Quotes about success
page 24

Berthe Morisot photo
Mortimer J. Adler photo

“Above all, money-making and other external indices of social success must become subordinate to the inner attainments of moral and intellectual virtue.”

Mortimer J. Adler (1902–2001) American philosopher and educator

Source: Reforming Education: The Opening of the American Mind (1990), p. 314

Thomas Kuhn photo
Arthur Jensen photo

“The study of race differences in intelligence is an acid test case for psychology. Can behavioral scientists research this subject with the same freedom, objectivity, thoroughness, and scientific integrity with which they go about investigating other psychological phenomena? In short, can psychology be scientific when it confronts an issue that is steeped in social ideologies? In my attempts at self- analysis this question seems to me to be one of the most basic motivating elements in my involvement with research on the nature of the observed psychological differences among racial groups. In a recent article (Jensen, 1985b) I stated:I make no apology for my choice of research topics. I think that my own nominal fields of expertise (educational and differential psychology) would be remiss if they shunned efforts to describe and understand more accurately one of the most perplexing and critical of current problems. Of all the myriad subjects being investigated in the behavioral and social sciences, it seems to me that one of the most easily justified is the black- white statistical disparity in cognitive abilities, with its far reaching educational, economic, and social consequences. Should we not apply the tools of our science to such socially important issues as best we can? The success of such efforts will demonstrate that psychology can actually behave as a science in dealing with socially sensitive issues, rather than merely rationalize popular prejudice and social ideology.”

Arthur Jensen (1923–2012) professor of educational psychology

p. 258
Source: Differential Psychology: Towards Consensus (1987), pp. 438-9

William Croswell Doane photo

“The success of sainthood is the success attained by struggle and suffering and achieved by faith; a success of honor, of clean hands and pure heart, of service to man and glory to God.”

William Croswell Doane (1832–1913) American bishop

Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 109.

Ellen Page photo
Josiah Gilbert Holland photo
Andrew Ure photo
Gulzarilal Nanda photo
George Washington Plunkitt photo
John Fisher, 1st Baron Fisher photo

“The 3 Requisites for Success - Ruthless, Relentless, Remorseless”

John Fisher, 1st Baron Fisher (1841–1920) Royal Navy admiral of the fleet

The 3 R's
p. 274. https://archive.org/stream/memoriesbyadmira00fishuoft#page/274/mode/1up
Also The World Crisis, Vol 1, 1911-14 (1923), Churchill, Thornton Butterworth (London), p. 73.
Memories (1919) https://archive.org/stream/memoriesbyadmira00fishuoft#page/n0/mode/2up

Frederic William Farrar photo
David Carter photo
Norman Tebbit photo
François de La Rochefoucauld photo

“Fortunate people seldom mend their ways, for when good luck crowns their misdeeds with success they think it is because they are right.”

Les gens heureux ne se corrigent guère; ils croient toujours avoir raison quand la fortune soutient leur mauvaise conduite.
Maxim 227.
Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims (1665–1678)

Stendhal photo

“Why not make an end of it all?" he asked himself. "Why this obstinate resistance to the fate that is crushing me? It is all very well my forming what are apparently the most reasonable forms of conduct, my life is a succession of griefs and bitter feelings. This month is no better than the last; this year is no better than last year. Why this obstinate determination to go on living? Can I be wanting in firmness? What is death?" he asked himself, opening his case of pistols and examining them. "A very small matter, when all is said; only a fool would be concerned about it.”

Pourquoi ne pas en finir? se dit-il enfin; pourquoi cette obstination à lutter contre le destin qui m'accable? J'ai beau faire les plans de conduite les plus raisonnables en apparence, ma vie n'est qu'une suite de malheurs et de sensations amères. Ce mois-ci ne vaut pas mieux que le mois passé; cette année-ci ne vaut pas mieux que l'autre année; d'où vient cette obstination à vivre? Manquerais-je de fermeté? Qu'est-ce que la mort? se dit-il en ouvrant la caisse de ses pistolets et les considérant. Bien peu de chose en vérité; il faut être fou pour s'en passer.
Source: Armance (1827), Ch. 2

Warren Farrell photo
Nicolas Chamfort photo
John Dewey photo
Steve Jobs photo
Bhakti Tirtha Swami photo
Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo
John F. Kennedy photo

“Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”

John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America

This is one of seven quotes inscribed on the walls at the gravesite of John F. Kennedy at Arlington National Cemetery.
1961, Inaugural Address

John F. Kennedy photo
Norman Thomas photo
Katharine McPhee photo

“In my view, I’ve had tons of success but, in the way the world views success and they expect Idols to do, mine has just been a longer journey to get there. And I’m grateful for it. It just makes the journey that much sweeter in the end.”

