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A man who pays respect to the great paves the way for his own greatness. (Chinua Achebe)
A great photograph is one that fully expresses what one feels, in the deepest sense, about what is being photographed. (Ansel Adams)
Did you ever see a portrait of a great man without perceiving strong traits of pain and anxiety? (John Adams)
It is my intention to own my Greatness. (Jeanne Aisthorpe-Smith)
You will become as small as your controlling desire; as great as your dominant aspiration. (James Allen)
The only thing standing between me and greatness is me. I feel I should have done better. (Woody Allen)
Distinction is the consequence, never the object of a great mind. (Washington Allston)
Great people have great egos; maybe that's what makes them great. (Paul Arden)
No great mind has ever existed without a touch of madness. (Aristotle)
Great thoughts, like great deeds, need no trumpet. (James M. Bailey)
Great art does not break with the past. It breaks with the present by emulating the best of the past. (Darby Bannard)
The Great suffer hours of depression through introspection and self-doubt. That is why they are great. That is why you will find modesty and humility the characteristics of such men. (Bruce Barton)
We shall never resolve the enigma of the relation between the negative foundations of greatness and that greatness itself. (Jean Baudrillard)
Familiarity with any great thing removes our awe of it. (L. Frank Baum)
The experiential test of whether this art is great or good, or minor or abysmal is the effect it has on your own sense of the world and of yourself. Great art changes you. (Sister Wendy Beckett)
Any great work of art... revives and readapts time and space, and the measure of its success is the extent to which it makes you an inhabitant of that world - the extent to which it invites you in and lets you breathe its strange, special air. (Leonard Bernstein)
Great things are done when men and mountains meet. (William Blake)
Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some hire public relations officers. (Daniel J. Boorstin)
There are selections so acute that they come to define a place, with the result that we can no longer travel through that landscape without being reminded of what a great artist noticed there. (Alain de Botton)
The great artist is a slave to his ideals. (Christian Nestell Bovee)
Every great artist raises art to a science, and every great scientist raises science to an art, hence we have Michelangelo's David and Einstein's Theory of Relativity. (Robert Brault)
Great writers are the saints for the godless. (Anita Brookner)
Great art can be neither fully understood nor accomplished without the complete understanding of edges. (Harley Brown)
Each part of a great painting should in itself be a great painting. (Melissa Brown)
An ignorance of means may minister / To greatness, but an ignorance of aims / Make it impossible to be great at all. (Elizabeth Barrett Browning)
The nearer we come to great men the more clearly we can see that they are only men. They rarely seem great to their valets. (Jean de La Bruyere)
I don't confuse greatness with perfection. To be great anyhow is... the higher achievement. (Lois McMaster Bujold)
Earnestness is the best gift of mental power, and deficiency of heart is the cause of many men never becoming great. (Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton)
A great work of art is that which moves and touches one's spirit and adds to one's experience of the world, but does not impose on one's values. It lets one take from it what one wants or needs. (Maritza Burgos)
It is the nature of all greatness not to be exact. (Edmund Burke)
All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning. Great works are often born on a street corner or in a restaurant's revolving door. (Albert Camus)
Great art is always a balancing act. But all art has both – an emotional content and an intellectual content. (George L. Carlson)
No sadder proof can be given by a man of his own littleness than disbelief in great men. (Thomas Carlyle)
All great men are gifted with intuition. They know without reasoning or analysis, what they need to know. (Alexis Carrel)
If we study the lives of great men and women carefully and unemotionally we find that, invariably, greatness was developed, tested and revealed through the darker periods of their lives. One of the largest tributaries of the river of greatness is always the stream of adversity. (Robert Cavett)
Great art picks up where nature ends. (Marc Chagall)
They're only truly great who are truly good. (George Chapman)
There is a great man who makes every man feel small. But the real great man is the man who makes every man feel great. (G. K. Chesterton)
When you are on the podium nobody is asking you if you are 15 or 30 years old. What matters is who can do great gymnastics. (Oksana Chusovitina)
If you cannot do great things; do small things in a great way. (J. F. Clarke)
Great things alone can make a great mind, and petty things will make a petty mind unless a man rejects them as completely alien. (Carl von Clausewitz)
