Quotes about greatness

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“Beauty and love pass, I know… Oh, there's sadness, too. I suppose all great happiness is a little sad. Beauty means the scent of roses and then the death of roses”

“Your powers drain you too much,' [Percy] noted.
[Nico] nodded sleepily. 'With great power… comes great need to take a nap. Wake me up later.”

“Without Mona, Hanna felt like a great outfit without matching accessories, a screw-driver that was all orange juice and no vodka, and an iPod without headphones. She just felt wrong.”

“Only the strongest are put through the fire,' Josiah said. 'And the forge creates things of great strength and beauty.'
'Then I shall be truly glorious by the time my tenure ends.”

“And maybe you should stop pitying yourself,” he said. “Most people are lucky to have even one great love in their life. You have found two.”

“France is great because she is France.”

“Great minds have purpose, others have wishes. Little minds are tamed and subdued by misfortunes; but great minds rise above them.”

“No man is great enough or wise enough for any of us to surrender our destiny to. The only way in which anyone can lead us is to restore to us the belief in our own guidance.”

“The outward work will never be puny if the inward work is great.”

“I am the god Apostolos. The Harbinger of Telikos. The Final Fate of all. Beloved son of Apollymi the Great Destroyer. My will makes the will of the universe. [Apostolos / Acheron Parthenopaeus]”

“The end of the world started when a pegasus landed on the hood of my car.
Up until then I was having a great afternoon.”

“You cannot fake effort; talent is great, but perseverance is necessary.”

“Small disciplines repeated with consistency every day lead to great achievements gained slowly over time.”

“After all, the appeal to stop being yourself, even for a little while, is very great.”

“To be independent of public opinion is the first formal condition of achieving anything great or rational whether in life or in science. Great achievement is assured, however, of subsequent recognition and grateful acceptance by public opinion, which in due course will make it one of its own prejudices”

“Books have great value, actions have greater value.”

“I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker, and I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker, and in short, I was afraid.”

“A great novel heightens your senses and sensitivity to the complexities of life and of individuals, and prevents you from the self-righteousness that sees morality in fixed cormulas about good and evil.”

“It is as great a thing to love as it is to be loved. Love is not something that can be wasted.”

“In this world of gossip, a good listener is rarer than a great orator.”

“Everything is perfect on the street again, the world is permeated with roses of happiness all the time, but none of us know it. The happiness consists in realizing that it is all a great strange dream.”

“… great things may come from moments of nothingness.”

“A great many men are mad, and no one knows it. They do not know it themselves”

“Life's one great lesson was: Do not care. Not caring was a person's real protection.”

“Each day I live in a glass room
Unless I break it with the thrusting
Of my senses and pass through
The splintered walls to the great landscape.”

“All is forgotten in the stone halls of the dead. These are the rooms of ruin where the spiders spin and the great circuits fall quiet, one by one…”

“In Greek tragedy, they fall from great heights. In noir, they fall from the curb.”

“It must be a great disappointment to God if we are not dazzled at least ten times a day.”

“Our Age of Anxiety is, in great part, the result of trying to do today’s jobs with yesterday’s tools!”

“To be a woman is a great adventure;
To drive men mad is a heroic thing.”

“Giants are not what we think they are. The same qualities that appear to give them strength are often the sources of great weakness.”

“Great," Percy said. "Seven of us against Hercules."

"And a satyr!" Hedge added. "We can take him.”

“What the really great artists do is they're entirely themselves. They're entirely themselves, they've got their own vision, they have their own way of fracturing reality, and if it's authentic and true, you will feel it in your nerve endings.”

“I am in great terror of your understanding by which you penetrate into my world; and then I stand revealed and I have shared my kingdom with you.”

“Love is so unpredictable. That's what makes it so great.”

“Alright, you'll get your bonus, buy play nice with her. Keep your sarcasm to a minimum. (Kyrian)
Yes, O Great Lord and Master. Be nice to woman, keep mouth shut. (Nick)”

“The door could not be heard slamming; they had probably left it open, as is the custom in homes where a great misfortune has occurred.”

“And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.”

“The mark of a great man is one who knows when to set aside the important things in order to accomplish the vital ones.”

“The car was full of unhappy people heading west. It was the Great American Family Road Trip, all right. Whaaa-hoo!”

“You are not my high school crush, idiot.”
“Great. I can die happy, then.”

“I must be a mermaid, Rango. I have no fear of depths and a great fear of shallow living.”

“Emptying the ashtrays was very expressive of myself. I just lump everything in a great heap which I have labeled ‘the past,’ and having thus emptied this deep reservoir that was once myself, I am ready to continue.”

“Cleavage is great," she said. "Like an extra pocket.”

“Those at too great a distance may, I am well aware, mistake ignorance for perspective.”

“The craving to risk death is our last great perversion. We come from night, we go into night. Why live in night?”

“Great God! I'd rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.”

“For your life to be great, your faith must be bigger than your fear.”

“Facing the difficulties, I can choose either to be a poor victim or a great adventurer.”

“Mahon's wife stared down at us. Her hands went to her hips. "Which one of you idiots wants to explain to me what the hell is going on?"
With great effort I raised my arm and pointed in Mahon's general direction. "Him.”

“Caesar broke the law when he crossed the Rubicon," Frank said. "Great leaders have to think out side the box sometimes.”

“Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination.”

“No great thing is created suddenly.”

“Why could you not have left me as I was, in the sea of being?"

"Because the world has need of your humility, your piety, your great teaching and your Machiavellian scheming.”