Katharine McPhee (1984) American pop singer, songwriter, and actress

'Smash' scoop: Katharine McPhee talks NBC's new musical drama and life after 'Idol' -- 'Certain casting people didn’t wanna see me' http://ew.com/article/2012/01/24/smash-katharine-mcphee-2/ (January 24, 2012)

John Ashcroft photo
Bernhard Riemann photo
Desmond Morris photo
John Quincy Adams photo

“I can never join with my voice in the toast which I see in the papers attributed to one of our gallant naval heroes. I cannot ask of heaven success, even for my country, in a cause where she should be in the wrong. Fiat justitia, pereat coelum. My toast would be, may our country always be successful, but whether successful or otherwise, always right.”

John Quincy Adams (1767–1848) American politician, 6th president of the United States (in office from 1825 to 1829)

Letter to his father, John Adams (1 August 1816), referring to the popular phrase "My Country, Right or Wrong!" based upon Stephen Decatur's famous statement "Our Country! In her intercourse with foreign nations may she always be in the right, but our country, right or wrong." The Latin phrase is one that can be translated as : "Let justice be done though heaven should fall" or "though heaven perish".

Fred Allen photo

“Sullivan will be successful as long as other people have talent.”

Fred Allen (1894–1956) comedian

As quoted in Always On Sunday. Ed Sullivan: An Inside View (1968) by Michael David Harris; reproduced in "Sunday Marks Ed Sullivan's 20th Anniversary on TV," https://www.newspapers.com/newspage/82860831/ The San Antonio Express (June 16, 1968), p. 117

Alfred Jules Ayer photo
Joe Biden photo

“When seagull droppings landed on my head at a campaign event at Bowers Beach two days before Election Day, I chose to read it as a sign of a coming success.”

Joe Biden (1942) 47th Vice President of the United States (in office from 2009 to 2017)

Page 73
2000s, Promises to Keep (2008)

Charles Krauthammer photo
John Stossel photo
Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot photo
Gloria Estefan photo
Derren Brown photo
Harold Pinter photo
John Banville photo

“I'm a little surprised that commercial success has arrived. I used to think that it was hopeless, that it would never happen.”

John Banville (1945) Irish writer

Once More Admired Than Bought, A Writer Finally Basks in Success (1990)

Kenneth Arrow photo

“In an ideal socialist economy, the reward for invention would be completely separated from any charge to the users of information. In a free enterprise economy, inventive activity is supported by using the invention to create property rights; precisely to the extent that it is successful, there is an underutilization of the information.”

Kenneth Arrow (1921–2017) American economist

Kenneth J. Arrow (1962). "Economic Welfare and the Allocation of Resources for Invention." In: The Rate and Direction of Inventive Activity. Princeton University Press.; cited in: Thrainn Eggertsson, Economic behavior and institutions. 1990. p. 22
1950s-1960s

Aron Ra photo
Ryōji Noyori photo

“Keep stupid, keep crazy. Knowledge begins with wonder. Success as a scientist is based on keen curiosity. If one wants to enjoy academic life, I would recommend him or her to be different.”

Ryōji Noyori (1938) Japanese chemist

Ryōji Noyori (2018) cited in " Diverse culture, free environment keys for Nobel prizes: Nobel winner http://focustaiwan.tw/news/ast/201805090001.aspx" on Focus Taiwan, 9 May 2018.

Roger Scruton photo
Clayton M. Christensen photo
Ambrose Bierce photo
Saddam Hussein photo
Phil Brown (footballer) photo

“We're knocking on the door of success.”

Phil Brown (footballer) (1959) English association football player and manager

5-Oct-2005, DCFC website
Said after 9 games without a win.

Tod A photo

“I'm a raging success as a failure.”

Tod A (1965) American musician

"7th Avenue Static", Psychopharmacology(July 10, 2001).
Lyrics, Firewater

Jefferson Davis photo

“I think Stone Mountain is amusing, but then again I find most representations of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson outside of Virginia, and, in Jackson's case, West Virginia, to be amusing. Aside from a short period in 1861-62, when Lee was placed in charge of the coastal defense of South Carolina and Georgia, neither general stepped foot in Georgia during the war. Lee cut off furloughs to Georgia's soldiers later in the war because he was convinced that once home they’d never come back. He resisted the dispatch of James Longstreet's two divisions westward to defend northern Georgia, and he had no answer when Sherman operated in the state. It would be better to see Joseph E. Johnston and John Bell Hood on the mountain, although it probably would have been difficult to get those two men to ride together. Maybe Braxton Bragg would have been a better pick, but no one calls him the hero of Chickamauga. Yet Bragg, Johnston, and Hood all attempted to defend Georgia, and they are ignored on Stone Mountain. So is Joe Wheeler, whose cavalry feasted off Georgians in 1864. So is John B. Gordon, wartime hero and postwar Klansman. Given Stone Mountain's history, Klansman Gordon would have been a good choice. It's also amusing to see Jefferson Davis represented. Yes, Davis came to Georgia, once to try to settle disputes within the high command of the Army of Tennessee, not a rousing success, and once to rally white Georgians to the cause once more after the fall of Atlanta. But any serious student of the war knows that Davis spent much of his presidency arguing with Georgia governor Joseph Brown about Georgia's contribution to the Confederate war effort, and that the vice president of the Confederacy, Georgia's own Alexander Hamilton Stephens, was not a big supporter of his superior. Yet we don't see Brown or Stephens on Stone Mountain, either.”

