Quotes About Achievement

Knowing what to do is not usually the problem; the elusive goal becomes translating intentions into action and resolutions into results.

Learning is a process of refining errors to the point where they no longer prevent our desired goal.

Stop being so proud of mediocrity; show some spirit!

An overnight success usually takes about ten years. — Anonymous

No task is too formidable when you divide your goals into small, realistic steps and prepare well.

You focused on the goal, not on the obstacle. This is how we face our lives.

The secret of success in life: Prepare for opportunity when it comes. —Benjamin Disraeli

Do you think it's ready? I [Silenus, The Poet] asked. It's perfect... a masterpiece. Do you think it'll sell? I asked. No fucking way.

all good things beyond sleep come precisely because we defy gravity while we live.

Arete is simply excellence and the striving for excellence in all things," said Odysseus. "Arete simply means the act of offering all actions as a sort of sacrament to excellence, of devoting one's life to finding excellence, identifying it when it offers itself, and achieving it in your own life.

takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature

Why . . ." she begins. "Why do you want to climb it?" "Because it's there.

Their three approaches fail but somehow the story itself succeeds, despite its narrator's and even author's failures!

interlocutor

America, he thought, and not for the first time, is a nation with huge dreams and not infrequently the ability to realize them.

More climbers die during the descent than on the way up." Karakaredes seems to be considering this. After a minute he says, "Yes, but here on the summit, there must be some ritual . . ." "Hero photos," gasps Paul. "Gotta . . . have . . . hero photos." Our alien nods. "Did . . . anyone . . . bring an imaging device? A camera? I did not.

During this time I quit attending classes at the university, and my grades rose from four Fs to three Bs and an A.

Of course it's all a game. All of the good and hard and even bad things in life are just a game.

I immediately called Abe Bronstein to share the good news. Abe, who was as well known for never rising before ten-thirty in the morning as he was for his sense of good prose, congratulated me and gently pointed out that I had called at 5:45 A.M.

It was as if they had climbed the last hill in creation.

We all want to leave monuments

You carry the pain and you also carry the reward.

And these years later, when I think of that essay, what I remember most is not the moment I saw my work in New Yorker font, not when I saw the illustration of my father, not the congratulatory phone calls and notes that followed, but that predawn morning in my bedroom, at my desk, the lights of cars below on Broadway, my computer screen glowing in the dark.

I couldn't write. I grew tense. I was strangled by my own ego, by my petty desire for what I perceived to be the literary brass ring. I was missing the point, of course. The reward is in the doing.