Quotes About Achievement

We aren't suggesting that mental instability or unhappiness makes one a better poet, or a poet at all; and contrary to the romantic notion of the artist suffering for his or her work, we think these writers achieved brilliance in spite of their suffering, not because of it.

Every man is said to have his peculiar ambition," he wrote. "I have no other so great as that of being truly esteemed of my fellow men, by rendering myself worthy of their esteem.

A real democracy would be a meritocracy where those born in the lower ranks could rise as far as their natural talents and discipline might take them.

More and more it seems to me that about the best thing in life is to have a piece of work worth doing and then to do it well.

Always bear in mind that your own resolution to succeed, is more important than any other one thing.

Some people obtain fame, others deserve it.

The Wright brothers flew through the smoke screen of impossibility.

Success, for any sane adult, is exactly equivalent to doing one's best. What that best may be, what its farthest reaches may include, we can discover only by freeing ourselves completely from the Will to Fail.

If someone else does excellently in the line you had dreamed of for yourself, you can always believe that, if you had really tried again, you could have surpassed him.

With the time and energy we spend in making failure a certainty we might have certain success.

Yet when it comes to going straight to the appointments we make with ourselves and our own fulfillment, we all act very much like the hero of this silly fable: we drive the wrong way. We fail where we might have succeeded by spending the same power and time.

These seem such minor matters, but it is the sum of small things successfully done that lifts a life out of bondage to the humdrum.

Long before Freud made his contribution to modern thought, Pico della Mirandola, in a treatise called De Imaginatione—Concerning the Imagination—was discriminating between two kinds of revery: the one retrograde, backward-turning, keeping the man from his man's work, prolonging irresponsibility and mental childhood; the other, the true imagination, was found in the successful man.

My own experience has been that there is no field where one who is in earnest about learning to do good work can make such enormous strides in so short a time.

There's nothing hard about it. But I get praised for the hardest of things I do, and I do some of the hardest of things. Things like waking up in the morning and going to sleep at night, all alone except for when I'm with someone; and it's getting harder and harder.

People say, "What is the sense of our small effort?" They cannot see that we must lay one brick at a time, take one step at a time.

It's terribly important for everyone, at any age, to live to his full potential. Otherwise a kind of dry rot sets in, a rust, a disintegration of personality.

Dorothy Koomson is the author of seven other novels: The Cupid Effect, The Chocolate Run, My Best Friend's Girl, Marshmallows for Breakfast, The Ice Cream Girls and The Woman He Loved Before –all of which have spent several weeks on the Sunday Times bestseller list. Her books have been translated into thirty languages and regularly top the bestseller charts around the

I don't know much about being a millionaire, but I'll bet I'd be darling at it.

I suppose all young men dream of making a fortune," she said. "But most of them come to be content to make a living.

Molly was bending over the table where her masterpiece, the white and silver cake, towered above her lesser achievements in the shape of patties, canapes, rolls, sandwiches, cakes and biscuits. A current of goodwill flowed from Molly through the food to the people who ate it and back again the same way. Her good cooking made the connection; she seemed to need no other.

My mother explained it for him once. "There is nothing there for anyone who has ambition and intelligence," she said.

The real killers in the business world aren't the ones who aim for the top, it's the ones who aim for two notches below the top.

Flying dreams mean that you're doing the right thing with your life.