Top 100 Great Quotes of All Time

A short, finished list rather than an endless feed: 100 of the best great quotes ever written, picked out of the full great archive on QuoteForever. You will find Maya Angelou, Francois De La Rochefoucauld, Benjamin Disraeli and Rosalynn Carter among them.

Read the list top to bottom, or use it as a starting point - every author name links to everything else they said, and every quote has its own page you can share or turn into an image.

1

Absence diminishes mediocre passions and increases great ones, as the wind extinguishes candles and fans fires.

2

To be conscious that you are ignorant of the facts is a great step to knowledge.

3

A leader takes people where they want to go. A great leader takes people where they don't necessarily want to go, but ought to be.

4

A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within.

5

There is no pain so great as the memory of joy in present grief.

6

Teaching man his relatively small sphere in the creation, it also encourages him by its lessons of the unity of Nature and shows him that his power of comprehension allies him with the great intelligence over-reaching all.

7

And so while the great ones depart to their dinner, the secretary stays, growing thinner and thinner, racking his brain to record and report what he thinks that they think that they ought to have thought.

8

A great man is different from an eminent one in that he is ready to be the servant of the society.

9

It's sad to know I'm done. But looking back, I've got a lot of great memories.

10

It doesn't matter what age you are. You can look sexy and feel great, and that doesn't have to be a gift only for the young. It can be a gift for any age, even the old, whatever that is nowadays.

11

Man as an individual is a genius. But men in the mass form the headless monster, a great, brutish idiot that goes where prodded.

12

A great business at a fair price is superior to a fair business at a great price.

13

You know, be able to do something great in your life, you're gonna have to realize your failures. You're gonna have to embrace them and figure out how to overcome it.

14

Great humorists are great insulters.

15

I am concerned for the security of our great Nation; not so much because of any threat from without, but because of the insidious forces working from within.

16

There are many of us that are willing to do great things for the Lord, but few of us are willing to do little things.

17

It is the nature of all greatness not to be exact.

18

Great art is the outward expression of an inner life in the artist, and this inner life will result in his personal vision of the world.

19

Anywhere the struggle is great, the level of ingenuity and inventiveness is high.

20

I just feel like I'm the luckiest person in the world being able to do what I love and be able to do it all day every day if I like, you know, I mean it's great, I love it.

21

He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune; for they are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief.

22

I'm into very colorful food. Obviously lots of flavor, but I think we eat with our eyes first, so it has to look great. The presentation has to be great.

23

Every man of action has a strong dose of egoism, pride, hardness, and cunning. But all those things will be regarded as high qualities if he can make them the means to achieve great ends.

24

But, when the work was finished, the Craftsman kept wishing that there were someone to ponder the plan of so great a work, to love its beauty, and to wonder at its vastness.

25

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.

26

Great love affairs start with Champagne and end with tisane.

27

I woke up and realized life is great and people are awesome and life is worth living.

28

Well, I'm a daughter of the great migration as, really, the majority of African Americans that you meet in the north and west are products of the great migration. It's that massive. Many of us owe our very existence to the fact that people migrated.

29

I used to think that one of the great signs of security was the ability to just walk away.

30

I was given such a great gift. It's a miracle that never stops amazing me and reminding me to give thanks, every day. Having a wife and daughter gives me a lot more purpose. I was much more selfish before, but now I think about what kind of role model I'll be. I just want to be a better man.

31

When I read great literature, great drama, speeches, or sermons, I feel that the human mind has not achieved anything greater than the ability to share feelings and thoughts through language.

32

Most men who have really lived have had, in some share, their great adventure. This railway is mine.

33

A little flattery will support a man through great fatigue.

34

If you do build a great experience, customers tell each other about that. Word of mouth is very powerful.

35

When you want something so bad and when something great happens, I think it's instinct that you say, 'This is gonna be the moment that's gonna change everything. Everybody is gonna see me a different way.'

36

I have a great family, I live an amazing life.

37

Every great political campaign rewrites the rules; devising a new way to win is what gives campaigns a comparative advantage against their foes.

38

All great and beautiful work has come of first gazing without shrinking into the darkness.

39

It's always better to shock people and change people's expectations than to give them exactly what they think you can do. It's not unexpected for me to be in a comedy film anymore; I'm no longer the underdog in that world. Not that I'm great or good at it or anything, it's just that I've done a bunch of them, so you're not shocked.

40

You need great passion, because everything you do with great pleasure, you do well.

41

Singing is my passion, my first love and the secret of my energy. Music to me is like finding my inner self, my soul. It gives me a great joy to see audiences enjoying with me. I have given my heart to singing. When I sing, I can feel romance in everything around me.

42

By nature, I'm a very positive person, and because I'm happy in myself, and in my life, and I've got a great husband, and beautiful children, and I have a job that I love that calls for a certain amount of emotional expression, I get to realise a lot of my dreams and aspirations.

43

There are two great rules of life: never tell everything at once.

44

Australia is a nation of compassion. Courage and compassion. And the third of these great values: resilience.

45

I just wanna learn and I wanna grow. I wanna consume as much information as possible. I wanna be great.

46

The most important thing is to try and inspire people so that they can be great in whatever they want to do.

