Quotes About Achievement

When I was in school, every student's grades and position in the class were printed in the leading newspapers for all to see. Success or failure was reason for public pride or shame. One of my closest friends toyed with suicide after his high-school exams because he did not stand first in the entire city of New Delhi. Another one of my classmates in college actually burned himself to death because he did not make the grade. Such

Write a thousand words a day and in three years you'll be a writer!

It takes writing a billion bad words before you get to the good ones.

Any man who keeps working is not a failure. He may not be a great writer, but if he applies the old-fashioned virtues of hard, constant labor, he'll eventually make some kind of career for himself as writer. [ 1967 interview ]

Each of the men I have listed seized a bit of the quicksilver of life, froze it for all time and turned, in the blaze of their creativity, to point at it and cry, Isn't this good! And it was good.

I have spent my life going from mania to mania. Somehow it has all paid off.

I discovered very early on that if you wanted a thing, you went for it — and you got it. Most people never go anywhere, or want anything — so they never get anything.

So here, after fifty years, is Fahrenheit 451. I didn't know what I was doing, but I'm glad that it was done.

The stars are yours, if you have the head, the hands, and the heart for them.

The smallest effort to win means, at the end of each day, a sort of victory.

By the time I was forty my blunt instrument had been honed to a fine cutting point for me.

It's the rich who have dreams and rockets!

The Toynbee Convector" was born because of my reaction to the bombardment of despair we so frequently find in our newspaper headlines and television reportage, and the feeling of imminent doom in a society that has triumphed over circumstances again and again, but fails to look back and realize where it has come from, and what it has achieved.

The smallest effort to win means, at the end of each day, a sort of victory. Remember that pianist who said that if he did not practice every day he would know, if he did not practice for two days, the critics would know, after three days, his audiences would know.

The leader might be analyzed as the one who perceived what could be achieved and did it. p159

The one who watches athletic games instead of participating in athletics is involved in a surrogate achievement. But when you think about what people are actually undergoing in our civilization, you realize it's a very grim thing to be a modern human being. The drudgery of the lives of most of the people who have to support families—well, it's a life-extinguishing affair.

The achievement of the hero is one that he is ready for, and it's really a manifestation of his character. And it's amusing, the way in which the landscape and the conditions of the environment match the readiness of the hero. The adventure that he's ready for is the one that he gets.

I am afraid that if you want to go down into history you'll have to do something for it.

Art is long and life is short, and success is very far off.

As a general rule, a reputation is built on manner as much as on achievement.

It is not the clear-sighted who rule the world. Great achievements are accomplished in a blessed, warm fog.

It was the very essence of his life to be a solitary achievement, accomplished not by hermit-like withdrawal with it's silence and immobility but by a system of restless wandering, by the detachment of an impermanent dweller amongst changing scenes. In this scheme he had perceived the means of passing through life without suffering and almost without a single care in the world- invulnerable because elusive.

Nobody, nobody is good enough

No influential friend would have served me better. She [the steamboat] had given me a chance to come out a bit-to find out what I could do. No, I don't like work. I had rather laze about and think of all the fine things that can be done. I don't like work-no man does-but I like what is in the work,-the chance to find yourself. Your own reality-for yourself, not for others-what no other man can ever know. They can only see the mere show, and can never tell what it really means.