Quotes About Success

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

should we double our wealth and conquer the stars, and still be unequal to this issue, then we will have failed as a people and as a nation. For with a country as with a person, "What is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?

Many Americans have never liked acknowledging that the public sector has always been integral to making the private sector successful.

Fear, Aristotle observed, does not strike those who are "in the midst of great prosperity.

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.

What a brilliant cover story. In a success-obsessed society like this one, what's the best rock to hide something under? It's the rock called failure.

He fulfilled the bipolar checklist. See? And so they gave him some pretty heavy-duty medication. It slowed him way down, to a drooling fat kid. And they declared the meds a success." It

if you take loving kindness out of the human brain, there's not much left except the will to win

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 you are a success in life, there are places you must go and pay to be humiliated. It is an unwritten law that human beings must be tormented throughout their lives in one way or another. If you are fortunate enough to have risen to a social level where no one does it to you for free, then you must pay for the service.

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.

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

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.

There may be mistakes in the choice of means to attain an end. But success or failure also involves much that lies beyond our power. We are not responsible for the inevitable, nor for a knowledge that is beyond our reach. Solely the ends, honestly chosen, and consistently sought, determine the moral quality of a life.

She was here to get rich and richer and then get out from under these men, not to accommodate mediocre mumbling coves. A man should be able to afford his own expulsions.

Balzac's assertion, which my mother also quoted, that behind every great fortune was a great crime

We spent our lives making livings.

You used to write such honest books. Honest and emotionally ambitious. Maybe they weren't finding millions of readers. Maybe they weren't making you rich. But they were making the world rich

When a great office is vacant, either by death or disgrace (which often happens,) five or six of those candidates petition the emperor to entertain his majesty and the court with a dance on the rope; and whoever jumps the highest, without falling, succeeds in the office.

How low an opinion I had of human wisdom and integrity, when I was truly informed of the springs and motives of great enterprises and revolutions in the world, and of the contemptible accidents to which they owed their success

The lucky individual that finds a different seed, or nook, or niche, will fly up and out from beneath the Sisyphean rock of competition. It will tend to flourish and so will its descendants—that is, those that inherit the lucky character that had set it a little apart. Individuals that diverge from the madding crowd will tend to prosper, while the rest will be ground down.

What sells a book sells a book, same in traditional or self-publishing. You gotta shake your tail feathers.

I believe the secret of the success of psychoanalysis resides in people's vanity.