Top 100 The Great Man Quotes
#1. The great man ... walks across his century and leaves the marks of his feet all over it, ripping out the dates on his goloshes as he passes.
Stephen Leacock
#2. The gap between enthusiasm and indifference is filled with failures. The great man is he that does not lose his child's heart.
Mencius
#3. The great man, Genghis Khan, only knew how to shoot eagles with an arrow. The past is past. To see real heroes, look around you.
Mao Tse-tung
#4. The great man fights the elements in his time that hinder his own greatness, in other words his own freedom and sincerity.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#5. Then none was for a party; Than all were for the state; Then the great man helped the poor, And the poor man loved the great: Then lands were fairly portioned; Then spoils were fairly sold: The Romans were like brothers In the brave days of old.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#6. 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
#7. The great man is the man who can get himself made and who will get himself made out of anything he finds at hand.
Gerald Stanley Lee
#8. No, I don't admire the genius. But I admire and love the result of the genius's activity in the world, of which the great man is only the poor necessary tool, only, so to speak, the paltry awl to bore with.
Knut Hamsun
#9. Liberty coincides with heroism. It is the asceticism of the great man, the bow bent to the breaking-point.
Albert Camus
#10. The great man is sparing in words but prodigal in deeds.
Confucius
#11. Thus it is that the Great man abides by what is solid, and eschews what is flimsy; dwells with the fruit and not with the flower.
Lao-Tzu
#12. The profound paradox is that the great man became more confident in his approach to others, including the man of his own Cabinet, but he recognized that his major confidence was not himself but in Another.
Elton Trueblood
#13. There are big men, men of intellect, intellectual men, men of talent and men of action; but the great man is difficult to find, and it needs
apart from discernment
a certain greatness to find him.
Margot Asquith
#14. The great man does not think beforehand of his words that they may be sincere, nor of his actions that they may be resolute;
he simply speaks and does what is right.
Mencius
#15. The great man is too often all of a piece; it is the little man that is a bundle of contradictory elements. He is inexhaustible. You never come to the end of the surprises he has in store for you.
W. Somerset Maugham
#16. I can't go to bed with John Wayne, so I do the next best thing: I go to bed with my girlfriend, who once met the great man. That's how much I love westerns.
Clive Sinclair
#17. The great man is he who does not lose his child's heart
Mencius
#18. How shall we praise the magnificence of the dead,
The great man humbled, the haughty brought to dust?
Conrad Aiken
#19. The great man, that is, the man most imbued with the spirit of the time, is the impressionable man.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#20. He has come to be the great man he thought he wanted to be. If this is true, then he is not a man. He is still a little boy and wants the moon.
John Steinbeck
#21. Song-Mi Lee, ... her life wholly dedicated to protecting the great man against the importunities of the academic world and soothing his despair at no longer being able to achieve an erection or an original thought.
David Lodge
#22. [on John Cowper Powys] ... there is an indistinct photograph of the great man himself, gazing into the misty cleft of a mountain range, wearing what could be an old rug, or an old cardigan. He looks like a cross between an aged werewolf and a puzzled child.
Margaret Drabble
#23. There have been in this century only one great man and one great thing: Napoleon and liberty. For want of the great man, let us have the great thing.
Victor Hugo
#24. The people ... they are church-broken, nation-broken
they drink and pray and piss in the one place. Every man has a house-broken heart except the great man. The people love their church and know it, as a dog knows where he was made to conform, and there he returns by his instinct.
Djuna Barnes
#25. What real good does an addition to a fortune already sufficient procure? Not any. Could the great man, by having his fortune increased, increase also his appetites, then precedence might be attended with real amusement.
Oliver Goldsmith
#26. The great man who thinks greatly of himself, is not diminishing that greatness in heaping fuel on his fire.
Isaac D'Israeli
#27. I have played some of the great men in history and I believe in the great man who does heroic deeds, even in these egalitarian times.
Charlton Heston
#28. The great man is not so great as folks think, and the dull man is not quite so stupid as he seems. The difference in our estimates of men lies in the fact that one individual is able to get his goods into the show-window, and the other is not aware that he has any show-window or any goods.
Elbert Hubbard
#29. History of the world is the biography of the great man. And I said: The great man always act like a thunder. He storms the skies, while others are waiting to be stormed.
