Quotes About Success

It wasn't long ago I was cleaning toilets and now I have protestors. How cool is this?

My mother often said, as long as a person is happy at work, then poverty is nothing to be ashamed of.

People fear getting famous just as pigs fear getting fat. Reflecting the observation that fame invites a fall just as a fattened pig invites the butcher.

The more boldly a man dares, the more richly his land bears

Beneath the sky, wretched lonliness was no jot better or worse than good fortune and success. To put it another way, wherever you stood, the same starry sky was peering down.

This was the domain established in less than twenty years by the young man of promise. Then he had had almost nothing over which his fingers might close with a sense of possession, but because the lack had stirred no anxious irritation in him, all these things had now come securely into his grasp.

The greater success a man has made, the more he fears a climb down.

The most common reaction of the human mind to achievement is not satisfaction, but craving for more.

This discrepancy between evolutionary success and individual suffering is perhaps the most important lesson we can draw from the Agricultural Revolution. When we study the narrative of plants such as wheat and maize, maybe the purely evolutionary perspective makes sense. Yet in the case of animals such as cattle, sheep and Sapiens, each with a complex world of sensations and emotions, we have to consider how evolutionary success translates into individual experience.

The currency of evolution is neither hunger nor pain, but rather copies of DNA helixes. Just as the economic success of a company is measured only by the number of dollars in its bank account, not by the happiness of its employees, so the evolutionary success of a species is measured by the number of copies of its DNA.

Successful cultures are those that excel in reproducing their memes, irrespective of the costs and benefits to their human hosts.

If a species boasts many DNA copies, it is a success, and the species flourishes. From such a perspective, 1,000 copies are always better than a hundred copies. This is the essence of the Agricultural Revolution: the ability to keep more people alive under worse conditions.

Though historians occasionally try their hand at prophecy (without notable success), the study of history aims above all to make us aware of possibilities we don't normally consider. Historians study the past not in order to repeat it, but in order to be liberated from it.

The economic game was rigged by legal restrictions and unofficial glass ceilings. When the peasant brother made his way to the Beijing market with his torn clothes, rough manners and incomprehensible dialect, he would quickly have discovered that in the business world, manners and connections often speak far louder than genes.

There is no basis for thinking that the most successful cultures in history are necessarily the best one for Homo sapiens.

Yet in the case of animals such as cattle, sheep and Sapiens, each with a complex world of sensations and emotions, we have to consider how evolutionary success translates into individual experience. In the following chapters we will see time and again how a dramatic increase in the collective power and ostensible success of our species went hand in hand with much individual suffering.

Unfortunately, the evolutionary perspective is an incomplete measure of success. It judges everything by the criteria of survival and reproduction, with no regard for individual suffering and happiness.

Domesticated chickens and cattle may well be an evolutionary success story, but they are also among the most miserable creatures that ever lived.

Success is not guaranteed. Males in particular live in constant dread of losing their claim to manhood. Throughout history, males have been willing to risk and even sacrifice their lives, just so that people will say 'He's a real man!

Like the elite of ancient Egypt, most people in most cultures dedicate their lives to building pyramids. Only the names, shapes and sizes of these pyramids change from one culture to the other.

In evolutionary terms, cattle represent one of the most successful animal species ever to exist. At the same time, they are some of the most miserable animals on the planet.

Following Homo sapiens, domesticated cattle, pigs and sheep are the second, third and fourth most widespread large mammals in the world. From a narrow evolutionary perspective, which measures success by the number of DNA copies, the Agricultural Revolution was a wonderful boon for chickens, cattle, pigs and sheep. Unfortunately,

la misma manera que una compañía sin dinero está en bancarrota. Si una especie puede alardear de muchas copias de ADN, es un éxito, y la especie prospera. Desde esta perspectiva, 1.000 copias siempre son mejores que 100 copias. Esta es la esencia de la revolución agrícola: la capacidad de mantener más gente viva en peores condiciones.

O sucesso não é garantido. Os indivíduos do sexo masculino, em particular, vivem um temor constante de perder sua afirmação de masculinidade. Durante toda a história, estiveram dispostos a arriscar e até mesmo sacrificar a vida, apenas para que as pessoas dissessem: "Ele é um homem de verdade!".