Top 100 What A Great Man Quotes
#1. What? A great man? I always see merely the play-actor of his own ideal.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#3. What a great man. There aren't very many of them left. I can't wait to see his other policies. Hope he's the next Teddy Roosevelt!
Brad McKinniss
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. What a great advantage a man can have over women, if he only knew what cold and calculating thoughts are going through her mind ... while her eyes are brimming with tears.
Esther Vilar
#9. 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
#10. Yes, you'd make a great partner for him. What with the embezzling and the adultery and the drinking. That's what every man wants in a wife - a vaguely alcoholic, fornicating thief.
Eleanor Brown
#11. (About Cesare Borgia) What cruelties were not the result of his? Who could count all his crimes? Such was the man that Machiavel prefers to all the great geniuses of his time, and to the heroes of antiquity, and of which he finds the life and action make a good example for those that fortune favors.
Frederick The Great
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. In short, [Coltrane's] tone is beautiful because it is functional. In other words, it is always involved in saying something. You can't separate the means that a man uses to say something from what he ultimately says. Technique is not separated from its content in a great artist.
Cecil Taylor
#15. You see, at Rugby I was rather a great man. There one had a share in the ruling of 300 boys, and a good deal of responsibility; but here one has only just to take care of oneself, and keep out of scrapes; and that's what I never could do.
Thomas Hughes
#16. Roman Polanski is a man who cares deeply about his art and its place in this world. What happened to him on his incredible path is filled with tragedy, and most men would have collapsed. Instead, he became a great artist and continues to make great films.
Harvey Weinstein
#17. Great is the issue at stake, greater than appears, whether a man is to be good or bad. And what will any one be profited if, under the influence of money or power, he neglect justice and virtue?
Plato
#18. I believe that the old man did indeed have far too narrow an idea of what a vision might be. He may, so to speak, have been too dazzled by the great light of his experience to realize that an impressive sun shines on us all.
Marilynne Robinson
#19. I think my dad is this great, wonderful ... man with a lot of integrity, who is fighting for things he believes in and is serious in what he wants to see happen and serious in helping people.
Vanessa Kerry
#20. Do not expect to be acknowledged for what you are, much less for what you would be; since no one can well measure a great man but upon the bier.
Walter Savage Landor
#21. Every man aims at avoiding what causes him pain; the activities of government ultimately consist in the infliction of pain. All great achievements of mankind were the product of a spontaneous effort on the part of individuals; government substitutes coercion for voluntary action.
Ludwig Von Mises
#22. Love is so unpredictable. Sometimes you'll know a man for years and then one day, boom! Suddenly you see him in a different way. And other times, it's that first date, that first moment. That's what makes it so great.
Sarah Dessen
#23. My father is very Jean Valjean. He's what I would call a great example of a religious person. He is a deeply thoughtful man whose religion is in his deeds way more than anything else. It's not talked about that much.
Hugh Jackman
#24. A great man does not seek applause or place; he seeks for truth; he seeks the road to happiness, and what he ascertains, he gives to others.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#25. A Man is born and dies but what he does with his life in between will make him great. Go out ... Live your life great!
Timothy Pina
#26. Man, in spite of his tendency towards mendacity, has a great respect for what he calls the truth. Truth is his staff in his voyage through life; commonplaces are the bread in his bag and the wine in his jug.
Remy De Gourmont
#27. What absurd victims of contrary desires we are! If a man is settled in one place he yearns to wander; when he wanders he yearns to have a home. And yet how bestial is content - all the great things in life are done by discontented people.
Christopher Morley
#28. I think that Richard Nixon is a great man and that he is very dedicated to what he does. I had the pleasure of meeting him when I attended the Republican National Convention in Miami. You can really tell that he is willing to go out of his way to help the American people.
Laraine Day
#29. The great lesson of biography is to show what man can be and do at his best. A noble life put fairly on record acts like an inspiration to others.
Samuel Smiles
#30. You mustn't hit her over the head with it. Women like to be romanced like the heroines in the sensation novels." "What the devil do you know about sensation novels?" "A man can learn a great deal about women from novels," Matt said. "You should try it sometime.
Amanda Quick
#31. [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
#32. There is a very great difference - is there not? - between the temporal and the eternal judgments, a very great difference between a man's reputation and a man's character, for reputation is what men think and say of us, while character is what God and the angels know of us.
