Quotes about greatness
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“Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change. The sun might shine, or the clouds might lour: but nothing could appear to me as it had done the day before.”

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797–1851) English novelist, short story writer, dramatist, essayist, biographer, and travel writer

Pain, Appearance, Change, Sun

“If a story is not about the hearer, he will not listen. And here I make a rule—a great and interesting story is about everyone or it will not last.”

John Steinbeck (1902–1968) American writer

“Greatness and nearsightedness are incompatible. Meaningful achievement depends on lifting one's sights and pushing toward the horizon.”

Daniel H. Pink book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us

Source: Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us

Dependency

“With great power comes a great need to take a nap.”

Rick Riordan book The Last Olympian

Variant: With great power... comes need to take a nap. Wake me up later
Source: The Last Olympian

“There is a great deal of unmapped country within us which would have to be taken into account in an explanation of our gusts and storms.”

George Eliot book Daniel Deronda

Book 3, Ch. 24
Source: Daniel Deronda (1876)

Country

“Sometimes I feel like I’m actually on the wrong planet. It’s great when I’m in my garden, but the minute I go out the gate I think, ‘What the hell am I doing here?”

George Harrison (1943–2001) British musician, former member of the Beatles

Feeling, Hell, Thinking

“Don't sulk. For someone with all the grace and coordination of a pregnant wildebeest, you did great.”

Cassandra Clare (1973) American author

“All great discoveries… are products as much of doubt as of certainty, and the two in opposition clear the air for marvelous accidents.”

Mark Helprin book Winter's Tale

Source: Winter's Tale

“Statues to great men are made of the stones thrown at them in their lifetime.”

Jean Cocteau (1889–1963) French poet, novelist, dramatist, designer, boxing manager and filmmaker

Men

“The truth is, a great mind must be androgynous.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) English poet, literary critic and philosopher

1 September 1832
Table Talk (1821–1834)

Truth

“There's only one great evil in the world today. Despair.”

Evelyn Waugh book Vile Bodies

Source: Vile Bodies

World, Evil, Despair

“Sometimes I imagine myself looking back on right now and I think like where will I be standing when I look back Will right now look like the beginning of a great life or… or what”

Jennifer Egan A Visit from the Goon Squad

Source: A Visit from the Goon Squad

Life, Imagination, Thinking

“When you've suffered a great deal in life, each additional pain is both unbearable and trifling.”

Yann Martel book Life of Pi

Source: Life of Pi

Life, Pain, Suffering

“Do you take pride in your hurt? Does it make you seem large and tragic?… Well, think about it. Maybe you're playing a part on a great stage with only yourself as audience.”

John Steinbeck book East of Eden

Source: East of Eden

Thinking, Parting, Hurt

“You hold on to old experiences: injuries, injustices, and great love affairs, too. And you hold them in your joints and your organs, and wear them on your skin.”

Ann Brashares book My Name is Memory

Source: My Name Is Memory

Love

“Great necessities call forth great leaders.”

Abigail Adams (1744–1818) 2nd First Lady of the United States (1797–1801)

This seems to first appear in Why Leaders Can't Lead : The Unconscious Conspiracy Continues (1989) by Warren G. Bennis, p. 159, where it is cited as being from a letter to Thomas Jefferson, but it might be a misquote of "Great necessities call out great virtues" stated in a letter to her son John Quincy Adams (19 January 1780)
Disputed

“That I can read and be happy while I am reading, is a great blessing.”

Anthony Trollope (1815–1882) English novelist (1815-1882)

Reading, Happiness

“For, in the end, it is impossible to have a great life unless it is a meaningful life. And it is very difficult to have a meaningful life without meaningful work.”

James C. Collins (1958) American business consultant and writer

Source: Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't

Life

“Love, she thought, must come suddenly, with great outbursts and lightnings,--a hurricane of the skies, which falls upon life, revolutionises it, roots up the will like a leaf, and sweeps the whole heart into the abyss.”

Gustave Flaubert Madame Bovary

Source: Madame Bovary

Love, Life, Heart

“Our attachments are our temple, what we worship, no? What we give ourselves to, what we invest with faith…. Attachments are of great seriousness. Choose your attachments carefully. Choose your temple of fanaticism with great care.”

