Quotes about success
page 16

Chinmayananda Saraswati photo
Warren Farrell photo

“When women are at the height of their beauty power and exercise it, we call it marriage. When men are at the height of their success power and exercise it, we call it a mid-life crisis.”

Warren Farrell (1943) author, spokesperson, expert witness, political candidate

Source: Why Men Are the Way They Are (1988), p. 103.

Frances Kellor photo

“A first proposition, therefore, in Americanization is to find a way to satisfy the creative instinct in men and their sense of home, by giving them and their native-born sons the widest possible knowledge of America, including a pictorial geography, a simple history of the United States, the stories of successful Americans including those of foreign-born origin; a knowledge of American literature, of our political ideals and institutions, and of oiy: free educational opportunities. A systematic effort should be made to give them a land interest and a home stake and to get them close to the soil, not alone in the day's work but also in their cultural life. The men most likely to desert America at the close of the war will be workers with job stakes and wage rates, and not those with a home stake and investments. I would carry this campaign of information into every foreign language publication, every newspaper, every shop, and every racial center in America. The land interpreter of the future will be the government, and Franklin K. Lane, Secretary of the Interior, has foreseen this in his appeal for the use of the land for the rehabilitation of men returning from the front. It is the land that will make the life of the maimed livable and will connect the past with the future. This will not be achieved by forced "back-to-the-land movements" and colonization. Each individual American who interprets the beauty of America and its meaning, and who, wherever he can, personally puts the foreign-born in touch with the soil and helps him to a plot of ground which he can call his own, is doing effective Americanization. Loyalty and efficiency are inherent in this land sense, and they are the strength of a nation.”

Frances Kellor (1873–1952) American sociologist

What is Americanization? (1919)

Slavoj Žižek photo
Dan Balz photo
Peter F. Drucker photo

“Success always obsoletes the very behavior that achieved it.”

Peter F. Drucker (1909–2005) American business consultant

Source: 1960s - 1980s, MANAGEMENT: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices (1973), Part 1, p. 88

Henry John Stephen Smith photo

“If we except the great name of Newton (and the exception is one that the great Gauss himself would have been delighted to make) it is probable that no mathematician of any age or country has ever surpassed Gauss in the combination of an abundant fertility of invention with an absolute vigorousness in demonstration, which the ancient Greeks themselves might have envied. It may be admitted, without any disparagement to the eminence of such great mathematicians as Euler and Cauchy that they were so overwhelmed with the exuberant wealth of their own creations, and so fascinated by the interest attaching to the results at which they arrived, that they did not greatly care to expend their time in arranging their ideas in a strictly logical order, or even in establishing by irrefragable proof propositions which they instinctively felt, and could almost see to be true. With Gauss the case was otherwise. It may seem paradoxical, but it is probably nevertheless true that it is precisely the effort after a logical perfection of form which has rendered the writings of Gauss open to the charge of obscurity and unnecessary difficulty. The fact is that there is neither obscurity nor difficulty in his writings, as long as we read them in the submissive spirit in which an intelligent schoolboy is made to read his Euclid. Every assertion that is made is fully proved, and the assertions succeed one another in a perfectly just analogical order… But when we have finished the perusal, we soon begin to feel that our work is but begun, that we are still standing on the threshold of the temple, and that there is a secret which lies behind the veil and is as yet concealed from us. No vestige appears of the process by which the result itself was obtained, perhaps not even a trace of the considerations which suggested the successive steps of the demonstration. Gauss says more than once that for brevity, he gives only the synthesis, and suppresses the analysis of his propositions. Pauca sed matura—few but well matured… If, on the other hand, we turn to a memoir of Euler's, there is a sort of free and luxuriant gracefulness about the whole performance, which tells of the quiet pleasure which Euler must have taken in each step of his work; but we are conscious nevertheless that we are at an immense distance from the severe grandeur of design which is characteristic of all Gauss's greater efforts.”