Price Collier
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. WHAT'S SO GREAT ABOUT WOMEN, ANYWAY? And, lower: HEY, EVERY WOMAN, PAL, IS A VOLUME OF STORIES A CATALOGUE OF MOVEMENTS A SPECTACULAR ARRAY OF IMAGES Then: PLUS THERE'S THE MYSTERY OF LEARNING ABOUT HER CHILDHOOD A fourth man had concluded: AND OF EVERYTHING
Michael Chabon
#36. To be young and not to know how, is bearable; to be old and not have the strength, is too great a weight to carry. And what's is so painful you can't sense your powers leaving you. It's hard for an old man to ensure such blows!
Ivan Turgenev
#37. She began to see that character is a better possession than money, rank, intellect, or beauty, and to feel that if greatness is what a wise man has defined it to be, 'truth, reverence, and good will,' then her friend Friedrich Bhaer was not only good, but great.
Louisa May Alcott
#38. But my father was also the one who told me I needed to clean up my mouth or I'd never find a man. What's very important to him is manners. Show up on time. Always send thank-you letters. He is one of the more thoughtful humans I've ever met. He's a great man and a very good dad.
Zosia Mamet
#39. What man would not romance a woman who had invited him? And what woman would not romance a man who had chosen her? It was the nature of the Great Romance.
Ted Dekker
#40. I staggered weakly to my feet. What mattered hunger? What mattered thirst? They were but incidents on the road to Babylon. Within me surged the soul of a free man going back to conquer his enemies and reward his friends. I thrilled with the great resolve.
George S. Clason
#41. What was sexier on a man than great abs and a heart full of hidden torment? They should bottle it and sell it by the truckloads. Or perhaps write a book: "Abs and Hidden Torment: A Man's Guide to Bagging Babes." I would have laughed if I didn't feel so much like crying.
Mia Sheridan
#42. The man watched him. Real life is pretty bad?
What do you think?
Well, I think we're still here. A lot of bad things have happened but we're still here.
Yeah.
You don't think that's so great.
It's okay.
Cormac McCarthy
#43. Though a man has all other perfections, and wants discretion, he will be of no great consequence in the world; but if he has this single talent in perfection, and but a common share of others, he may do what he pleases in his station of life.
Joseph Addison
#44. The explorers of the past were great men and we should honour them. But let us not forget that their spirit lives on. It is still not hard to find a man who will adventure for the sake of a dream or one who will search, for the pleasure of searching, not for what he may find.
Edmund Hillary
#45. A man who has the inventive genius can't control it exactly as he wishes. Its working depends in great measure on inspiration
on a momentary suggestion
and it is almost impossible to tell beforehand at what moment it will come.
Henrik Ibsen
#46. What of it? If I die, I die. It will be no great loss to the world, and I am thoroughly bored with life. I am like a man yawning at a ball; the only reason he does not go home to bed is that his carriage has not arrived yet.
Mikhail Lermontov
#47. In life I learned that you should not brag, until you've done it And even worse than that.. Could you do it again?? That's why I'm always humble, humbleness is a brave man's obligation, since he knows what it takes to accomplish a great deed
Renzo Gracie
#48. Payton and Laney watched him go.
Laney shook her head. "Unbelievable."
Payton gestured. "See - I told you."
"That man has such a great butt."
"Laney!"
"What? I'm conservative, Payton, not blind.
Julie James
#49. A young man seeks a woman and finds her and is great and dies to the world. Afterward he is never as great again, but the woman is a comfort to him, reminding him of the time that was, and he is a little again with her what once he was wholly.
Gene Wolfe
#50. It was like some great big spring was tugging at him - and maybe,perhaps sooner rather than later, a boy has to decide what kind of man he is going to be. Is he going to be a player,or a playing piece ... ?
Terry Pratchett
#51. 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
#52. Do I raise the dead when I put him behind bars? Then what'll I do it for? We used to shoot a man who acted like a dog, but honor was real there, you were protecting something. But here? This is the land of the great big dogs, you don't love a man here, you eat him!
Arthur Miller
#53. Alexander the Great once said that 'I would rather live a short life of glory than a long one of obscurity!' What a great illusion is this! Wise man is he who always chooses to live longer and he who blesses the obscurity!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#54. Davy, I knew the exact time of your birth and what you would look like when the time was at hand, for I dream dreams. Now is the time. A great evil is brewing in the land that will turn the nation against itself. But you must make a stand for what is right. Be strong, young man, be strong.
