William Hazlitt Greatness Quotations

No man is truly great who is great only in his lifetime. The test of greatness is the page of history.

He who comes up to his own idea of greatness must always have had a very low standard of it in his mind.

Those people who are always improving never become great. Greatness is an eminence, the ascent to which is steep and lofty, and which a man must seize on at once by natural boldness and vigor, and not by patient, wary steps.

Greatness is great power, producing great effects. It is not enough that a man has great power in himself, he must shew it to all the world in a way that cannot be hid or gainsaid.

Popularity is neither fame nor greatness.

To display the greatest powers, unless they are applied to great purposes, makes nothing for the character of greatness.

A great chess-player is not a great man, for he leaves the world as he found it. No act terminating in itself constitutes greatness. This will apply to all displays of power or trials of skill, which are confined to the momentary, individual effort, and construct no permanent image or trophy of themselves without them

...greatness sympathises with greatness, and littleness shrinks into itself.

No act terminating in itself constitutes greatness.

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.