Be it known that we, the greatest, are misthought. (Cleopatra)
You know, the way art history is taught, often there's nothing that tells you why the painting is great. The description of a lousy painting and the description of a great painting will very much sound the same. (Chuck Close)
Greatness and goodness are not means, but ends. (Samuel Taylor Coleridge)
Let every man or woman here, if you never hear me again, remember this, that if you wish to be great at all, you must begin where you are and with what you are. (Kitty O'Neill Collins)
Greatness is not a function of circumstance; greatness is largely a matter of conscious choice, and discipline. (Jim Collins, author)
It is not truth that makes man great; but man that makes truth great. (Confucius)
If my resolution to be a great man was half so strong as it is to despise the shame of being a little one... (William Cowper)
It is not enough to be very good if you have the ability to be great. (Alberta Lee Cox)
A good character today is shaped by greatness, greatness in vision, greatness in courage, greatness in insight, greatness in purpose and devotion. (A. Powell Davies)
Not one great mind coming after them (great artists) but owes them tribute, and finds in them the prototype of his own inspiration. (Eugene Delacroix)
One must be able to strike a balance between the opposing forces of self-esteem and self-doubt. Great artists have both in generous quantities. (Paul deMarrais)
Learn about Rembrandt's life of continuous ups and downs, misfortune and adversity. There is a lesson here, one that is shown to us by great artists through the ages. (Jack Dickerson)
Beware of endeavoring to become a great man in a hurry. One such attempt in ten thousand may succeed. These are fearful odds. (Benjamin Disraeli)
A great song's greatest attribute is how it hints at more. (Gord Downie)
Great wits are sure to madness near alli'd, / And thin partitions do their bounds divide. (John Dryden)
Every great film should seem new every time you see it. (Roger Ebert)
Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds. (Albert Einstein)
It is frequently the tragedy of the great artist, as it is of the great scientist, that he frightens the ordinary man. (Loren Eiseley)
Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together. (George Eliot)
It is only the great men who are truly obscene. If they had not dared to be obscene, they could never have dared to be great. (Havelock Ellis)
Nothing is more simple than greatness; indeed, to be simple is to be great. (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
To be great is to be misunderstood. (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
To some, art is a trite and trivial activity in these times of war and intolerance, yet if all human beings functioned on the level of self-awareness and ego-less meditation that brings about great works of art and self-discovery, there would be no space for
violence and hate... all things in life would be seen as they truly are; beautiful. (Ian Factor)
The great art includes much that the small art excludes: humor, pain and evil. Much that is repulsive when alone becomes beautiful in its relation. To find the ennobling relation is the task of life and art. (Oscar W. Firkin)
Our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world as in being able to remake ourselves. (Mahatma Gandhi)
In matters of art one's state of mind is three-quarters of what counts, so it has to be carefully nurtured if you want to do something great and lasting. (Paul Gauguin)
The difference between great people and everyone else is that great people create their lives actively, while everyone else is created by their lives, passively waiting to see where life takes them next. The difference between the two is the difference between living fully and just existing. (Michael Gerber)
A minute moving among the patterns of beauty and the dreams of love is greater and more precious than an age filled with splendor granted by the weak to the strong. (Kahlil Gibran)
The lights of stars that were extinguished ages ago still reaches us. So it is with great men who died centuries ago, but still reach us with the radiations of their personalities. (Kahlil Gibran)
The great artist is one whom constraint exalts, for whom the obstacle is a springboard. (Andre Gide)
Ten thousand hours is the magic number of greatness. (Malcolm Gladwell)
If you have a great work in your head, nothing else thrives near it; all other thoughts are repelled, and the pleasure of life itself is for the time lost. (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)
Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together. (Vincent van Gogh)
The great square has no corners and the great implement completes nothing. (Josh Goldberg)
Great dancers are not great because of their technique; they are great because of their passion. (Martha Graham)
To become a great artist you have to see unity and direction in everything you do. (Irwin Greenberg)
Great art is the expression of a solution of the conflict between the demands of the world without and that within. (Edith Hamilton)
- Jude the Obscure...