Henry John Stephen Smith (1826–1883) mathematician

As quoted by Alexander Macfarlane, Lectures on Ten British Physicists of the Nineteenth Century (1916) p. 95, https://books.google.com/books?id=43SBAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA95 "Henry John Stephen Smith (1826-1883) A Lecture delivered March 15, 1902"

Gerald Ford photo

“It's the quality of the ordinary, the straight, the square, that accounts for the great stability and success of our nation. It's a quality to be proud of. But it's a quality that many people seem to have neglected.”

Gerald Ford (1913–2006) American politician, 38th President of the United States (in office from 1974 to 1977)

As quoted by TIME magazine (28 January 1974)
1970s

Daniel Drake photo

“There is a widespread impression today that the history of economics is a sequence of revolutions and counter-revolutions, successive schools rising to dominance just to be deposed in a crisis by another school. According to this view, paraphrasing Marx, all history of economics is a history of school struggles, punctuated by revolutions.”

Jürg Niehans (1919–2007) Swiss economist

Jürg Niehans, " Revolution and evolution in economic theory https://ecompapers.biz.uwa.edu.au/paper/PDF%20of%20Discussion%20Papers/1992/92-20%20Niehans,%20J.pdf." The Australian Quarterly (1993): 498-515.

Stanley Baldwin photo
Richard Bertrand Spencer photo
Frederick Douglass photo
Tony Blair photo
Narendra Modi photo
Calvin Coolidge photo

“Peace has an economic foundation to which too little attention has been given. No student can doubt that it was to a large extent the economic condition of Europe that drove those overburdened countries headlong into the World War. They were engaged in maintaining competitive armaments. If one country laid the keel of one warship, some other country considered it necessary to lay the keel of two warships. If one country enrolled a regiment, some other country enrolled three regiments. Whole peoples were armed and drilled and trained to the detriment of their industrial life, and charged and taxed and assessed until the burden could no longer be borne. Nations cracked under the load and sought relief from the intolerable pressure by pillaging each other. It was to avoid a repetition of such a catastrophe that our Government proposed and brought to a successful conclusion the Washing- ton Conference for the Limitation of Naval Armaments. We have been altogether desirous of an extension of this principle and for that purpose have sent our delegates to a preliminary conference of nations now sitting at Geneva. Out of that conference we expect some practical results. We believe that other nations ought to join with us in laying aside their suspicions and hatreds sufficiently to agree among themselves upon methods of mutual relief from the necessity of the maintenance of great land and sea forces. This can not be done if we constantly have in mind the resort to war for the redress of wrongs and the enforcement of rights. Europe has the League of Nations. That ought to be able to provide those countries with certain political guaranties which our country does not require. Besides this there is the World Court, which can certainly be used for the determination of all justifiable disputes. We should not underestimate the difficulties of European nations, nor fail to extend to them the highest degree of patience and the most sympathetic consideration. But we can not fail to assert our conviction that they are in great need of further limitation of armaments and our determination to lend them every assistance in the solution of their problems. We have entered the conference with the utmost good faith on our part and in the sincere belief that it represents the utmost good faith on their part. We want to see the problems that are there presented stripped of all technicalities and met and solved in a way that will secure practical results. We stand ready to give our support to every effort that is made in that direction.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, Ways to Peace (1926)

Enoch Powell photo
Adam Smith photo
Arnold Vosloo photo
Hannah Arendt photo
Grant Morrison photo
Bernie Sanders photo
David Pogue photo

“The Kindle is the most successful electronic book-reading tablet so far, but that’s not saying much; Silicon Valley is littered with the corpses of e-book reader projects.”

David Pogue (1963) Technology writer, journalist and commentator

" The Kindle: Good Before, Better Now http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/24/technology/personaltech/24pogue.html," The New York Times, February 24, 2009.

Gene Kelly photo
Edgar Degas photo

“I always suspect an artist who is successful before he is dead.”

Edgar Degas (1834–1917) French artist

John Murray Gibbon, Pagan Love (1922), ch. xiv
Misattributed

Nathaniel Hawthorne photo
Douglas Coupland photo
Ai Weiwei photo
Carl Friedrich Gauss photo
Hugo Diemer photo
Matt Ridley photo
Marcus Annaeus Lucanus photo

“Great things come crashing down upon themselves – such is the limit of growth ordained by heaven for success.”
In se magna ruunt: laetis hunc numina rebus<br/>crescendi posuere modum.