Thomas Carlyle
#30. The great man who gives a true transcript of his mind fascinates and instructs. Most writers suppress individuality. They wish to please the public.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#31. Great men are rare, poets are rarer, but the great man who is a poet, transfiguring his greatness, is the rarest of all events.
John Drinkwater
#32. Far from being a paradox, this invitation is more reasonable than that of our modern gurus, who ask their disciples to imitate them as the great man or woman who imitates no one. Jesus, by contrast, invites us to do what he himself does, to become like him a perfect imitator of God the Father.
Rene Girard
#33. The great man of science, unless he is also a philosopher, ... deserves the title of genius as little as the man of action.
Otto Weininger
#34. Abraham Lincoln said, Patents Add Fuel to the Fire of Genius. What the great man did not say is that Too Much Fuel Can Burn the Genius
Kalyan C. Kankanala
#35. Adversity toughens manhood, and the characteristic of the good or the great man is not that he has been exempt from the evils of life, but that he has surmounted them.
Patrick Henry
#36. Juan Fangio was the great man of racing, whilst Stirling Moss was the epitome of a racing driver.
Jackie Stewart
#37. Struggling to end the war and to eliminate slavery once and for all by way of the 13th Amendment, with the amendment's prospective passage undermining the effort to make peace with the Confederacy and vice versa, Lincoln embodied the Great Man theory that leftists disdain.
Steve Erickson
#38. The great man is to be the servant of mankind, not they of him.
Theodore Parker
#39. The salesman thanks the customer for patronizing his shop and asks him to come again. But the socialists say: Be grateful to Hitler, render thanks to Stalin; be nice and submissive, then the great man will be kind to you later too.
Ludwig Von Mises
#40. I don't believe in the Great Man theory of science or history. There are no great men, just men standing on the shoulders of other men and what they have done.
Jacque Fresco
#41. It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#42. The rise to prominence of the Saudi novel in Arabic is the great man-bites-dog of recent world literature. Saudi Arabia is a country without a free press, where European styles and forms are distrusted and where the female half of the population became literate only in this generation.
James Buchan
#43. The great man is not convulsible or tormentable; events pass over him without much impression.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#44. There we were, hundreds of us lined up, waving at the great man as he tipped his hat to us. And that is the extent of my acquaintance with Albert Einstein.
Gregory Peck
#45. The Biblical language was so deeply embedded in the great man's mind that it became his normal way of speaking.
Elton Trueblood
#46. Franco will bring the army from Castille. The ambassador will complain, causing a schism. Rivera's men will be part of the force. The great man will be denied entry to the gulf.
Nostradamus
#47. Better is the man of humble standing that works for himself than one who plays the great man but lacks bread.
Solomon
#48. The great man presides over all his states of consciousness with obstinate rigor.
Leonardo Da Vinci
#49. Bible says the tree is known by his fruit. We can also say that the great man is known by his undreamed dreams!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#50. Who is the great man? He who is strongest in patience. He who patiently endures injury, and maintains a blameless life
he is a man indeed!
H. P. Blavatsky
#51. It is those who concentrates on but one thing at a time who advance in this world. The great man or woman is the one who never steps outside his or her specialty or foolishly dissipates his or her individuality.
Og Mandino
#52. The great man is not the child of his age but its step-child.
Georg Brandes
#55. The great man say that life is pain," Coydog had said over eighty-five years before. "That mean if you love life, then you love the hurt come along wit' it. Now, if that ain't the blues, I don't know what is.
Walter Mosley
#56. Truth is not only a man's ornament but his instrument; it is the great man's glory, and the poor man's stock: a man's truth is his livelihood, his recommendation, his letters of credit.
Benjamin Whichcote
#57. Many simple peoples feared the exceptional individual as a disintegrating force; there is a Chinese proverb that "the great man is a public misfortune.
Will Durant
#58. Just as a waterfall grows slower and more lightly suspended as it plunges down, so the great man of action tends to act with greater calmness than his tempestuous desires prior to the deed would lead one to expect.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#59. And remember it takes great courage and heart for a man who knows no kindness to show it to another. Even the wildest of beasts can be tamed by a patient and gentle hand.
Sherrilyn Kenyon
#60. When a man comes out of great danger, he is apt to be a little deaf to the call of duty.
John Buchan
#61. Herein lies the great difference between divine weakness and human weakness, the wounds of Christ and the wounds of man. Two human weaknesses only intensify each other. But human weakness plus Christ's weakness equals a supernatural strength.