Remember that the best and greatest among mankind are those who do themselves no worldly good. (Thomas Hardy)
All great artists were consumed by their suffering and obsessed by their subject - they learned how to turn not only their talents, but their faults and failings into fuel for their work. (Margot Hattingh)
He who comes up to his own idea of greatness must always have had a very low standard of it in his mind. (William Hazlitt)
What is greatest in human beings is what makes them equal to everybody else. Everything else that deviates higher or lower from what is common to all human beings makes us less. If we know this, we can develop a deep respect for every human being. (Bert Hellinger)
There would be no great men if there were no little ones. (George Herbert)
Great art has no nationality. We know that Goya was Spanish, Da Vinci was Italian, and Rembrandt was Dutch. But we don't think of them first as the Dutch painter or the Spanish painter anymore than Picasso or Matisse... Chagal and Soutine were Russian but lived in France. DeKooning was Dutch and came to NY in his forties. Who cares? They transcend their origins. (Jeffrey Hessing)
The average person would have quit after the first failure. That's why there have been many average men and only one Edison. (Napoleon Hill)
Most great people have attained their greatest success just one step beyond their greatest failure. (Napoleon Hill)
You can always tell a great painting, because when you get close there are all these nervous marks. (Damien Hirst)
Lives of great men oft remind us as we o'er their pages turn, / That we too may leave behind us - / Letters that we ought to burn. (Thomas Hood)
I believe that the great painters, with their intellect as master, have attempted to force the unwilling medium of paint and canvas into a record of their emotions. I find any digression from this large aim leads me to boredom. (Edward Hopper)
There is virtue in virtuosity, especially today, when it protects us from the tedious spectacle of ineptitude. (Robert Hughes)
Great art is an instant arrested in eternity. (James G. Huneker)
The greatness of art is not in the display of knowledge, or in material accuracy, but in the distinctness with which it conveys the impressions of a personal vital force, that acts spontaneously, without fear or hesitation. (George Inness)
Great minds have purposes; others have wishes. (Washington Irving)
Great ideas need landing gear as well as wings. (C. D. Jackson)
Insanely Great! (Steve Jobs)
Great works are performed not by strength but by perseverance. (Samuel Johnson)
-on Thomas Gray...
He was dull in a new way, and that made many people think him great. (Samuel Johnson)
Our biggest challenge with our inherent potential for greatness might be that too often we unconsciously fear it because we have not conditioned ourselves for what greatness may bring. (Dennis Merritt Jones)
The artist who could disentangle the subtle soul of the image from its mesh of defining circumstances most exactly and 're-embody' it in artistic circumstances chosen as the most exact for it in its new office, he was the supreme artist. (James Joyce)
The biographies of great artists make it abundantly clear that the creative urge is often so imperious that it battens on their humanity and yokes everything to the service of the work, even at the cost of health and ordinary human happiness. The unborn work in the psyche of the artist is a force of nature that achieves its end either with tyrannical might or with the subtle cunning of nature herself, quite regardless of the personal fate of the man who is its vehicle. (Carl Gustav Jung)
Great dreams of great dreamers are always transcended. (Abdul Kalam)
Few will have the greatness to bend history; but each of us can work to change a small portion of the events, and in the total of all these acts will be written the history of this generation. (Robert F. Kennedy)
Everybody can be great, because everybody can serve. You don't have to have a college degree to serve. You don't have to make your subject and your verb agree to serve... You only need a heart full of grace, a soul generated by love. (Martin Luther King, Jr.)
