Quotes About Achievement

And what was the ultimate goal? To have one's work caged in art's great zoos—the Modern, the Met, the Louvre?

Observing people taking in the work I had watched Robert create was an emotional experience. It had left our private world. It was what I had always wanted for him, but I felt a slight pang of possessiveness sharing it with others. Overriding that feeling was the joy of seeing Robert's face, suffused with confirmation, as he glimpsed the future he had so resolutely sought and had worked so hard to achieve.

The only real success is when you've done something well.

that without a doubt we sometimes eclipse our own dreams with reality

It's not that successful people are givers; it is that givers are successful people.

Against those who are indebted to the allegorical utopian model and its offshoots, the Memory Palace proves that alternatives to the tribal consensus exists. Furthermore, this alternative is a leap away, is deeply discontinuous with the allegorists' endless internal struggles for refinement. It promises not quite freedom but the fact that a careful look at history as achievement rather than ruination offers solid evidence that the allegorical utopian has about it no necessity at all.

I've lived a life that's full, I traveled each and ev'ry highway, And more, much more than this, I did it my way.

Talent helps, but it won't take you as far as ambition.

You need to aim beyond what you are capable of.

If you think you're unable to be on the cover of Time magazine, make it your business to be there.

It's not how good you are, It's how good you want to be.

Failure was a major contributor to its success.

She knows there's no success like failure And that failure's no success at all.

You can't put your feet on the ground until you've touched the sky.

Not to me," I said. Kafka wrote his first story in one night. Stendhal wrote The Charterhouse of Parma in forty-nine days. Melville wrote Moby- Dick in sixteen months. Flaubert spent five years on Madame Bovary. Musil worked for eighteen years on The Man Without Qualities and died before he could finish. Do we care about any of that now?

There it was: a full confession. Sherlock Holmes had done it again, and as I marveled at my devastating powers of deduction, I wished there had been two of me so I could have patted myself on the back. I know it sounds arrogant, but how often does one achieve a mental triumph of that magnitude? After listening to her speak just two words, I had nailed the whole bloody thing. If Watson had been there, he would have been shaking his head and muttering under his breath.

If I can give you the words you need to have, we will have a great victory.

Afterwards, walking to the car with my father, he told me I had played a nice game. No I hadn't, I said, it was terrible. Well, you did your best, he answered. You can't do well everytime.

We find ourselves only by looking to what we're not. You can't put your feet on the ground until you've touched the sky.

Weary and stuffed from being force-fed the falsehood that when one of your kind makes it, it means that you've all made it.

It'd taken only a few hours, but I felt like Michelangelo staring at the Sistine Chapel after four years of hard labor, like Banksy after spending six days searching the Internet for ideas to steal and three minutes of sidewalk vandalism to execute them.

Sub-goals, some indication of progress. Part of the pleasure of a crossword puzzle is the feeling of progress as you get closer to completion, bit by bit, through the meeting of small goals. This is what much of gamification is about: using points or currency or badges or progress bars to indicate that you're getting closer to the end;

Mastery. The right game establishes an optimal level of difficulty.

Money does make you happy; it's the trying to make money that makes you sad. The trick is to get money in the course of other, meaningful, pursuits