Quotes About Fulfillment

For me, writing is the only thing that passes the three tests of metier: (1) when I'm doing it, I don't feel that I should be doing something else instead; (2.) it produces a sense of accomplishment and, once in a while, pride; and (3) it's frightening.

Don't take anyone else's definition of success as your own. (This is easier said than done.)

Whatever you are by nature, keep to it; never desert your own line of talent. Be what nature intended you for, and you will succeed; be anything else and you will be ten thousand times worse than nothing.

If a man has a talent and cannot use it, he has failed. If he has a talent and uses only half of it, he has partly failed. If he has a talent and learns somehow to use the whole of it, he has gloriously succeeded, and won a satisfaction and a triumph few men ever know.

It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.

Arriving at one goal is the starting point to another.

The problem is not that you cannot have what you think you want. The problem is that when you get what you think you want, it won't satisfy.

The really happy man is one who can enjoy the scenery on a detour.

Success is not greedy, as people think, but insignificant. That's why it satisfies nobody.

Is there anything in life so disenchanting as attainment?

We are never further from our wishes than when we imagine that we possess what we have desired.

Some aspects of success seem rather silly as death approaches.

The prospect of success in achieving our most cherished dream is not without its terrors. Who is more deprived and alone than the man who has achieved his dream?

He has achieved success, who has lived well, laughed often, and loved much; who has gained the respect of intelligent men and the love of little children.

If you have a good name, if you are right more often than you are wrong, if your children respect you, if your grandchildren are glad to see you, if your friends can count on you and you can count on them in time of trouble, if you can face your God and say, "I have done my best," then you are a success.

I don't think success is harmful, as so many people say. Rather I believe it indispensible to talent: if for nothing else than to increase the talent.

Success is a great healer.

All outward success, when it has value, is but the inevitable result of an inward success of full living, full play and enjoyment of one's faculties.

The exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess Success is our national disease.

Great men have not been concerned with fame. The joy of achievement that comes from finding something new in the universe is by far their greatest joy.

Out of the strain of the Doing, into the peace of the Done.

Success is like a liberation, or the first phase of a love affair.

The best place to succeed is where you are with what you have.

I have found that it is much easier to make a success in life than to make a success of one's life.