Great art moves you from where you are to a different place. It alters the way you have always perceived your world. (Gayle Konantz)
Great things are not accomplished by those who yield to trends and fads and popular opinion. (Charles Kuralt)
To be great, art has to point somewhere. (Anne Lamott)
Great men lose somewhat of their greatness by being near us; ordinary men gain much. (Walter Savage Landor)
Great men always pay deference to greater. (Walter Savage Landor)
The great man... walks across his century and leaves the marks of his feet all over it, ripping out the dates on his goloshes as he passes. (Stephen Leacock)
Great paintings are simple in concept. They have one essential visual idea about color, shapes, values, edges, alone or in combination. These are things that paint can do. The idea or visual concept creates a relationship between objects. (David Leffel)
I found so-called great art too pompous, too stiff. What at this time was called minor art was freer, more imaginative, more open to all kinds of unorthodox expression, all kinds of daring in the handling of materials, and I preferred to surround myself with this type of art than with the great collectors' pieces. I had always in my mind that I was collecting for learning. (Jacques Lipchitz)
The secret of great art – to rob the moment of its impermanence. (Ivan Lissner)
As for famous men who were not artists, I am beginning to be tired of them. Those poor little scoundrels who are called great men fill me with nothing but overwhelming horror. (Franz Liszt)
Great art... is the result of the labours of thousands of faithful craftsmen who know that they are doomed to remain for ever outside the gates of the Paradise of Perfection, but who nevertheless will give the very best there is in them because the work they do means more to them than anything else in this world. (Hendrik Willem van Loon)
A great man is made up of qualities that meet or make great occasions. (James Russell Lowell)
Many of the greatest men have owed their success to industry rather than to cleverness. (John Lubbock)
Kurosawa was one of film's true greats... His ability to transform a vision into a powerful work of art is unparalleled. So it seemed appropriate to name the new digital studio for him. (George Lucas)
Great things are, by their very nature, unique and unconventional. Therefore, to achieve them, we must go against the herd mentality. And to do that is scary. (Mark Manson)
The great artists are those who impose their personal vision upon humanity. (Guy de Maupassant)
- b.372 BC d.289 BC...
He who attends to his greater self becomes a great man, and he who attends to his smaller self becomes a small man. (Mencius)
The great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable. (H. L. Mencken)
How can great minds be produced in a country where the test of great minds is agreeing in the opinion of small minds? (John Stuart Mill)
No one asks you to throw Mozart out of the window. Keep Mozart. Cherish him. Keep Moses too, and Buddha and Lao-Tzu and Christ. Keep them in your heart. But make room for the others, the coming ones, the ones who are already scratching on the window-panes. (Henry Miller)
Some of the greatest love affairs I've known have involved one actor – unassisted. (Wilson Mizner)
The strange quality of expectation that hovers over muted things... I must try to get hold of the great and simple beauty of all that. In general, I must strive for the utmost simplicity united with the most intimate power of observation. That's where greatness lies. (Paula Modersohn-Becker)
Every great work of art should be considered like any work of nature. First of all from the point of view of its aesthetic reality and then not just from its development and the mastery of its creation but from the standpoint of what has moved and agitated its creator. (Amedeo Modigliani)
No, I'm not a great painter. Neither am I a great poet. (Claude Monet)
All things great are wound up with all things little. (Lucy Maud Montgomery)
If I set out to sculpt a standing man and it becomes a lying woman, I know I am making art. (Henry Moore)
You cannot demonstrate your own greatness by remaining at one extreme, but by reaching out to both extremes at the same time, and filling the intermediate space. (Giorgio Morandi)
Great artists have no country. (Alfred de Musset)
Great art is as irrational as great music. It is mad with its own loveliness. (George Jean Nathan)
The mark of great sportsmen is not how good they are at their best, but how good they are their worst. (Martina Navratilova)
Greatness breaks laws. (Louise Nevelson)
If I have seen farther than others, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants. (Isaac Newton)
Real greatness is often hidden, humble, simple, and unobtrusive. It is not easy to trust ourselves and our actions without public affirmation. We must have strong self-confidence combined with deep humility. (Henri Nouwen)
Greatness is never free; it must be earned. (Barack Obama)
All great art is an imperfect, halting attempt to catch up upon life. (John Edgar Park)
