women who appear to have presented symptoms that allow us to describe them as bipolar. Whether it's Hemingway, Van Gogh... Robert Schumann has been mentioned... Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath... some of them with rather grim ends.

Produce great men, the rest follows.

It is only the great men who are truly obscene. If they had not dared to be obscene, they could never have dared to be great.

Even the best intentioned of great men need a few scoundrels around them; there are some things you cannot ask an honest ma to do.

Nothing great will ever be achieved without great men, and men are great only if they are determined to be so.

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

The only good luck many great men ever had was being born with the ability and determination to overcome bad luck.

Some great men owe most of their greatness to the ability of detecting in those they destine for their tools the exact quality of strength that matters for their work.

There would be no great men if there were no little ones.

I think my best work has been in France with great men. It's been my great fortune to work with really great men - with Olivier Assayas, Raoul Ruiz, Jacques Rivette. I am tutored by them.

The great men of a nation reach out to all mankind. They are unifying, not divisive; internationally conciliating and still great nationally.

Great men hallow a whole people, and lift up all who live in their time.

Great men always pay deference to greater.

It is chiefly through books that we enjoy intercourse with superior minds. In the best books, great men talk to us, give us their most precious thoughts, and pour their souls into ours.

The reward of great men is that, long after they have died, one is not quite sure that they are dead.

All great men are gifted with intuition. They know without reasoning or analysis, what they need to know.

Great men are rare, poets are rarer, but the great man who is a poet, transfiguring his greatness, is the rarest of all events.

I jump out of perfectly good airplanes, and it's a great thrill and it allows me to share in the dangers that our great men and women in uniform share in on a regular basis.

They've all been through bad things. So bad things happen to people. They happen to all the great men of God.