Grandiose Quotes

“Narcissistic personality disorder is named for Narcissus, from Greek mythology, who fell in love with his own reflection. Freud used the term to describe persons who were self-absorbed, and psychoanalysts have focused on the narcissist's need to bolster his or her self-esteem through grandiose fantasy, exaggerated ambition, exhibitionism, and feelings of entitlement.”
― Donald W. Black, DSM-5 Guidebook: The Essential Companion to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders

“You have a faculty for defining the simplest in terms of the grandiose, so that a poor devil like me can't understand it.”
― Malcolm Bradbury, Eating People is Wrong

“Every one is fond of comparing himself to something great and grandiose, as Louis XIV likened himself to the sun, and others have had like similes. I am more humble. I am a mere street scavenger (chiffonier) of science. With my hook in my hand and my basket on my back, I go about the streets of science, collecting what I find.”
― François Magendie

“Humility is the greatest shaper of souls and crafter of character, for it wipes away all the grandiose things that we spend so much of our lives pretending to be, so that we can spend all of our lives being the exceptional person that we were actually created to be.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“The empty self therefore becomes a political problem. An empty politician has a great deal to make up for. How will he compensate for his emptiness? The empty politician is easily drawn into a grandiose self assignment. And this must prove disastrous for society, as the promises of an empty politician are themselves empty. In fact, he brings about the opposite of what he promises. This has long been true of the totalitarian dictators. Increasingly it is true of democratically elected leaders in the West. It seems, as well, that the conflict between the totalitarian East and the consumerist West may, in the last analysis, devolve into a conflict between two types of emptiness: in the first instance, the emptiness of the characters in a Woody Allen film; in the second, the emptiness of "a boot stamping on a human face - forever.”
― J.R.Nyquist

“The undertakings of the rich are grandiose”
― Mukta Singh-Zocchi, Game of Big Numbers