A man does not show his greatness by being at one extremity, but rather by touching both at once. (Blaise Pascal)
The Renaissance of the fifteenth century was, in many things, great rather by what it designed than by what it achieved. (Walter Pater)
Anybody can do just about anything with himself that he really wants to and makes up his mind to do. We are all capable of greater things than we realize. (Norman Vincent Peale)
Great artists need great clients. (I. M. Pei)
The secret of greatness is simple: do better work than any other man in your field – and keep on doing it. (Wilfred A. Peterson)
Titian, Rembrandt and Goya were the great painters. I am only a public clown. (Pablo Picasso)
Greatness and nearsightedness are incompatible. Meaningful achievement depends on lifting one's sights and pushing toward the horizon. (Daniel H. Pink)
Those who intend on becoming great should love neither themselves nor their own things, but only what is just, whether it happens to be done by themselves or others. (Plato)
Great people do things before they're ready. They do things before they know they can do it. (Amy Poehler)
Lo, what huge heaps of littleness around! (Alexander Pope)
All great art is born of the metropolis. (Ezra Pound)
A great age of literature is perhaps always a great age of translations. (Ezra Pound)
Everything great in the world comes from neurotics. They alone have founded our religions and composed our masterpieces. (Marcel Proust)
A truly great man never puts away the simplicity of a child. (Chinese proverb)
Art makes life great. (Carl Purcell)
All great work – artistic, poetic, intellectual or spiritual – is produced at those moments when creators forget themselves altogether and are free from self-consciousness. (Walpola Rahula)
Great men have the nature of a child. (Ramakrishna)
Great paintings are not just good renderings – they are emotional triggers... (B. Eric Rhoads)
I don't know what motivated the artist, which means that the paintings have an intrinsic quality. I think Goethe called it the 'essential dimension,' the thing that makes great works of art great. (Gerhard Richter)
Do continue to believe that with your feeling and your work you are taking part in the greatest; the more strongly you cultivate this belief, the more will reality and the world go forth from it. (Rainer Maria Rilke)
There is no greatness without a passion to be great, whether it's the aspiration of an athlete or an artist, a scientist, a parent, or a businessperson. (Tony Robbins)
Greatness, in the last analysis, is largely bravery: courage in escaping from old ideas and old standards and respectable ways of doing things. (James Harvey Robinson)
Don't be afraid to give up the good for the great. (Kenny Rogers)
Whoever renders service to many puts himself in line for greatness - great wealth, great return, great satisfaction, great reputation, and great joy. (Jim Rohn)
All great art, the moment you are looking at it, there is nothing else... like a love affair. (Norman Rosenthal)
Greatness is within, if you believe it. The trick is to really believe it. (Rick Rotante)
-said to Picasso in 1908...
We are the two great painters of this era; you are in the Egyptian style, I in the modern style. (Henri Rousseau)
Nobody cares much at heart about Titian, only there is a strange undercurrent of everlasting murmur about his name, which means the deep consent of all great men that he is greater than they. (John Ruskin)
All great art is the expression of man's delight in God's work, not his own. (John Ruskin)
What distinguishes a great artist from a weak one is first their sensibility and tenderness; second, their imagination, and third, their industry. (John Ruskin)
He is the greatest artist who has embodied, in the sum of his works, the greatest number of the greatest ideas. (John Ruskin)
We incline to think that a great painting is like an earthquake – something that makes itself felt at once and over a wide area – whereas it could be better likened to a murder or an act of love: a private episode that may be discovered 20 years later or not at all. (John Russell)
Nothing is as uplifting as standing before a great painting whether it was painted in 1505 or last Tuesday. (Charles Saatchi)
To be alone is the fate of all great minds – a fate deplored at times, but still always chosen as the less grievous of two evils. (Arthur Schopenhauer)
Great men are like eagles, and build their nest on some lofty solitude. (Arthur Schopenhauer)
They say greatness skips a generation, but I think that's because the generation before helps too much. (Nick Simmons)
The very greatest things - great thoughts, discoveries, inventions - have usually been nurtured in hardship, often pondered over in sorrow, and at length established with difficulty. (Samuel Smiles)
What makes greatness is starting something that lives after you. (Ralph Sockman)
I think continually of those who were truly great / ...Born of the sun they traveled a short while towards the sun, / And left the vivid air signed with their honor. (Stephen Spender)
It is the nature of man to rise to greatness if greatness is expected of him. (John Steinbeck)
- East of Eden...