David Foster Wallace book Infinite Jest

Source: Infinite Jest

Faith

“All of the great leaders have had one characteristic in common: it was the willingness to confront unequivocally the major anxiety of their people in their time. This, and not much else, is the essence of leadership.”

John Kenneth Galbraith (1908–2006) American economist and diplomat

Source: The Age of Uncertainty (1977), Chapter 12, p. 330

Motivational, Leadership, People, Time

“The community of the Giver had achieved at such great price. A community without danger or pain. But also, a community without music, color or art. And books.”

Lois Lowry book The Giver

Source: The Giver

Pain, Books, Art, Music

“Great opportunities may come once in a lifetime, but small opportunities surround us every day.”

Rick Warren (1954) Christian religious leader

Source: The Purpose Driven Life: What on Earth Am I Here for?

“Have a little faith in me, Volger."
"I have great faith, tempered with vast annoyance.”

Scott Westerfeld book Goliath

Source: Goliath

Faith

“Greatness is best measured by how well an individual responds to the happenings in life that appear to be totally unfair, unreasonable, and undeserved.”

Marvin J. Ashton (1915–1994) Apostle of the LDS Church

Life, Appearance

“Men love a submissive woman, Damon said simply. Even when they say the don't. There's just something about a beautiful, soft woman looking to them to protect and take care of them that inspires a man to greatness.”

Maya Banks (1964) Author

Source: Sweet Surrender

Love, Men, Beauty

“Great Music, it said, and Great Poetry would like quieten Modern Youth down and make Modern Youth more Civilized. Civilized my syphilised yarbles.”

Anthony Burgess book A Clockwork Orange

Source: A Clockwork Orange

Youth, Music

“Great, I thought. We just blowtorched a national monument.”

Rick Riordan book The Lightning Thief

Source: The Lightning Thief

“The great corporation which employed you lied to you, and lied to the whole country—from top to bottom it was nothing but one gigantic lie.”

Upton Sinclair book The Jungle

Source: The Jungle

Lie, Country

“Words are like eggs dropped from great heights; you can no more call them back than ignore the mess they leave when they fall.”

Jodi Picoult Salem Falls

Source: Salem Falls

“There is no absurdity so palpable but that it may be firmly planted in the human head if you only begin to inculcate it before the age of five, by constantly repeating it with an air of great solemnity.”

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) German philosopher

Age

“… and the great advantage of being a literary woman, was that you could go everywhere and do everything.”

Henry James book The Portrait of a Lady

Source: The Portrait of a Lady

“Few things linger longer or become more indwelling than that feeling of both completion and emptiness when a great book ends. That the book accompanies the reader forever from that day forward is part of literature's profligate generosity.”

Pat Conroy (1945–2016) American novelist

Source: My Reading Life

Books, Feeling, Literature, Parting

“How is Eric?'
'Very tightly wound. Plus, a lot of stuff happened that he'll tell you about.'
'Thanks for the warning. I'll go to the house now. You're my favorite breather.'
'Oh. Well… great.'
She hung up.”

Charlaine Harris Dead in the Family

Source: Dead in the Family

Housing

“Let me not then die ingloriously and without a struggle, but let me first do some great thing that shall be told among men hereafter.”

Homér Iliad

Source: The Iliad

Men

“We ordinary people might lack your great speed or your X-Ray vision, Superman, but never underestimate the power of the human mind. We carry the most dangerous weapon on Earth inside these thick skulls of ours.”

Mark Millar book Superman: Red Son

Source: Superman: Red Son

People, Speed

“Small facts lead to great knowing.”

Patrick Rothfuss book The Wise Man's Fear

Source: The Wise Man's Fear

“I am a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it”

Stephen Leacock (1869–1944) writer and economist

“Great poetry needs no interpreter other than a responsive heart.”

Helen Keller (1880–1968) American author and political activist

Source: The Story of My Life: With Her Letters (1887 1901) and a Supplementary Account of Her Education Including Passages from the Reports and Letters of Her Teacher Anne Mansfield Sullivan by John Albert Macy

Heart

“You can only become great at something you are willing to sacrifice for”

Maya Angelou (1928–2014) American author and poet

“Before embarking on important undertakings sit quietly calm your senses and thoughts and meditate deeply. You will then be guided by the great creative power of Spirit.”

