Theodore Parker Quotes

I have spent years as a leadership coach to the very wealthy and have been able to get behind the eyes of some of the world's best, studying the minute details of what makes a person great.

A great man is one who deliberately causes something important to a happen, the probability of which seemed low before he took up the task. A great man is a man who gives history a turn which it could scarcely have taken without him. They give history a twist which nobody would have predicted. Great men leave permanent effects.

Nothing great will ever be achieved without great men, and men are great only if they are determined to be so.

By a great man, however, we mean a man who, because of his spiritual gifts, his character, and other qualities, deserves to be called great and who as a result earns the power to influence others.

Great men are rare, poets are rarer, but the great man who is a poet, transfiguring his greatness, is the rarest of all events.

Great hopes make great men.

All men who have achieved great things have been great dreamers.

A hero is born among a hundred, a wise man is found among a thousand, but an accomplished one might not be found even among a hundred thousand men.

A great man is a torch in the darkness, a beacon in superstition's night, an inspiration and a prophecy.

Great thoughts reduced to practice become great acts.

Poets and heroes are of the same race, the latter do what the former conceive.

A great man is made up of qualities that meet or make great occasions.

Big dreams create the magic that stir men's souls to greatness.

I don't hero worship for the sake of hero worship. When I find people who are truly remarkable - and I think Joseph Needham is a classic example - I do value their counsel.

Produce great men, the rest follows.

There is a pinch of the madman in every great man.

It is not by his faults, but by his excellences, that we measure a great man.

No one knows how greatness comes to a man. It may lie in his blackness, sleeping, or it may lance into him like those driven fiery particles from outer space. These things, however, are known about greatness: need gives it life and puts it in action; it never comes without pain; it leaves a man changed, chastened, and exalted at the same time--he can never return to simplicity...

All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare

It is a very poor thing, whether for nations or individuals, to advance the history of great deeds done in the past as an excuse for doing poorly in the present; but it is an excellent thing to study the history of the great deeds of the past, and of the great men who did them, with an earnest desire to profit thereby so as to render better service in the present.

Great men need to be lifted upon the shoulders of the whole world, in order to conceive their great ideas or perform their great deeds. That is, there must be an atmosphere of greatness round about them. A hero cannot be a hero unless in an heroic world.

Anybody can make history. Only a great man can write it.

Great men grow.

... the greatest man who walks in America.

I want to be great - in everything I do. As far as football, I always looked up to Kellen Moore of Boise State. I thought it was the coolest thing that he was the winningest QB of all time.