Top 100 A Great Man Is Quotes
#2. But the divinest poem, or the life of a great man, is the severest satire ... The greater the genius, the keener the edge of the satire.
Henry David Thoreau
#3. A great man is he who has not lost the heart of a child.
Mencius
#4. I have said that one of the distinguishing characteristics of a great man is that his active intervention makes what seemed highly improbable in fact happen.
Isaiah Berlin
#5. The sign of a great man is that the closer you get, the greater he seems.
Israel Meir Kagan
#6. A great man is one who seizes the vital issue in a complex question, what we might call the jugular vein of the whole organism, and spends his energies upon that
Joseph Rickaby
#8. Destination is, ideally, where one should stop; and ideally, one should not stop. Practically, destination of a great man is where he wants to stop; of a common man, where he has to. The one ends with Will, the other with Reason. Morality is always pursued, never reached!
Raheel Farooq
#9. A great man is a torch in the darkness, a beacon in superstition's night, an inspiration and a prophecy.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#10. The monument of a great man is not of granite or marble or bronze. It consists of his goodness, his deeds, his love and his compassion.
Alfred Armand Montapert
#11. 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.
Harpo Marx
#12. A great man is different from an eminent one in that he is ready to be the servant of the society.
B.R. Ambedkar
#13. A great man is one who has not lost the child's heart.
Mencius
#15. The modern idea of a Great Man is one who stands at the lonely extremity of some single line of development
C.S. Lewis
#16. A great man is the man who does something for the first time.
Alexander Smith
#17. A great man is not a man so strong that he feels less than other men; he is a man so strong that he feels more.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#18. The mark of a great man is one who knows when to set aside the important things in order to accomplish the vital ones.
Brandon Sanderson
#19. A great man is hard on himself; a small man is hard on others.
Confucius
#20. The sign of a great man is how you handle defeat. - Old Jack
Jeffrey Archer
#21. Who is considered a great man is the one who can be the smallest of the small.
Dada Bhagwan
#22. To vilify a great man is the readiest way in which a little man can himself attain greatness.
Edgar Allan Poe
#27. A great man is one who leaves others at a loss after he is gone.
Paul Valery
#28. When a man comes out of great danger, he is apt to be a little deaf to the call of duty.
John Buchan
#29. I think there's nothing better than laughing in life, so that's nice, to be thought of as someone who can make someone laugh. It's 'cause I think life is hard. You know, my dad was a really silly man. A great Irish silly man. And that's fine.
Joan Cusack
#30. What is man without the beasts? For if all the beast were gone, man would die of a great loneliness of the spirit.
Chief Seattle
#31. Character - in things great and small - is indicated when a man (or person) pursues with sustained follow-through what he feels himself capable of doing.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#32. There is no prosperity, trade, art, city, or great material wealth of any kind, but if you trace it home, you will find it rooted in a thought of some individual man.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#33. A lie is troublesome, and sets a man's invention upon the rack, and one trick needs a great many more to make it good.
Richard Steele
#34. You English are like mad bulls ... you see red everywhere! What on earth has come over you, to heap on us such suspicion as is unworthy of a great nation. I regard this as a personal insult ... You make it uncommonly difficult for a man to remain friendly to England.
Wilhelm II
#35. Senator [George] Mitchell is a man of many talents and he's swift on his feet, but one would not think of him as 'dancing with the stars.' And we had this great rock 'n' roll fund raiser.
Barbara Mikulski
#36. People realize that Salieri is not the man we saw in the Amadeus movie. That man had no talent. It was a great movie, but the Salieri character was a big fiction.
Cecilia Bartoli
#37. Human misery universally arises from some error that man admits as true. We confound our fears with the idea feared, and place the evil in the thing seen or believed. Here is a great error, for we never see what we are afraid of.
Phineas Quimby
#38. And the will therein lieth, which dieth not. Who knoweth the mysteries of the will, with its vigor? For God is but a great will pervading all things by nature of its intentness, Man doth not yield himself to the angels, nor unto death utterly, save only through the weakness of his feeble will.
Joseph Glanvill
#39. I've said many times before that Pebble Beach is a wonderful thinking-man's golf course. That is why it is such a great U.S. Open venue.
Jack Nicklaus
#40. Monday is great if I can spend it in bed. I'm a man of simple pleasures, really.
Arthur Darvill
#41. No matter how much a man may study, reflect and meditate on all the books in the world, he is nothing more than a minor scribe unless he has read the great book.
Denis Diderot
#42. You live in a deranged age - more deranged than usual, because despite great scientific and technological advances, man has not the faintest idea of who he is or what he is doing.
Walker Percy
#43. We will be happy if we can get around to the idea that art is not an outside and extra thing; that it is a natural outcome of a state of being; that the state of being is the important thing; that a man can be a carpenter and be a great man.