47

There's a great metaphor that one of my doctors uses: If a fish is swimming in a dirty tank and it gets sick, do you take it to the vet and amputate the fin? No, you clean the water. So, I cleaned up my system. By eating organic raw greens, nuts and healthy fats, I am flooding my body with enzymes, vitamins and oxygen.

48

I believe that in a great city, or even in a small city or a village, a great theater is the outward and visible sign of an inward and probable culture.

49

Money is the great tool through whose means labor and skill become universally co-operative.

50

Life is not an easy matter... You cannot live through it without falling into frustration and cynicism unless you have before you a great idea which raises you above personal misery, above weakness, above all kinds of perfidy and baseness.

51

To achieve great things, two things are needed; a plan, and not quite enough time.

52

Society is like a large piece of frozen water; and skating well is the great art of social life.

53

A great building must begin with the unmeasurable, must go through measurable means when it is being designed and in the end must be unmeasurable.

54

A man's worth is no greater than his ambitions.

55

For precocity some great price is always demanded sooner or later in life.

56

Every day is a great day for hockey.

57

There is a gigantic difference between earning a great deal of money and being rich.

58

If we can understand that death is not the end but is really a transition into the next life, the great part of life, that frees us up into receiving God's courage and his help.

59

I am grateful to be a woman. I must have done something great in another life.

60

Whatever you want to do, if you want to be great at it, you have to love it and be able to make sacrifices for it.

61

I know I'm not a great singer. But I love to sing and I like to use my voice in different ways.

62

The great gift of human beings is that we have the power of empathy.

63

The past is a great place and I don't want to erase it or to regret it, but I don't want to be its prisoner either.

64

I feel like life is really short, and it's important to enjoy yourself and embrace whatever comes your way, whether it's a challenging day or a great day, just welcome it with open arms. No matter who you are, you can't escape challenges; they are part of life.

65

And the American people are the greatest people in the world. What makes America the greatest nation in the world is the heart of the American people: hardworking, innovative, risk-taking, God- loving, family-oriented American people.

66

And some places you been before are so great that you don't ever mind going back. Some places you been before you don't ever want to go back, you know, like Montreal in the Winter.

67

It's hard to be humble, when you're as great as I am.

68

Making money is a happiness. And that's a great incentive. Making other people happy is a super-happiness.

69

Great ambition is the passion of a great character. Those endowed with it may perform very good or very bad acts. All depends on the principles which direct them.

70

Celebrity is a word I take great umbrage with. I'm actively anti-celebrity.

71

For a selfie, it's not about the pose, it's about you. There's a reason why you look great in the picture or you look great in real life, because someone has caught the essence of who you are, and a pose is not you.

72

Tennis is a mental game. Everyone is fit, everyone hits great forehands and backhands.

73

There was never a great man who had not a great mother.

74

Great men of action... never mind on occasion being ridiculous; in a sense it is part of their job, and at times they all are.

75

The great questions of the day will not be settled by means of speeches and majority decisions but by iron and blood.

76

Good artists copy, great artists steal.

77

Great leaders have a heart for people. They take time for people. They view people as the bottom line, not as a tool to get to the bottom line.

78

Everybody wants to be good, but not many are prepared to make the sacrifices it takes to be great. To many people, being nice in order to be liked is more important. There's equal merit in that, but you must not confuse being good with being liked.

79

A great man is one who leaves others at a loss after he is gone.

80

All architecture is shelter, all great architecture is the design of space that contains, cuddles, exalts, or stimulates the persons in that space.

81

The ingredients of health and long life, are great temperance, open air, easy labor, and little care.

82

Character may be manifested in the great moments, but it is made in the small ones.

83

The greatest wealth is to live content with little.

84

See everything, overlook a great deal, correct a little.

85

I think it's great to be flawed. I am hugely flawed, and I like it this way. That's the fun of life. You fall, get up, make mistakes, learn from them, be human and be you.

86

Do not say a little in many words but a great deal in a few.

87

There is a great deal of pain in life and perhaps the only pain that can be avoided is the pain that comes from trying to avoid pain.

88

To be great is to be misunderstood.

89

The great fun in my life has been getting up every morning and rushing to the typewriter because some new idea has hit me.

90

I don't believe in perfection. I don't think there is such a thing. But the energy of wanting things to be great is a perfectionist energy.

91

Sport is a great equalizer that can build bridges, transcend borders and cultures, and render even the fiercest conflicts temporarily irrelevant.

92

Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.

93

I'm really, really enjoying myself, I seem to have a lot of purpose in my life. I'm enjoying what I'm doing, you know, and people are liking it. So, it's great, you know.

94

Racism may be as systemic as it always was. It is the great problem of America. It's the one stumbling block that I don't believe was ever smoothed over.

95

Most businesses think that product is the most important thing, but without great leadership, mission and a team that deliver results at a high level, even the best product won't make a company successful.

96

Canada is like a loft apartment over a really great party.

97

Prosperity tries the fortunate, adversity the great.

98

Americans are the great Satan, the wounded snake.

99

I truly believe in positive synergy, that your positive mindset gives you a more hopeful outlook, and belief that you can do something great means you will do something great.

100

Habit is a great deadener.

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