“Eighty percent of success is showing up.”

Quoted in [Bill, Maxwell, In gloomy times, let's try to find a sense of humor, http://www.sptimes.com/2002/07/07/Columns/In_gloomy_times__let_.shtml, 2002-07-07, 2008-10-04, St. Petersburg Times]

Matsuo Bashō, Collected Haiku Theory, eds. T. Komiya & S. Yokozawa, Iwanami, 1951 (Unknown translator)
Statements

Source: Stranger in a Strange Land

Source: Stranger in a Strange Land

As quoted in The New Hollywood : American Movies in the '70s (1975) by Axel Madsen

People used to always say to me that they wanted to write a play, they wanted to write a movie, they wanted to write a novel, and the couple of people that did it were 80 percent of the way to having something happen. All the other people struck out without ever getting that pack. They couldn’t do it, that’s why they don’t accomplish a thing, they don’t do the thing, so once you do it, if you actually write your film script, or write your novel, you are more than half way towards something good happening. So that I was say [sic] my biggest life lesson that has worked. All others have failed me.
Interview for The Collider (2008) http://collider.com/entertainment/interviews/article.asp/aid/8878/tcid/1/pg/2.

Philadelphia University Commencement speech NPR: "The Best Commencement Speeches, Ever" http://apps.npr.org/commencement/speech/steve-blank-philadelphia-university-2011/. May 14, 2011.

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)
Context: Fifty years ago, science took for granted that the rate of acceleration could not last. The world forgets quickly, but even today the habit remains of founding statistics on the faith that consumption will continue nearly stationary. Two generations, with John Stuart Mill, talked of this stationary period, which was to follow the explosion of new power. All the men who were elderly in the forties died in this faith, and other men grew old nursing the same conviction, and happy in it; while science, for fifty years, permitted, or encouraged, society to think that force would prove to be limited in supply. This mental inertia of science lasted through the eighties before showing signs of breaking up; and nothing short of radium fairly wakened men to the fact, long since evident, that force was inexhaustible.