Quotes About Achievement

the primary organizing principle for human achievement is stability, not progress, meaning that balance, symmetry, and regularity are more to be valued than change, growth, deviation, and ambition.

That's genius, you see. The masterstroke that no one recognises until it's been pulled off.

All dreams appear impossible until somebody makes them happen.

The reason of football is not to be the best but to be the best team

Students work to get good grades even when they have no interest in their studies.

Our heightened individualism means that, not only do we expect perfection in all things, but we expect to produce this perfection ourselves.

human possibility, awash in material abundance. As a society, we have achieved what our ancestors could, at most, only dream about, but it has come at a great price.

you seek and accept only the best, you are a maximizer.

The odds against this were tremendous, but Edith was not interested in the odds; people who thought about odds were unheroic and would never achieve anything. 20

the art of the possible.

Business is like football, Craig. If you have to knock someone down to reach the goal line, you better damn well do it, or you shouldn't put on a uniform and go out on the field in the first place.

When asked, "How do you write?" I invariably answer, "One word at a time," and the answer is invariably dismissed. But that is all it is. It sounds too simple to be true, but consider the Great Wall of China, if you will: one stone at a time, man. That's all. One stone at a time. But I've read you can see that motherfucker from space without a telescope.

Not a wind, not even a high, exactly, but an elevation. A sense that you had gone beyond yourself and could go farther still.

Tell you something, my friend — if I worked hard and really wanted it, there might be a real Rembrandt on my wall someday. Sure. In a job like this, there is nowhere to go but up. In a way, that's the scary part...

It's like practicing pole vaulting your entire life, and then getting to the olympics and saying, 'what the hell did I want to jump over this stupid bar for?

Had we to do it over again," he said in an interview sixteen months after the invasion, "we would look at the consequences of catastrophic success.

Productivity is the only path to confidence.

If their occupation is actual work they prefer to pump water into cisterns, two of which leak through holes in the bottom and one of which is water-tight. A, of course, has the good one;

There's neither need nor justification to wallow in the trough of mediocrity.

the focus was clearly not on activities, but on results. In addition to the benefit of differentiating between results and activities, there's another positive dimension to taking responsibility for results.

Self-trust is the first secret of success . . . the essence of heroism.

behind all great achievement there lies great toil: nothing that is worth doing is done easily."41

NOTHING GREAT WILL EVER BE ACHIEVED WITHOUT GREAT MEN, AND MEN ARE GREAT ONLY IF THEY ARE DETERMINED TO BE SO. FOR GLORY GIVES HERSELF ONLY TO THOSE WHO HAVE ALWAYS DREAMED OF HER." —Charles De Gaulle, from The Army of the Future (Vers l'armée de métier), 1941

Ineffective people live day after day with unused potential.