Greatness is a spiritual condition worthy to excite love, interest, and admiration; and the outward proof of greatness is that we excite love, interest, and admiration. Matthew Arnold.
Greatness is its own torment. Theodore Parker.
Greatness is like a laced coat from Monmouth Street, which fortune lends us for a day to wear, to-morrow puts it on another's back. Fielding.
Greatness is not a teachable nor gainable 45 thing, but the expression of the mind of a God-made man: teach, or preach, or labour as you will, everlasting difference is set between one man's capacity and another's; and this God-given supremacy is the priceless thing, always just as rare in the world at one time as another.... And nearly the best thing that men can generally do is to set themselves, not to the attainment, but the discovery of this: learning to know gold, when we see it, from iron-glance, and diamond from flint-sand, being for most of us a more profitable employment than trying to make diamonds of our own charcoal. Ruskin.
Greatness is nothing unless it be lasting. Napoleon.
Greatness lies not in being strong, but in the right using of strength. He is greatest whose strength carries up the most hearts by the attraction of his own. Ward Beecher.
Greatness may be present in lives whose range is very small. Phil. Brooks.
Greatness of mind is not shown by admitting small things, but by making small things great under its influence. He who can take no interest in what is small will take false interest in what is great. Ruskin.
Greatness, once and for ever, has done with opinion. Emerson.
Greatness, once fallen out with fortune, / Must fall out with men too; what the declined is, / He shall as soon read in the eyes of others / As feel in his own fall. Troil. and Cress., iii. 3.