quotations about success
You create everything that happens to you.... If you want to be really successful, and I know you do, then you will have to give up blaming and complaining and take total responsibility for your life--that means all your results, both your successes and your failures. That is the prerequisite for creating a life of success. It is only by acknowledging that you have created everything up until now that you can take charge of creating the future you want.
JACK CANFIELD
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The Success Principles
Yes, success is everything. Failure is more common. Most achieve a sort of middling thing, but fortunately one's situation is always blurred, you never know absolutely quite where you are.
DONALD BARTHELME
"The Crisis"
All successful men have agreed in one thing--they were causationists. They believed that things went not by luck, but by law; that there was not a weak or a cracked link in the chain that joins the first and last of things. A belief in causality, or strict connection between every trifle and the principle of being, and, in consequence, belief in compensation, or, that nothing is got for nothing--characterizes all valuable minds, and must control every effort that is made by an industrious one. The most valiant men are the best believers in the tension of the laws.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
The Conduct of Life
There has appeared in our time a particular class of books and articles which I sincerely and solemnly think may be called the silliest ever known among men. They are much more wild than the wildest romances of chivalry and much more dull than the dullest religious tract. Moreover, the romances of chivalry were at least about chivalry; the religious tracts are about religion. But these things are about nothing; they are about what is called Success. On every bookstall, in every magazine, you may find works telling people how to succeed. They are books showing men how to succeed in everything; they are written by men who cannot even succeed in writing books. To begin with, of course, there is no such thing as Success. Or, if you like to put it so, there is nothing that is not successful. That a thing is successful merely means that it is; a millionaire is successful in being a millionaire and a donkey in being a donkey. Any live man has succeeded in living; any dead man may have succeeded in committing suicide. But, passing over the bad logic and bad philosophy in the phrase, we may take it, as these writers do, in the ordinary sense of success in obtaining money or worldly position. These writers profess to tell the ordinary man how he may succeed in his trade or speculation--how, if he is a builder, he may succeed as a builder; how, if he is a stockbroker, he may succeed as a stockbroker. They profess to show him how, if he is a grocer, he may become a sporting yachtsman; how, if he is a tenth-rate journalist, he may become a peer; and how, if he is a German Jew, he may become an Anglo-Saxon. This is a definite and business-like proposal, and I really think that the people who buy these books (if any people do buy them) have a moral, if not a legal, right to ask for their money back. Nobody would dare to publish a book about electricity which literally told one nothing about electricity; no one would dare to publish an article on botany which showed that the writer did not know which end of a plant grew in the earth. Yet our modern world is full of books about Success and successful people which literally contain no kind of idea, and scarcely any kind of verbal sense.
G. K. CHESTERTON
"The Fallacy of Success", All Things Considered
You're bound to succeed if you have ignorance and confidence.
KEN ALSTAD
Savvy Sayin's
The talent of success is nothing more than doing what you can do well; and doing well whatever you do, without a thought of fame.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
Hyperion
Success is terrifying. Like happiness, it is often appreciated in retrospect. It's only later that you place it in perspective. Years from now, I'll look back and say, "God, wasn't it wonderful?"
JULIE ANDREWS
This Week, September 18, 1966
Every person falls down at some point. Successful people choose to get back up.
DAVE RAMSEY
daily tip, official Dave Ramsey website
The distance between insanity and genius is measured only by success.
INFECTED MUSHROOM
"The Missed Symphony"
If you are a genius and unsuccessful, everybody treats you as if you were a genius, but when you come to be successful, when you commence to earn money, when you are really successful, then your family and everybody no longer treats you like a genius, they treat you like a man who has become successful.
PABLO PICASSO
attributed, Picasso
Success: a marvelous stimulant, bubbling with inspiration and incitement. But for all except the few who are strong and steadfast, there lurks beneath the effervescence a subtle poison.
SAMUEL HOPKINS ADAMS
Success: A Novel
There is only one success: to be able to spend your life in your own way, and not to give others absurd maddening claims upon it.
CHRISTOPHER MORLEY
Where the Blue Begins
Success is a journey not a destination. The doing is usually more important than the outcome. Not everyone can be Number 1.
ARTHUR ASHE
attributed, Get Motivated!: Daily Psych-Ups
Failure seems to be regarded as the one unpardonable crime, success as the all-redeeming virtue.
CHARLES FRANCIS ADAMS
"A Chapter of Erie", North American Review, July 1869
While success is necessary to happiness, it must be remembered that the term is a relative one; in other words, that there are many degrees of success, among which the highest are neither attainable by all, nor essential to felicity.
WILLIAM MATHEWS
Hints on Success in Life
About the only problem with success is that it does not teach you how to deal with failure.
TOMMY LASORDA
The Artful Dodger
The toughest thing about success is that you've got to keep on being a success. Talent is only a starting point in this business. You've got to keep on working that talent. Someday I'll reach for it and it won't be there.
IRVING BERLIN
Theatre Arts, February 1958
The squalid cash interpretation put on the word success -- is our national disease.
WILLIAM JAMES
letter to H. G. Wells, September 11, 1906
The mighty credit, which is a mantle of cloth of gold and finest silver spun ... by the greatest of the angels of men--Success.
LEW WALLACE
Ben-Hur
To attain "success" without attaining positive self-esteem is to be condemned to feeling like an imposter anxiously awaiting exposure.
NATHANIEL BRANDEN
The Power of Self-Esteem