Pride mars greatness.

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

Everybody hates a prodigy, detests an old head on young shoulders.

Ignobly vain, and impotently great.

All greatness is unconscious, or it is little and naught.

False greatness is unsociable and remote: conscious of its own frailty, it hides, or at least averts its face, and reveals itself only enough to create an illusion and not be recognized as the meanness that it really is. True greatness is free, kind, familiar and popular; it lets itself be touched and handled, it loses nothing by being seen at close quarters; the better one knows it, the more one admires it.

After all, greatness is not for everybody

The word "modern" no longer has an automatic prestige except among fools.

The ancients thought it shameful to seek advancement or want to be the head of something, or the chief or senior.

Reverence for greatness dies out, and is succeeded by base envy of greatness. Every man is in the way of many, either in the path to popularity or wealth. There is a general feeling of satisfaction when a great statesman is displaced, or a general, who has been for his brief hour the popular idol, is unfortunate and sinks from his high estate. It becomes a misfortune, if not a crime, to be above the popular level. We should naturally suppose that a nation in distress would take counsel with the wisest of its sons. But, on the contrary, great men seem never so scarce as when they are most needed, and small men never so bold to insist on infesting place, as when mediocrity and incapable pretence and sophomoric greenness, and showy and sprightly incompetency are most dangerous.

With the great quality of egoism, great deeds and great merits became extinct.

To be great is to be misunderstood.

To be great is to be misunderstood.

Inventors and geniuses have almost always been looked on as no better than fools at the beginning of their career, and very frequently at the end of it also.