Christian Wiman
#62. And Jasmine, royal princess and daughter of the sultan..." the little old religious man trailed off, confused. "I'm sorry, daughter. I don't remember all of your names. Rose of Agrabah? Twice Great-Granddaughter of Elisheba the Wise?"
"I think it was Elisheba," Jasmine said thoughtfully.
Liz Braswell
#63. If I steal money from any person, there may be no harm done from the mere transfer of possession; he may not feel the loss, or it may prevent him from using the money badly. But I cannot help doing this great wrong towards Man, that I make myself dishonest.
William Kingdon Clifford
#64. I have characterized Nixon as a loner, a cold man with great self-confidence and a one-track mind centered on the advancement of Richard Nixon.
Barry Goldwater
#65. Taught to regard a part of our own Species in the most abject and contemptible Degree below us, we lose that Idea of the dignity of Man which the Hand of Nature had implanted in us, for great and useful purposes.
George Mason
#66. 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
#67. Among the noblest in the land - Though man may count himself the least - That man I honor and revere, Who without favor, without fear, In the great city dares to stand, The friend of every friendless beast.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
#68. If a man says, "I have had such-and-such spiritual communications, I am a great man," he has never had any communion with Jesus at all; for "God hath respect unto the lowly: but the proud He knoweth afar off.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
#69. 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
#70. In order to appreciate a great man, we must know his surroundings. We must understand the scope of the drama in which he played - the part he acted - and we must also know his audience.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#71. Intelligence, integrity and courage are the great pillars that support the State. Above all, the citizens of a free nation should honor the brave and independent man - the man of stainless integrity, of will and intellectual force.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#72. I dare to be great. The man without imagination stands unhurt and hath no wings. This is my credo, this is my forte.
Don King
#73. 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
#74. It makes a great difference in the force of a sentence, whether a man be behind it or no.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#75. 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
#76. And again: No more gods! no more gods! Man is King, Man is God! - But the great Faith is Love!
Arthur Rimbaud
#77. All great masters are chiefly distinguished by the power of adding a second, a third, and perhaps a fourth step in a continuous line. Many a man has taken the first step. With every additional step you enhance immensely the value of your first.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#78. 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
#79. Oh, but I am quite resigned to taking second place in the shadow of my husband. I am humbly aware that the wife of a great man has to be contented with reflected glory - don't you think so Miss Taggart?"
"No," said Dagny, "I don't.
Ayn Rand
#80. We don't often look into these unpleasant details of our great struggle. We all prefer to think that every man who wore the blue or gray was a Philip Sidney at heart.
Rebecca Harding Davis
#81. 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
#82. Perhaps I will be a great man ... I mean perhaps I will hold on to the substance of truth and find my way always with the right course
Lorraine Hansberry
#83. It takes a truly great man to see that he's been wrong and to apologize for it, even in the face of the obvious.
Amy Lane
#84. It will be a great story when I'm an old man telling my grandkids that I was once the best player in the world.
Luke Donald
#85. We go on dating from Cold Fridays and Great Snows; but a little colder Friday, or greater snow would put a period to man's existence on the globe.
Henry David Thoreau
#86. 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
#87. James Joyce seemed like the most arrogant man who ever lived, had both his eyes wide open and great faculty of speech, but what he say, I knew not what.
Bob Dylan
#88. In the future I man a lighthouse with my wife, daughter, and father-in-law. We send out a great beam of light every night even though no one ever sees it.
Matthew Quick
#89. The great revolution in the history of man, past, present and future, is the revolution of those determined to be free.
John F. Kennedy
#90. He was the man who rode into our valley out of the heart of the great glowing west and when his work was done, he left whence he had come--and he was Shane.
Jack Shaeffer
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. 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
#94. 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
#95. You praise man who has the ability to perform great actions.
I admire man who can deal with great pain and knows no despair.
Toba Beta
#96. 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
#97. What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote.
E. M. Forster
#98. Man Of Steel looks great, is well cast, and is, moralistically, completely rotten to the core.
Jamie McKelvie
#99. Incontestably, the great centres of population in the primeval ages were the chalklands, and next to them those of limestone. The chalk first, for it furnished man with flints, and the limestone next when he had learned to barter.
Sabine Baring-Gould
#100. The images of the unconscious place a great responsibility upon a man. Failure to understand them, or a shirking of ethical responsibility, deprives him of his wholeness and imposes a painful fragmentariness on his life.
Carl Jung