In se magna ruunt: laetis hunc numina rebus
crescendi posuere modum.
Book I, line 81 (tr. J. D. Duff).
Pharsalia

Elizabeth Stuart Phelps photo
Charles Grey, 2nd Earl Grey photo
Maurice Glasman, Baron Glasman photo
Roger Nash Baldwin photo
Franz Kafka photo
Mrs Patrick Campbell photo

“Success is the ability to go from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm.”

Mrs Patrick Campbell (1895–1940) British stage actress

No definite source has been found for this statement; though most often attributed to Sir Winston Churchill, and sometimes to Abraham Lincoln, it has only rarely been attributed to Campbell.
Disputed

Jerry Coyne photo
Bruce Fein photo
Eric Hoffer photo

“Failure in the management of practical affairs seems to be a qualification for success in the management of public affairs.”

Section 54
The True Believer (1951), Part Three: United Action and Self-Sacrifice

Salvador Dalí photo

“It is a question of the systematic and interpretive organization of the sensational, scattered and narcissist surrealist experimental material, - that is to say, of everyday surrealist events:, br>nocturnal pollution, false recollection, dream, diurnal fantasy, the concrete transformation of nocturnal phosphene into a hypnagogic image or of "waking phosphene" into an objective image, - the nutritive caprice, - inter-uterine claims, - anamorphic hysteria, - the voluntary retention of the urine, - the involuntary retention of insomnia - the fortuitous image of exclusively exhibitionist tendency, -the incomplete action, - the frantic manner, - the regional sneeze, the anal wheelbarrow, the minimal mistake, the liliputian malaise, the super-normal physiological state, - the picture one leaves off painting, that which one paints, the territorial ringing of the telephone, "the deranging image", etc., etc.,
all these things, I say, and a thousand other instantaneous or successive sollicitations, revealing a minimum of irrational intentionalety or, on the contrary, a minimum of suspect phenomenal nullity, are associated, by the mechanisms of paranoiac-critical activity, in an indestructible delirious-interpretive system of political problems, paralytic images, more or less mammiferous questions, playing the role of the obsessing idea.”

Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) Spanish artist

Source: Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1931 - 1940, My Pictorial Struggle', S. Dali, 1935, Chapter: 'My Pictorial Struggle', pp. 15-16

Kevin Kelly photo

“Not every success needs to be abandoned drastically, but every success needs to be questioned drastically.”

Kevin Kelly (1952) American author and editor

Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World (1995), New Rules for the New Economy: 10 Radical Strategies for a Connected World (1999)

Swami Vivekananda photo

“Purity, patience, and perseverance are the three essentials to success and, above all, love.”

Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902) Indian Hindu monk and phylosopher

Pearls of Wisdom

John Hodgman photo

“So long as you refuse to ever acknowledge failure, success becomes eternal, a downward curve, always approaching failure, but never quite reaching it.”

September 11, 2007
The Areas of My Expertise (2005), Appearances on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart

Patrick Swift photo
Paul Allen photo

“Our great string of successes had married my vision to his unmatched aptitude for business.”

Paul Allen (1953–2018) American inventor, investor and philanthropist

Idea Man (2012)

Frank Harris photo

“Frank Harris has no feelings. It is the secret of his success. Just as the fact that he thinks other people have none either is the secret of the failure that lies in wait for him somewhere on the way of Life.”