Robert Henri
#44. You could name the great stars of the silent screen who were finished; the great directors gone; the great title writers who were washed up. But remember this, as long as you live: the producers didn't lose a man. They all made the switch. That's where the great talent is.
Ernst Lubitsch
#45. Any man who tries to be good all the time is bound to come to ruin among the great number who are not good. Hence a prince who wants to keep his authority must learn how not to be good, and use that knowledge, or refrain from using it, as necessity requires.
Niccolo Machiavelli
#46. I don't want to be a great leader; I want to be a man who goes around with a little oil can and when he sees a breakdown, offers his help. To me, the man who does that is greater than any holy man in saffron-colored robes. The mechanic with the oil can: that is my ideal in life.
Baba Amte
#47. It is part of a good man to do great and noble deeds, though he risk everything.
Plutarch
#48. DUEL, n. A formal ceremony preliminary to reconciliation of two enemies. Great skill is necessary to its satisfactory observance; if awkwardly performed ... deplorable consequences sometimes ensue. A long time ago a man lost his life.
Ambrose Bierce
#49. Fools gain greater advantages through their weakness than intelligent men through their strength. We watch a great man struggling against fate and we do not lift a finger to help him. But we patronize a grocer who is headed for bankruptcy.
Honore De Balzac
#50. A little jewellery on a man is OK, although he should never wear too much. Every man should always have a great watch.
Tamara Mellon
#51. Maybe no great man is virtuous. Or good. Perhaps a man rich in those qualities by definition is barred from greatness.
Colleen McCullough
#52. Senator Barack Obama is a gifted and eloquent young man who I think can do great things for our country.
Joe Lieberman
#53. Sondheim is my god; I love the man. I learned a great deal about writing from his work, his lyrics, and his structure.
Richard LaGravenese
#54. The great champions were always vicious competitors. You never lose respect for a man who is a vicious competitor, and you never hate a man you respect. I don't like Rod Laver because he's such a vicious competitor, but I don't dislike him.
Pancho Gonzales
#55. No matter what great characteristics a man may have, he cannot be equal to God
Sunday Adelaja
#56. How it chanced that a man who reasoned on his premises so ably, should assume his premises so foolishly, is one of the great mysteries of human nature.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#57. You may glory in a team triumphant, but you fall in love with a team in defeat. Losing after great striving is the story of man, who was born to sorrow, whose sweetest songs tell of saddest thought, and who, if he is a hero, does nothing in life as becomingly as leaving it.
Roger Kahn
#58. Either nature has made a great difference between man and man, or that the world is not yet anywhere near to being fully civilized.
Mary Wollstonecraft
#59. Peter Jackson is a wonderful man. He's a great director. He's found his niche in life.
Luke Evans
#60. 7. Have one great cologne that's not from the drugstore. Just one. Wear very little of it, all the time. I cannot tell you how sexy it is to be enveloped in a hug by a man whose smell you remember. Then, anytime I smell that cologne, I think of you.
Mindy Kaling
#61. It is difficult to make a man miserable while he feels worthy of himself and claims kindred to the great God who made him.
Abraham Lincoln
#62. Yeah, I don't think you can live anywhere else
it's such a great city [New York]. L.A. is kind of a necessary evil, but man, I love going back to New York.
Will Arnett
#63. The fact is Jerry Weintraub, the handsome, bearish movie producer, the man with the long career, who worked with Arthur Godfrey and Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra and George Clooney, is a great storyteller - he's this as much as he's anything else. He takes time telling stories, too.
Rich Cohen
#64. It is a fine thing to be out on the hills alone. A man can hardly be a beast or a fool alone on a great mountain.
Francis Kilvert
#65. Here again is one grand element of a preacher's success. He must labour by all means to be understood. It was a wise saying of Archbishop Usher, To make easy things seem hard is every man's work; but to make hard things easy is the work of a great preacher.
J.C. Ryle
#66. In all the world there is nothing so remarkable as a great man, nothing so rare, nothing which so well repays study.
Theodore Parker
#67. I don't think of my books as being biographies. I never had any interest in doing a book just to write the life of a great man. I had zero interest in that. My interest is in power. How power works.
Robert Caro
#68. You know how they say behind every great man there's a great woman? My mother would say, No, the woman is three steps ahead.
Renee Carlino
#69. A man is great not because he hasn't failed; a man is great because failure hasn't stopped him.
Confucius
#70. What work I have done I have done because it has been play. If it had been work I shouldn't have done it ... The work that is really a man's own work is play and not work at all ... When we talk about the great workers of the world we really mean the great players of the world.
Mark Twain
#71. Did you ever stop to think that a great man in life who has won great acclaim and great reputation is the very man who is willing to share and give the honor to others in the doing of things that made him great?
