“The power of fortune is confessed only by the miserable; for the happy impute all their success to prudence or merit.”

— Jonathan Swift

Thoughts on Various Subjects from Miscellanies (1711-1726)

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Jonathan Swift 141

Anglo-Irish satirist, essayist, and poet 1667–1745

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“If great renown is won by true merit, and if virtue is considered in itself and apart from success, then all that we praise in any of our ancestors was Fortune's gift.”
Si veris magna paratur fama bonis et si successu nuda remoto inspicitur virtus, quidquid laudamus in ullo maiorum, fortuna fuit.

Marcus Annaeus Lucanus book Pharsalia

Book IX, line 593 (tr. J. D. Duff).
Pharsalia

“The only real formula for real success is Work and Faith. All may achieve this sort of success for all may work and the only happiness, the only success, is in labor.”

Antonio Moreno (1887–1967) Spanish-American film actor and director

Other rewards do not count, comparatively. The joy of leisure is an illusion. The chief reason for my liking serials for as long as I did was because they kept me constantly at work, whereas feature pictures do permit of a week or more idleness in between.
The True Story of My Life http://www.public.asu.edu/~bruce/Taylor57.txt (November 8 - December 13, 1924)

“The foundation of success in life is good health: that is the substratum fortune; it is also the basis of happiness. A person cannot accumulate a fortune very well when he is sick.”

P.T. Barnum (1810–1891) American showman and businessman

Source: The Art of Money Getting: Golden Rules for Making Money

“Most people judge men only by success or by fortune.”

François de La Rochefoucauld book Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims

La plupart des gens ne jugent des hommes que par la vogue qu'ils ont, ou par leur fortune.
Variant translation: Most people judge men only by their fashion or their fortune.
Maxim 212.
Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims (1665–1678)

“The world needs divine power in every human being the recognition of which is the secret to all success and happiness”

Ella Wheeler Wilcox (1850–1919) American author and poet

Introduction to Poems of Power 1918 edition

“Though fortune scowl, though prudence interfere,
One thing is certain: Love will triumph here!”

Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809–1894) Poet, essayist, physician

The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1858)
Context: Though fortune scowl, though prudence interfere,
One thing is certain: Love will triumph here!
Lords of creation, whom your ladies rule,—
The world's great masters, when you 're out of school,—
Learn the brief moral of our evening's play
Man has his will,—but woman has her way!

“Referring to a wealthy miser he said, "He has not acquired a fortune; the fortune has acquired him."”

Bion of Borysthenes (-325–-246 BC) ancient greek philosopher

As quoted by Diogenes Laërtius, iv. 50.

“When one is already happy it is important not to lose the virtues which have produced happiness. When they are successful, many men and women forget prudence, moderation, and kindness - qualities which were instrumental in their success. They are arrogant or thoughtless; an excessive self-confidence prevents them from accomplishing difficult tasks, and they soon become unworthy of their good fortune. They are surprised when their luck changes from good to bad. The ancient practice of sacrifice to the gods in return for happiness was a wise one. Polycrates, Tyrant of Samos, threw his precious ring into the sea as a sacrifice, and there are several ways of throwing the ring of Polycrates into the sea. The simplest is to be modest.”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939), The Art of Happiness

“To build a better world we need to replace the patchwork of lucky breaks and arbitrary advantages today that determine success--the fortunate birth dates and the happy accidents of history--with a society that provides opportunities for all.”

Malcolm Gladwell (1963) journalist and science writer

Source: Outliers: The Story of Success

“The compliments you are about to pay could only sadden me, because what you love in our dear peninsula is exactly the object of our hatreds. Indeed, you crisscross Italy only to meticulously sniff out the traces of our oppressive past, and you are happy, insanely happy, if you have the good fortune to carry home some miserable stone on which our ancestors have trodden.”

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876–1944) Italian poet and editor, founder of the Futurist movement

Quoted in: Anthony L. Geist, Jose B. Monle-N, Modernism and Its Margins: Reinscribing Cultural Modernity from Spain and Latin America. Taylor & Francis, 1999, p. 57.
1910's, Futurist Speech to the English' (1910)

“The power of fortune is confessed only by the miserable; for the happy impute all their success to prudence or merit.”

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Jonathan Swift 141

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