Quotes About Achievement

I cannot help feeling that to die at the height of a man's career, universally honoured and admired, to die while great issues are still commanding the whole of his interest, to be taken from us at the moment when he could already see ultimate success in view—is not the most unenviable of fates." A number of those present thought Churchill was talking about himself, as well as the man to whom he was paying tribute.

But if the words struck her only lightly when she was nine, they stayed with her, gaining in density, to insinuate themselves whenever her performance fell short of perfection. They were less a mortification, she feared, than an actual statement of fact: B+ is all you deserve.

every great success story has elements of failure.

Unrealistic demands lead to undercurrents of failure.

Just because you…achieve what you always thought would make you feel special does not fix that deep-down internal insecurity. External achievement never equals internal acceptance.

In the lexicon of youth, which fate reserves For a bright manhood, there is no such word As "fail".

Happy is the man who hath never known what it is to taste of fame -- to have it is a purgatory, to want it is a hell.

What men want is not talent, it is purpose; in other words, not the power to achieve but the will to labour.

Success never needs an excuse.

If aught be worse than failure from overstress of a life's prime purpose, it is to sit down content with a little success.

The only guy I have to get better than is who I am right now.

I just don't know why they're shooting at us. All we want to do is bring them democracy and white bread. Transplant the American dream. Freedom. Achievement. Hyperacidity. Affluence. Flatulence. Technology. Tension. The inalienable right to an early coronary sitting at your desk while plotting to stab your boss in the back.

If at first you don't succeed, you're running about average.

William B. Shockley, coinventor of the transistor,

The royal road to a Nobel Prize has generally been through the reductionist approach,

had found a decent name for the thing—a process that had proved to be surprisingly tricky.

My biggest fear in life is to be average.

Being insecure - I'm a master, a virtuoso - they can be handing me the keys to the kingdom and all I can think is, I hope I don't drop the key.

Reward does more than make us work more effectively together—it stimulates creativity too. Reward, not necessity, is the true mother of invention.

Only those who attempt the absurd...will achieve the impossible. I think ...I think it's in my basement...Let me go upstairs and check.

So let us then try to climb the mountain, not by stepping on what is below us, but to pull us up at what is above us, for my part at the stars; amen.

At moments of great enthusiasm it seems to me that no one in the world has ever made something this beautiful and important.

Even his moustache—teased into the shape of a wide up-thrusting "w"—was so famous it acquired a name: Er ist erreicht! "It is achieved!" Manipulated through the miracle of pomade—its key ingredient the remarkable new product, petroleum jelly—it was the very model of a modern moustache, a controlled riposte to the great bushy, biblical patriarch beards and side-whiskers of the previous generation.*

The advantage of living is not measured by length, but by use; some men have lived long, and lived little. You've done well, and honourably.