David Holdsworth
#55. What is the secret to great living? Entire separation to Christ and devotion to Him. Thus speaks every man and woman whose life has made more than a passing flicker in the spiritual realm. It is the life that has no time for trifling that counts.
Amy Carmichael
#56. If religion had a good purpose, then man would have created something great. But we're man: we mess up everything. We mess up nature. We mess up God. We take what is given to us and make it into what we think it should be.
Ziggy Marley
#57. I read a book a week, man. And I don't have a great memory, but I have a good memory about what I read.
Junot Diaz
#58. Oh! what a superior man," said Candide below his breath. "What a great genius is this Pococurante! Nothing can please him.
Voltaire
#59. What bullshit excuses do you have for not going after whatever it is that you want? Please, write in, tell us on social media why these are real excuses with #bullshit afterwards. Oh my God, man, that's such a great story.
Timothy Ferriss
#60. Love and Death? What has great music or poetry ever been about, but those twin forces that undo a man?
Douglas Wynne
#61. What a great thing is understanding! It is priceless. No man can give greater pleasure to his fellow man than by understanding him.
Hazrat Inayat Khan
#62. A toast to great sex and a man who knows what to do with his cock.
Jaci Burton
#63. To try to understand the real significance of what the great artists, the serious masters, tell us in their masterpieces, that leads to God; one man wrote or told it in a book; another, in a picture.
Vincent Van Gogh
#64. Man is something that shall be overcome.Man is a rope,tied between beast and overman - a rope over an abyss.What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#65. I care not what your education is, elaborate or nothing, what your mental calibre is, great or small, that man who concentrates all his energies of body, mind and soul in one direction is a tremendous man.
Thomas De Witt Talmage
#66. To me, he was the grand master of wine. He was a forceful Russian and a gentle person. The greats of wine all over the world have great affection and admiration for him. What a beautiful man he was and what a privilege to have been touched by him.
Margrit Mondavi
#67. Failure to accord credit to anyone for what he may have done is a great weakness in any man.
William Howard Taft
#68. To lose one's life is no great matter; when the time comes I'll have the courage to lose mine. But what's intolerable is to see one's life being drained of meaning, to be told there's no reason for existing. A man can't live without some reason for living.
Albert Camus
#69. A man in the skyscraper needs to feed a pigeon from his window to remember what great thing missing in his life: The touch of nature!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#70. Unless a person has trained himself for his chance, the chance will only make him ridiculous. A great occasion is worth to man exactly what his preparation enables him to make of it.
J. B. Matthews
#71. Profound ignorance makes a man dogmatic. The man who knows nothing thinks he is teaching others what he has just learned himself; the man who knows a great deal can't imagine that what he is saying is not common knowledge, and speaks more indifferently.
Jean De La Bruyere
#72. It isn't what a man's got in the bank, but what he's got in his head, that makes him a great merchant.
George Horace Lorimer
#73. To me, the labor movement was never just a way of getting higher wages. What appealed to me was the spiritual side of a great cause that created fellowship. You wanted the girl or the man who worked beside you to be treated just as well as you were, and an injury to one was the concern of all.
Rose Schneiderman
#74. If there were no eternal consciousness in a man, if at the bottom of everything there were only a wild ferment, a power that twisting in dark passions produced everything great or inconsequential; if an unfathomable, insatiable emptiness lay hid beneath everything, what would life be but despair?
Soren Kierkegaard
#75. I am very sure that any man of common understanding may, by culture, care, attention, and labor, make himself what- ever he pleases, except a great poet.
Lord Chesterfield
#76. You shall be told what pleased me to-day in the writings of
Hecato; it is these words: "What progress, you ask, have I made? I have begun to be a friend to myself." That was
indeed a great benefit; such a person can never be alone. You may be sure that such a man is a friend to all mankind.
Seneca.
#77. I was walking through Central Park, and I saw an old man smoking. Nothing makes a smoker happier than to see an old person smoking. This guy was ancient, bent over a walker, puffing away. I'm like, "Duuude, you're my hero! Guy your age smoking, man, it's great." He goes, "What? I'm 28.