Paramahansa Yogananda (1893–1952) Yogi, a guru of Kriya Yoga and founder of Self-Realization Fellowship

Sense

“Character is higher than intellect…A great soul will be strong to live, as well as strong to think.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

1830s, The American Scholar http://www.emersoncentral.com/amscholar.htm (1837) <br class="br">Context: Character is higher than intellect... A great soul will be strong to live, as well as strong to think.

Soul, Thinking, Strong

“And the great spirit of darkness spread a shroud over me… everything was silent-everything. But upon the heights soughed the everlasting song, the voice of the air, the distant, toneless humming which is never silent.”

Knut Hamsun book Hunger

Source: Hunger

Distant

“… will you be so kind as to provide me with a few places where I might look for a murderer?"
"The mirror's a great place to start”

Rachel Caine (1962) American writer

Source: Bite Club

“Great minds have purposes, others have wishes.”

Washington Irving (1783–1859) writer, historian and diplomat from the United States

“In the beginning, the price of giving great love is risking that it won't be returned. Until you understand, of course, that great love is always returned. With interest.”

Mike Dooley (1961) American writer

Love, Understanding

“I hadn't seen my dad get violent since the Great Spatula Incident, and I wasn't anxious to see a repeat of that.”

Rick Riordan book The Red Pyramid

Source: The Red Pyramid

“Sebastian lay a few feet away from her, on his back. There was a great blackened hole across the front of his chest. He turned his head toward her, his face taut and white with pain, and her heart contracted.
His eyes were green.”

Cassandra Clare book City of Heavenly Fire

Source: City of Heavenly Fire

Pain, Heart

“Woman work a great many miracles.”

Louisa May Alcott book Little Women

Source: Little Women

“Guys are great before you know who they are,' said Lucy. 'They're great when you're still with who they might be.”

Carrie Fisher book Postcards from the Edge

Source: Postcards from the Edge

Guy

“A truly great artist has many talents.”

Rick Riordan (1964) American writer

“Picasso had a saying - 'good artists copy, great artists steal' - and we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.”

Walter Isaacson book Steve Jobs

Source: Steve Jobs

Idea

“One of the great things about books is sometimes there are some fantastic pictures.”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

Books

“Did not you? I did for you. But that is one great difference between us. Compliments always take you by surprise, and me never.”

Jane Austen book Pride and Prejudice

Source: Pride and Prejudice

“Not everybody can be famous but everybody can be great, because greatness is determined by service.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

“Great. Lookout. I'm a lookout. Another thing to put on my college applications. What do I do if I see someone?"
Val looked back. "I'm not sure, actually.”

Holly Black (1971) American children's fiction writer

Source: Valiant

“great men burn bridges before they come to them”

E.E. Cummings (1894–1962) American poet

Men

“Let’s not forget that the little emotions are the great captains of our lives and we obey them without realizing it.”

Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890) Dutch post-Impressionist painter (1853-1890)

Forgetting

“If it weren't for greed, intolerance, hate, passion and murder, you would have no works of art, no great buildings, no medical science, no Mozart, no Van Gough, no Muppets and no Louis Armstrong.”

Jasper Fforde book The Big Over Easy

Source: The Big Over Easy

Hate, Art, Passion, Science

“Love the earth and sun and animals,
Despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks,
Stand up for the stupid and crazy,
Devote your income and labor to others…
And your very flesh shall be a great poem.”

Walt Whitman (1819–1892) American poet, essayist and journalist

From the Preface to the 1855 edition of <i>Leaves of Grass</i>
Context: This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body. . . .
Context: This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.... The poet shall not spend his time in unneeded work. He shall know that the ground is always ready ploughed and manured.... others may not know it but he shall. He shall go directly to the creation. His trust shall master the trust of everything he touches.... and shall master all attachment.

Love, Stupidity, Sun, Animals

“Great,” Simon said. “Maybe I’ll even make it back before my mother notices I’m gone. What’s the time difference between here and Manhattan?”
“You have a mother?” Aline looked amazed.”

Cassandra Clare book City of Glass

Source: City of Glass

Time