Life & Wisdom Quote by George Chapman

Greatness, Chapman insists, is not a matter of volume. It is a matter of virtue. In eight compact words, he tries to hijack the prestige of public achievement and reroute it toward moral character, as if to say: your victories, titles, and applause are just stage effects unless they rest on an ethical core.

As a poet writing in the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean world, Chapman lived amid a culture obsessed with honor, reputation, and hierarchy. Courtly power rewarded the appearance of magnificence; “great” could mean eminent, wealthy, well-connected. His line reads like a corrective aimed at that social theater. The subtext is pointed: the era’s celebrated “great men” may be talented or feared, but without goodness they’re counterfeit. Chapman tightens the noose with repetition: “truly” appears twice, turning the sentence into a test of authenticity. Greatness is not merely rare; it’s easy to fake. Goodness is the verification.

The phrasing also carries a strategic optimism. It’s an argument for a moral meritocracy in a world that didn’t reliably run on merit. If greatness requires goodness, then greatness becomes, at least in principle, accessible to more than the lucky and well-born. At the same time, Chapman protects the mystique of greatness by making the entry fee steep: not skill, not ambition, not even heroic deeds, but an inner standard that can’t be performed indefinitely.

What makes it work is its quiet severity. No thunder, no sermonizing - just a clean equation that dares you to dispute it, and in disputing it, to reveal what kind of greatness you actually want.