Charles M. Schwab
#72. Cookery is a wholly unselfish art: as 'art for art's sake' it is unthinkable. A man may sing in his bath every morning without the least encouragement, but no cook can cook just for his or her own sake in a like manner. All good cooks, like all great artists, must have an audience worth cooking for.
Andre Simon
#73. If the union of these States, and the liberties of this people, shall be lost, it is but little to any one man of fifty-two yearsof age, but a great deal to the thirty millions of people who inhabit these United States, and to their posterity in all coming time.
Abraham Lincoln
#74. Critical thinking is a necessary and vital skill".
~R. Alan Woods [2012]
R. Alan Woods
#75. When we meet the great men and women of the Bible face-to-face, we may be surprised to discover just how much like us they are. It is faith in a great God that makes a great man or woman of God.
Mike Bickle
#76. Do you ever see a man who struts around altogether too large to notice an ordinary working mechanic? Do you think he is great?
He is nothing but a puffed-up balloon, held down by his big feet.
There is no greatness there.
Russell H. Conwell
#77. The office of President is a great one; to every true American it seems the greatest on earth. And to me, as I was engaged in weaving a background of music for the pageantry of it, there came a deeper realization of the effect of that office on the man.
John Philip Sousa
#78. That man is my Arthur, a great warlord and a hero who fought against impossible odds to such effect that even fifteen hundred years later his enemies love and revere his memory.
Bernard Cornwell
#79. A King (as such) is not a great man. He has great power, but it is not his own.
William Hazlitt
#80. It is a thing of no great difficulty to raise objections against another man's oration, it is a very easy matter; but to produce a better in it's place is a work extremely troublesome.
Plutarch
#81. A little wit and a great deal of ill-nature will furnish a man for satire; but the greatest instance of wit is to commend well.
John Tillotson
#82. the world is one great web, and a man dare not touch a single strand lest all the others tremble.
George R R Martin
#83. Truly, great is the man who is not afraid or ashamed of love.
K.A. Hosein
#84. The risk is too great. A man cannot place too much faith in any one thing, neither a woman, nor a horse, nor a weapon, nor any single thing.
Michael Crichton
#85. It has always seemed to me that any man is a better man for being a hunter. This sport confers a certain constant alertness, and develops a certain ruggedness of character ... Moreover, it allies us to the pioneer past. In a deep sense, this great land of ours was won for us by hunters.
Archibald Rutledge
#86. Real sex is as much about reciprocity as it is exploration and if you need a reason to resent a man later on, just consider the guy who doesn't believe in cunnilingus ...
Roberto Hogue
#87. It's a great thing when a man knows how to dance, she said. When a man can dance, the world is his oyster.
Adele, Henry's Mother
Joyce Maynard
#88. A blind man. I can stare at him
ashamed, shameless. Or does he know it?
No, he is in a great solitude.
O, strange joy,
to gaze my fill at a stranger's face.
No, my thirst is greater than before.
Denise Levertov
#89. Man must spend much more time in extraordinary natural places to grasp much better how remarkable our planet is and to realise what a great privilege and what an enormous joy to be living here!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#91. Greatness is not a teachable nor gainable thing, but the expression of the mind of a God-made great man.
John Ruskin
#92. Never forget, Caelius, that a great man makes his luck. Luck is there for everyone to seize. Most of us miss our chances; we're blind to our luck. He never misses a chance because he's never blind to the opportunity of the moment.
Colleen McCullough
#93. Henry is a great man, I really like him. He is a great professional and I think he will be a great captain for them. He's been the outstanding player in the Premiership for the last three or four years
Frank Lampard
#94. To what level of depravity has a society descended when it condemns a man simply because he is strong and great?
Ayn Rand
#95. Death is a great revealer of what is in a man, and in its solemn shadow appear the naked lineaments of the soul.
Edwin Hubbel Chapin
#96. Every man who is any kind of artist has a great deal of female in him. I act and give of myself as a man, but I register and receive with the soul of a woman. The only really good artists are feminine. I can't admit the existence of an artist whose dominant personality is masculine.
Orson Welles
#97. Human misery must somewhere have a stop; there is no wind that always blows a storm; great good fortune comes to failure in the end. All is change; all yields its place and goes; to persevere, trusting in what hopes he has, is courage in a man. The coward despairs.
Euripides
#98. Man is made for error; it enters his mind naturally, and he discovers a few truths only with the greatest effort.
Frederick The Great
#99. Subtract from the great man all that he owes to opportunity, all that he owes to chance, and all that he gained by the wisdom of his friends and the folly of his enemies, and the giant will often be seen to be a pygmy.
Charles Caleb Colton
#100. This is so," Illyrio agreed, "but the world is one great web, and a man dare not touch a single strand lest all the others tremble. More wine?
George R R Martin