“This great handsomeness I took into myself later when he desired me, but I took it as one breathes air, or swallows a snowflake, or yields to the sun.”

“Great art is horseshit, buy tacos.”

“Great minds may have cold hearts. Form but no color. It is an incompleteness. And so they are afraid of any woman who both thinks and feels deeply.”

“Movies are so rarely great art, that if we cannot appreciate great trash, we have very little reason to be interested in them.”

“She had what it took: great hair, a profound understanding of strategic lip gloss, the intelligence to understand the world and a tiny secret interior deadness which meant she didn’t care.”

“It is not only by one's impulses that one achieves greatness, but also by patiently filing away the steel wall that separates what one feels from what one is capable of doing.”

“Discretion,” said Fen with great complacency, “is my middle name.”
“I dare say. But very few people use their middle names.”

“It is a thing of no great difficulty to raise objections against another man's oration,—nay, it is a very easy matter; but to produce a better in its place is a work extremely troublesome.”

“When you meet someone who is truly great, he makes you believe you can be great, too. This is the kind of relationship you want, and it's the only kind of relationship worth having.”

“Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.”

“Janie saw her life like a great tree in leaf with the things suffered, things enjoyed, things done and undone. Dawn and doom was in the branches.”

“Let me say,
at the risk of seeming ridiculous,
that the true revolutionary
is guided by great feelings of love.”

“The great authors were great readers, and one way to understand them is to read the books they read.”

“In spite of everything I shall rise again: I will take up my pencil, which I have forsaken in my great discouragement, and I will go on with my drawing.”

“The play was a great success, but audience was a dismal failure.”

“Now we're in that sweet period where everyone agrees that our recent horrors should never be repeated. But collective thinking is usually short-lived. We're fickle, stupid beings with poor memories and a great gift for self-destruction.”

“great. now i was starting to get jealous of myself.”

“A prudent man should always follow in the path trodden by great men and imitate those who are most excellent.”

“A bit of advice
Given to a young Native American
At the time of his initiation:
As you go the way of life,
You will see a great chasm. Jump.
It is not as wide as you think.”

“Death and what came after death was no great mystery to Sabriel. She just wished it was.”

“My own great-grandfather, who said simply enough, "No wicked man could write such a book as this; and no good man would write it unless it were true and he were commanded of God to do so.”

“I have been meditating on the very great pleasure which a pair of fine eyes in the face of a pretty woman can bestow.”

“The great advantage about telling the truth is that nobody ever believes it.”

“So many of us find ourselves saying, “but he was so great!” Yes, and the people who got on the Titanic thought they were going on vacation. Things changed and it’s important to remember that they did.”

“And I, infinitesima­l being,
drunk with the great starry
void,
likeness, image of
mystery,
I felt myself a pure part
of the abyss,
I wheeled with the stars,
my heart broke loose on the wind.”

“The great use of life is to spend it for something that will outlast it.”

“To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be who have tried it.”

“Great. So if I saw a guy standing still, and he wasn't wearing an old uniform, I just had to ask him to walk through furniture. If he stared at me like I was crazy, then I'd know he wasn't a ghost. - Chloe”

“The great challenge of the twenty-first century is to raise people everywhere to a decent standard of living while preserving as much of the rest of life as possible.”

“Well, let me leave it at this: if God does exist, He would have a great deal be sad about. And if He doesn’t exist, then that too would make Him quite sad, I imagine. So to answer your question, God must be sad.”

“This wife you have, Bird said at last, deeply contemplative, did you pay a great deal for her?

She cost me almost everything I had, he said, with a wry tone that made the others laugh. But worth it.”

“A woman told me her child was autistic, and I thought she said artistic. So I said, 'Oh great. I'd like to see some of the things he's done.”

“The Great Depression in the United States, far from being a sign of the inherent instability of the private enterprise system, is a testament to how much harm can be done by mistakes on the part of a few men when they wield vast power over the monetary system of a country.”

“Roman might have survived the Great Vampire War of 1710, but he was about to face an even worse terror.
A mortal female in full rage.”

“One great thing about growing old is that nothing is going to lead to anything. Everything is of the moment.”

“Great teams do not hold back with one another. They are unafraid to air their dirty laundry. They admit their mistakes, their weaknesses, and their concerns without fear of reprisal.”

“Someone once told the Catholic writer Flannery O’Connor that it is more open-minded to think that the Blessed Sacrament of the Altar is a great, wonderful, powerful symbol.

Her response was, “If it’s only a symbol, to hell with it.”

“I know up on top you are seeing great sights,
But down here on the bottom,
We too should have rights.”

“Some guys look at you like they only want sex. Jace looks at you like you've had sex - it was great and now you're just friends. Drives girls crazy. Know what I mean?" Yes. Clary thought. "No." Clary said.”

“He who waits to do a great deal of good at once will never do anything.”

“Once in a while I go off on a spree and make a fool of myself, but I always come back, and in my heart I love her all the time. - The Great Gatsby.”

“A great photograph is a full expression of what one feels about what is being photographed in the deepest sense, and is, thereby, a true expression of what one feels about life in its entirety.”

“And today the great Yertle, that Marvelous he,
Is King of the Mud. That is all he can see.
And the turtles, of course… all the turtles are free
As turtles and, maybe, all creatures should be.”

“I have both held and beheld unlimited power and of it I know but one thing. It drives men mad.'
- Alexander the Great”

“That's how it is with relationships, it's a part of life, and all the great love songs and poems and films have been written by people who were standing where I was that morning as Simon shut the door. Doesn't make it any easier though.”