The message I got from my father was that life is hard, but you just don't quit. I am grateful that I didn't let fear get the best of me. It only holds you back from possibilities and greatness. You've got to kick fear to the side, because the payoff is huge.
There is no greatness without taking risks.
In historic events, the so-called great men are labels giving names to events, and like labels they have but the smallest connection with the event itself. Every act of theirs, which appears to them an act of their own will, is in an historical sense involuntary and is related to the whole course of history and predestined from eternity.
Much more frequent in Hollywood than the emergence of Cinderella is her sudden vanishing. At our party, even in those glowing days, the clock was always striking twelve for someone at the height of greatness; and there was never a prince to fetch her back to the happy scene.
Those writers who lie on the watch for novelty can have little hope of greatness; for great things cannot have escaped former observation.
I want to move from what we let go of to whom we hold on to. I want to explore not just the gravity of what we forsake in this world, but also the greatness of the one we follow in this world.
Any person can achieve greatness if they understand the philosophy of success and the steps required to achieve it.
No possible combination of circumstances can keep a man down, if he makes his personal attitude right and determines to rise.
There is something mean in human nature that prefers to think evil, that gives a willing ear and a ready welcome to calumny, a sort of jealousy of goodness and greatness and things of good report.
And why does it make you sad to see how everything hangs by such thin and whimsical threads? Because you’re a dreamer, an incredible dreamer, with a tiny spark hidden somewhere inside you which cannot die, which even you cannot kill or quench and which tortures you horribly because all the odds are against its continual burning. In the midst of the foulest decay and putrid savagery, this spark speaks to you of beauty, of human warmth and kindness, of goodness, of greatness, of heroism, of martyrdom, and it speaks to you of love.
There is no possibility in any man that is not in every man
I count him a great man who inhabits a higher sphere of thought, into which other men rise with labor and difficulty; he has but to open his eyes to see things in a true light, and in large relations; whilst they must make painful corrections, and keep a vigilant eye on many sources of error.
I believe that there is no test of greatness in periods, nations or men more sure than the development, among them or in them, of a noble grotesque, and no test of comparative smallness or limitation, of one kind or another, more sure than the absence of grotesque invention, or incapability of understanding it.
We must reject the idea. . . Well-intentioned, but dead wrong. . . That the primary path to greatness in the social sectors is to become "more like a business. " Most businesses. . . Like most of anything else in life. . . Fall somewhere between mediocre and good.
The final proof of greatness lies in being able to endure criticism without resentment.
Make measurable progress in reasonable time.
In the quiet of this day may you know the greatness of your spirit and may your hopes fly on the wings of possibility.
Jesus does not so much look at the greatness of our actions, nor even at their difficulty, but at the love with which we do them.
My fellow Minnesotans join me in mourning the loss of America's 40th President and celebrating the life of a man who personified both the greatness and goodness of America.
The safest kind of praise is to foretell that another will become great in some particular way. It has the greatest show of magnanimity and the least of it in reality.