All great and precious things are lonely. (John Steinbeck)
One would like to be grand and heroic, if one could; but if not, why try at all? One wants to be very something, very great, very heroic; or if not that, then at least very stylish and very fashionable. It is this everlasting mediocrity that bores me. (Harriet Beecher Stowe)
Picasso was a great naturalistic painter, and he fully absorbed what constituted great artwork. Then he departed from it completely. The great artists don't reject anything; they simply use it as their starting point. (Dan Sullivan)
The difference between something good and something great is attention to detail. (Charles Swindoll)
We come nearest to the great when we are great in humility. (Rabindranath Tagore)
We needs must love the highest when we see it. (Alfred, Lord Tennyson)
I had to become the greatest choreographer of my time. That was my mission, and that's what I set out to do. (Twyla Tharp)
We can do not great things - only small things with great love. (Paul Tillich)
There is no greatness where there is not simplicity, goodness and truth. (Leo Tolstoy)
Great works of art are only great because they are accessible and comprehensible to everyone. (Leo Tolstoy)
Every study of high achieving men and women proves that greatness in life is only possible when you become outstanding at your chosen field. (Brian Tracy)
Everybody does the things that top people do occasionally. Top people do these things all of the time. (Brian Tracy)
In reading the lives of great men, I found that the first victory they won was over themselves... self-discipline with all of them came first. (Harry S. Truman)
Great people are those who can make others feel that they, too, can become great. (Mark Twain)
I was sorry to hear my name mentioned as one of the great authors, because they have a sad habit of dying off. Chaucer is dead, so is Milton, so is Shakespeare, and I am not feeling very well myself. (Mark Twain)
Great undertakings always started with what is small. Therefore the sage never strives for the great, and thereby the great is achieved. (Lao Tzu)
A great man is one who leaves others at a loss after he is gone. (Paul Valery)
Great men undertake great things because they are great; fools, because they think them easy. (Marquis de Vauvenargues)
- Artists Magazine posed this question: When it comes to draftsmanship, who is your favorite artist?...
Leonardo da Vinci for his inventiveness and creativity, Michelangelo for his ingenuity and imagination, and Raphael for his grace and ability to communicate. (Costa Vavagiakas)
All great art is due to the abstraction process. (Curtis Verdun)
Thou shalt not let a day pass without rereading something great. (Stephen Vizinczey)
As great a picture can be made as one's mental capacity - no greater. Art cannot be taught; it must be self-inspiration, though the imagination may be fired and the ambition and work directed by the advice and example of others. (Edward Weston)
Success is born out of arrogance, but greatness comes from humility. (Marco Pierre White)
Great art is more than a transient refreshment. It is something which adds to the permanent richness of the soul's self-attainment. It justifies itself both by its immediate enjoyment, and also by its discipline of the inmost being. Its discipline is not distinct from enjoyment but by reason of it. It transforms the soul into the permanent realization of values extending beyond its former self. (Alfred North Whitehead)
Seek the lofty by reading, hearing and seeing great work at some moment every day. (Thornton Wilder)
What we have now is a communication ability. We have the ability to see working ideas that are going on in the great cities throughout the world and, whether you live in Shanghai or you live in Sao Paulo, you have the ability of seeing and knowing the ideas of some of the greatest minds of our generation. (Kehinde Wiley)
We grow great by dreams. All big men are dreamers. They see things in the soft haze of a spring day or in the red fire of a long winter's evening. Some of us let these great dreams die, but others nourish and protect them; nurse them through bad days till they bring them to the sunshine and light which comes always to those who sincerely hope that their dreams will come true. (Woodrow Wilson)
The creations of a great writer are little more than the moods and passions of his own heart, given surnames and Christian names, and sent to walk the earth. (William Butler Yeats)
Let the standard of everybody's mind be raised to the heights of his own inner glory and then man will feel for himself the greatness of the higher values of life and would be tempted to bring them down into practical life and live them. (Maharishi Mahesh Yogi)
A vandal is somebody who throws a brick through a window. An artist is somebody who paints a picture on that window. A great artist is somebody who paints a picture on the window and then throws a brick through it. (The New Yorker)
You can't play great music unless your heart's been broken. (Benjamin Zander)
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