How Does a Site Like BrainyQuote.com Get to #1

I am about to create an inspirational quote website and the leading site right now is a site called Brainyquote.

As far as I can see it only has non-unique quotes from famous people.

So I was wondering how it got to the top of Google for phrases such as "inspirational quotes"

I am also wondering how I create SEO optimized articles to promote a quote site because no one wants to read an article about inspirational quotes. While I could do posts containing inspirational stories about self-sacrificing persons or heros, etc. I'm not sure that such articles would end up getting the interest of persons looking for inspirational quotes.

Or I could skip SEO and just post links to Facebook groups.

Finally, the videos I will be posting right on the site that contain inspiring quotes while unique are only about 30 seconds long. Does that make a difference? And if I post creative commons images with quotes do I need to alter them to make them more unique in Google eyes to to get them to show up on Google image search. Is there any way to do that other than taking a screen shot of the image?