Frank Harris (1856–1931) Irish journalist and rogue

Oscar Wilde, letter to More Adey, May 12, 1897, quoted in Hugh Kingsmill Frank Harris (1932) p. 102.
Criticism

Chinmayananda Saraswati photo
Pauline Kael photo
Calvin Coolidge photo
Warren Farrell photo
K. R. Narayanan photo
Charles Darwin photo

“Amongst the half-human progenitors of man, and amongst savages, there have been struggles between the males during many generations for the possession of the females. But mere bodily strength and size would do little for victory, unless associated with courage, perseverance, and determined energy. With social animals, the young males have to pass through many a contest before they win a female, and the older males have to retain their females by renewed battles. They have, also, in the case of mankind, to defend their females, as well as their young, from enemies of all kinds, and to hunt for their joint subsistence. But to avoid enemies or to attack them with success, to capture wild animals, and to fashion weapons, requires the aid of the higher mental faculties, namely, observation, reason, invention, or imagination. These various faculties will thus have been continually put to the test and selected during manhood; they will, moreover, have been strengthened by use during this same period of life. Consequently, in accordance with the principle often alluded to, we might expect that they would at least tend to be transmitted chiefly to the male offspring at the corresponding period of manhood.”

second edition (1874), chapter XIX: "Secondary Sexual Characters of Man", page 564 http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=587&itemID=F944&viewtype=image
The Descent of Man (1871)

Arthur C. Clarke photo
Conrad Black photo

“Success in the marketplace increasingly depends on learning, yet most people don't know how to learn.”

Chris Argyris (1923–2013) American business theorist/Professor Emeritus/Harvard Business School/Thought Leader at Monitor Group

Chris Argyris (1991, p. 99) as cited in: Greenwood (2000) The Role of Reflection in Managerial Learning. p. xv

Pierre Corneille photo

“We never taste a perfect joy;
Our happiest successes are mixed with sadness.”

Jamais nous ne goûtons de parfaite allégresse:
Nos plus heureux succès sont mêlés de tristesse.
Don Diègue, act III, scene v.
Le Cid (1636)

John R. Bolton photo
Bhakti Tirtha Swami photo
William H. McNeill photo

“NEVER be surprised by your own success!”

Source: Life, the Truth, and Being Free (2010), p. 25

Joyce Brothers photo

“Success is a state of mind. If you want success, start thinking of yourself as a success.”

Joyce Brothers (1927–2013) Joyce Brothers

As quoted in The Pocket Philosopher/ Psychologist (2004) by Mark J. Merten, p. 87

Alphonse de Lamartine photo
Bruce Springsteen photo
Richard Blackwood photo
Paul Krugman photo
Germaine Greer photo
Alexander Hamilton photo
Luigi Russolo photo
Marshall Faulk photo
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel photo
Vladimir Lenin photo
Saul D. Alinsky photo
Alan Shepard photo

“One can make the argument that the success of the Shepard flight enabled the decision to go to the moon.”

Alan Shepard (1923–1998) American astronaut

John Logsdon — reported in John Noble Wilford, The New York Times (July 23, 1998) "Alan Shepard 1923-1998 One of 7 Original Astronauts, He was First American in Space", The Plain Dealer, p. 1A.
About

Mohammad-Javad Larijani photo

“We oppose the West's efforts to gain a monopoly in nuclear fuel, and in nuclear industry and science. I believe that the Iranian success is a great success for the Islamic world.”

Mohammad-Javad Larijani (1951) Iranian politician

We Are Interested in Nuclear Cooperation with Arab and Muslim Countries; the Americans Will Need Our Assistance to Withdraw from Iraq http://www.memritv.org/Transcript.asp?P1=1168 (May 2006)

Michel De Montaigne photo
Daniel Patrick Moynihan photo
Eugene McCarthy photo
Jerzy Vetulani photo
Nisargadatta Maharaj photo
Ralph Waldo Emerson photo

“Born for success he seemed,
With grace to win, with heart to hold,
With shining gifts that took all eyes.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

In Memoriam
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Thomas Jefferson photo
Victor Davis Hanson photo
Thom Yorke photo

“Q: Does commercial success matter to you?”

Thom Yorke (1968) English musician, philanthropist and singer-songwriter
Erik Naggum photo

“What I actually admire in Perl is its ability to provide a very successful abstraction of the horrible mess that is collectively called Unix.”

Erik Naggum (1965–2009) Norwegian computer programmer

Re: Using Lisp to Call another program in linux? http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/7c588cdb91a10d4d (Usenet article).
Usenet articles, Perl

Carlo Rovelli photo
Camille Pissarro photo
George Boole photo