Quotes About Achievement

But at some point in my midtwenties I abandoned my boyhood fantasy of climbing Everest. By then it had become fashionable among alpine cognoscenti to denigrate Everest as a "slag heap"—a peak lacking sufficient technical challenges or aesthetic appeal to be a worthy objective for a "serious" climber, which I desperately aspired to be. I began to look down my nose at the world's highest mountain.

By fixing my sights on one summit after another, I managed to keep my bearings through some thick postadolescent fog. Climbing mattered. The danger bathed the world in a halogen glow that caused everything—the sweep of the rock, the orange and yellow lichens, the texture of the clouds—to stand out in brilliant relief. Life thrummed at a higher pitch. The world was made real.

Following Sikhdar's discovery in 1852, it would require the lives of twenty-four men, the efforts of fifteen expeditions, and the passage of 101 years before the summit of Everest would finally be attained.

a challenge in which a successful outcome is assured isn't a challenge at all.

Jon Krakauer

The better you did—the more contests you won—the greater the next goal, the greater the next mission.

Dan, what people want is results. That's what matters.' " Bush's discomfort with the rhetorical requirements of his office was one of his cardinal weaknesses as a president.

the ground of liberty is to be gained by inches, that we must be contented to secure what we can get from time to time, and eternally press forward for what is yet to get.

passed the fundamental test of leadership: Despite all his shortcomings and all the inevitable disappointments and mistakes and dreams deferred, he left America, and the world, in a better place than it had been when he first entered the arena of public life.

Love what you do. Get good at it. Competence is a rare commodity in this day and age. And let the chips fall where they man.

If ever I'm disheartened by failures such as these, I simply reflect on my humble beginnings and marvel at the enormous distance I have travelled since then.

Success at sports is the province of the almost empty head.

My first hero was Thomas Edison, whose adult life had consisted entirely of free time.

Her very difficulty created friction, and friction led to satisfaction...

The deader the ball, the better it suited her purpose, which was to whack the shit out of it until she was physically exhausted. She thought this was quite possibly the most satisfying thing she'd ever done.

Charles was at the apex of his career, coming off a Lannan Fellowship year and a front-page Times review that had anointed him as the heir of John Barth and Stanley Elkin, but he didn't know it was the apex.

Among novelists I know, no one is more ambitious than I am.

It had to be possible to do better than her parents, but she wasn't sure she would.

exercise his brain and keep him fed, but how to gain any traction? Books, he thought. Books, books, books. Books to get him somewhere. Books to turn him into someone. Books to grab hold of on his way up. Books as a way to be alone without feeling so alone.

I don't think that there are any limits to how excellent we could make life seem.

It felt as if an only life should be better than good enough, but how many efforts for more have ended with having nothing?

I do not think that there are any limits to how excellent we could make life seem.

Caesar freely confessed to me, that the greatest actions of his own life were not equal, by many degrees, to the glory of taking it away.

Un hombre sabe tocar, otro puede hacer de un pueblo una gran ciudad, y el que no puede hacer ni una cosa ni otra merece que le echen del mundo a patadas; evitar este castigo a sido sin duda lo que ha dado lugar al nacimiento del reino de los críticos.