The Great Man ... is colder, harder, less hesitating, and without fear of ‘opinion’; he lacks the virtues that accompany respect and ‘responsibility’, and altogether that is the ‘virtue of the herd’. If he cannot lead, he goes alone ... He knows he is incommunicable: he finds it tasteless to be familiar ... When not speaking to himself, he wears a mask. There is a solitude within him that is inaccessible to praise or blame. Friedrich Nietzsche
The mark of a great in anything – golf professional, bank robber – is the ability to forget the past. Ray Donovan s5e5: Shabbos Goy, Mickey, Showtime 2017
Is Tiger Woods the Greatest? If He Isn’t, Who Is? Daily Telegraph headline, cited Tiger Woods: Back, Sky Documentaries 2020
The great man puts himself in the greatest danger in order to create the greatest danger to opposition. Matt Busby, cited Busy, 2019
For what nation is there so great, who hath God so nigh unto them, as the Lord our God is in all things that we call upon him for.
And what nation is there so great, that hath statutes and judgments so righteous as all this law, which I set before you this day? Deuteronomy 4:7&8
Great men are not always wise. Job 32:9
Somewhere in the world there is a defeat for everyone. Some are destroyed by defeat, and some made small and mean by victory. Greatness lives in one who triumphs equally over defeat and victory. John Steinbeck, The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights
There is no such thing as a perfect basketball player, and I don’t believe there is only one greatest player either. Michael Jordan
An infinitude of tenderness is the chief gift and inheritance of all truly great men. John Ruskin
If we are to place Hardy among his fellows, we must call him the greatest tragic writer among English novelists. Virginia Woolf
Thomas Hardy: The Wessex Novels are not one book, but many. They cover an immense stretch; inevitably, they are full of imperfections – some are failures, and others exhibit only the wrong side of the marker’s genius. But undoubtedly, when we have submitted ourselves fully to them, when we come to take stock of our impression of the whole, the effect is commanding and satisfactory. We have been freed from the cramp and pettiness of life. Our imaginations have been stretched and heightened; our humour has been made to laugh out; we have drunk deep of the beauty of the earth. Also we have been made to enter the shade of a sorrowful and brooding spirit which, even in its saddest mood, bore itself with a grave uprightness and never, even when most moved to anger, lost its deep compassion for the sufferings of men and women. Thus it is no mere transcript of life at a certain time and place that Hardy has given us. It is a vision of the world and of man’s lot as they revealed themselves to a powerful imagination, a profound and poetic genius, a gentle and humane soul. Virginia Woolf
You know, Mr Bernstein, if I hadn’t been very rich, I might have been a really great man. Citizen Kane 1941 starring Orson Welles & Joseph Cotten & Everett Sloane & Dorothy Comingore & Agnes Moorehead & Ruth Warrick & Ray Collins & William Alland & Paul Stewart & Philip van Zandt et al, director Orson Welles
Discipline is the foundation of greatness in and out of the ring. Mike Tyson