Bill Hicks
#78. If Pierre Bon-Bon had his failings--and what great man has not a thousand?--if Pierre Bon-Bon, I say, had his failings, they were failings of very little importance--faults indeed which, in other tempers, have often been looked upon rather in the light of virtues.
Edgar Allan Poe
#79. Win a lottery-prize and you are a cleaver man. Winners are adulated. To be born with a caul is everything; luck is what matters. Be fortunate and you will be thought great.
Victor Hugo
#80. Bob Ford is a great guy. He's a great friend. He's done a great job at Oakmont and Seminole. He's a very quiet man. He doesn't get in the middle of everything, but he understands what a nice job he's done at both places.
Jack Nicklaus
#81. So you see, the most vital question then becomes, what type of woman will conquer our hero? If she be of poor quality, he'll become a slave. But if she be great, then her greatness will elevate the man to greater heights than he could ever have attained on his own.
Bryan M. Litfin
#82. Cute? You think he's cute? What's cute about him?
...
Well, yes. He's got that smile, that really bad boy smile, and a great backside.
On page eighty of the relationship manual, it clearly states, you cannot look at another man's backside, especially if you think it's great.
Christine Feehan
#83. Action is greater than writing. A good man is a nobler object of contemplation than a great author. There are but two things worth living for: to do what is worthy of being written; and to write what is worthy of being read.
Ross Perot
#84. Toleration in religion was one of the great rights of man, and a man ought never to be deprived of what was his natural right.
Charles James Fox
#85. Every time they have somebody born in the movies, it is a little boy. They never have little girls being born. What makes boys so great and woooonnnderfullll? I can do anything a boy can do
Fannie Flagg
#86. An honest private man often grows cruel and abandoned when converted into an absolute prince. Give a man power of doing what he pleases with impunity, you extinguish his fear, and consequently overturn in him one of the great pillars of morality.
Joseph Addison
#87. I went to the opening of 'Sister Act,' and I had such a great time. I had no idea what it was about, and I had never seen the movies. But I heard the show went through some major last-minute craziness in previews, and man, opening night was really fun and really entertaining.
Aaron Lazar
#88. What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal: what is lovable in man is that he is an over-going and a down-going.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#89. I used to say, 'Man, I think I'd be a really good dad. I'll be a great provider. I'm funny; I'll go on trips with them - I'll do all sorts of stuff.' But the momming? I'm not made for that. I have a really good mom; I know what she put into it.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#90. CLOCK, n. A machine of great moral value to man, allaying his concern for the future by reminding him what a lot of time remains to him.
Ambrose Bierce
#91. If a man believes and expects great things of himself, it makes no odds where you put him, or what you show him . he will be surrounded by grandeur.
Henry David Thoreau
#92. One of the greatest discoveries a man makes, one of his great surprises, is to find he can do what he was afraid he couldn't do.
Henry Ford
#93. What else is Wisdom? What of man's endeavour
Or God's high grace, so lovely and so great?
To stand from fear set free, to breathe and wait;
To hold a hand uplifted over Hate;
And shall not Loveliness be loved for ever?
Euripides
#94. I worked in the family business, which was my father's shoe making company that he had inherited from his father, and that led me to become interested in what could be achieved by a great Italian brand. That became my ambition as a young man.
Diego Della Valle
#95. Life is short, and therefore, one thing being certain, death, let us take up a great ideal, and give up the whole life to it. For what is the value of life, this vegetating little low life of man? Subordinating it to one high ideal is the only value that life has.
Swami Vivekananda
#96. Occasions of adversity best discover how great virtue or strength each one hath. For occasions do not make a man frail, but they show what he is.
Thomas A Kempis
#97. There is a tale of a man who found on the road a large stone bearing the words, "Under me lies a great truth." The man strained to turn the stone over and finally succeeded. On the bottom was written, "Why do you want a new truth when you do not practice what you already know?
Eknath Easwaran
#98. Why should man value himself as more than a small part of the one great unit of creation? And what creature of all that the Lord has taken the pains to make is not essential to the completeness of that unit - the cosmos?
John Muir
#99. Aesop, that great man, saw his master making water as he walked. "What!" he said, "Must we void ourselves as we run?" Use our timeas best we may, yet a great part of it will still be idly and ill spent.
Michel De Montaigne
#100. We have great power to see the truth when the truth is all we wish to see; but what is easier than to credit what we desire? and can a man deceive anyone so easily as himself?
James Vila Blake