Jefferson Davis (1808–1889) President of the Confederate States of America

Brooks D. Simpson, "The Future of Stone Mountain" https://cwcrossroads.wordpress.com/2015/07/22/the-future-of-stone-mountain/ (22 July 2015), Crossroads, WordPress

Gloria Estefan photo
James Anthony Froude photo
Aron Ra photo
James Macpherson photo
Mike Tyson photo
Calvin Coolidge photo
Desmond Morris photo
Peter Woit photo

“We have an incredibly successful theory called the Standard Model. … It still leaves open several questions.”

Peter Woit (1957) American physicist

[Big Think Interview with Peter Woit, 23 April 2012, YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnWjZCS9YVY] (See Big Think.)

Jay Samit photo
Roberto Mangabeira Unger photo

“The extreme moment of shock in battle presents in heightened and distorted form some of the distinctive characteristics of a whole society involved in war. These characteristics in turn represent a heightening and distortion of many of the traits of a social world cracked open by transformative politics. The threats to survival are immediate and shifting; no mode of association or activity can be held fixed if it stands as an obstacle to success. The existence of stable boundaries between passionate and calculating relationships disappears in the terror of the struggle. All settled ties and preconceptions shake or collapse under the weight of fear, violence, and surprise. What the experience of combat sharply diminishes is the sense of variety in the opportunities of self-expression and attachment, the value given to the bonds of community and to life itself, the chance for reflective withdrawal and for love. In all these ways, it is a deformed expression of the circumstance of society shaken up and restored to indefinition. Yet the features of this circumstance that the battle situation does share often suffice to make the boldest associative experiments seem acceptable in battle even if they depart sharply from the tenor of life in the surrounding society. Vanguardist warfare is the extreme case. It is the response of unprejudiced intelligence and organized collaboration to violence and contingency.”

Roberto Mangabeira Unger (1947) Brazilian philosopher and politician

Source: Plasticity Into Power: Comparative-Historical Studies on the Institutional Conditions of Economic and Military Success (1987), p. 160

“We have said all along that we think we need strategic partnerships to achieve our goals. We won't be successful as a lone wolf out there. We're not that good.”

Charlie Ergen (1953) American businessman

Bloomberg: "Dish Sinks After Giving Little Hope of Finding Network Partners" https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-05-08/dish-sinks-after-giving-little-hope-of-finding-network-partners (8 May 2018)

A. P. J. Abdul Kalam photo
Yoshida Kenkō photo

“It is excellent for a man to be simple in his tastes, to avoid extravagance, to own no possessions, to entertain no craving for worldly success.”

Yoshida Kenkō (1283–1350) japanese writer

18
Essays in Idleness (1967 Columbia University Press, Trns: Donald Keene)

Nigel Cumberland photo

“Success is the accomplishment of any number of possible aims, dreams, aspirations or goals. It’s very personal and unique to you. Your greatest desire could be someone else’s idea of hell; you might want to be an award-winning chef while your best friend hates cooking.”

Nigel Cumberland (1967) British author and leadership coach

Your Job-Hunt Ltd – Advice from an Award-Winning Asian Headhunter (2003), Successful Recruitment in a Week (2012) https://books.google.ae/books?idp24GkAsgjGEC&printsecfrontcover&dqnigel+cumberland&hlen&saX&ved0ahUKEwjF75Xw0IHNAhULLcAKHazACBMQ6AEIGjAA#vonepage&qnigel%20cumberland&ffalse, 100 Things Successful People Do: Little Exercises for Successful Living (2016) https://books.google.ae/books?idnu0lCwAAQBAJ&dqnigel+cumberland&hlen&saX&ved0ahUKEwjF75Xw0IHNAhULLcAKHazACBMQ6AEIMjAE

Francis Xavier photo
Auguste Rodin photo

“In sculpture the projection of the fasciculi must be accentuated, the foreshortening forced, the hollows deepened; sculpture is the art of the hole and the lump, not of clear, well-smoothed, unmodelled figures. Ignorant people, when they see close-knitted true surfaces, say that 'it is not finished.' No notion is falser than that of finish unless it be that of elegance; by means of these two ideas people would kill our art. The way to obtain solidity and life is by work carried out to the fullest, not in the direction of achievement and of copying détails, but in that of truth in the successive schemes. The public, perverted by académie préjudices, confounds art with neatness. The simplicity of the 'École' is a painted cardboard ideal, A cast from life is a copy, the exactest possible copy, and yet it has neither motion nor eloquence. Art intervenes to exaggerate certain surfaces, and also to fine down others. In sculpture everything depends upon the way in which the modelling is carried out with a constant thought of the main line of the scheme, upon the rendering of the hollows, of the projections and of their connections; thus it is that one may get fine lights, and especially fine shadows that are not opaque. Everything should be emphasised according to the accent that it is desired to render, and the degree of amplification is personal, according to the tact and the temperament of each sculptor; and for this reason there is no transmissible process, no studio recipe, but only a true law. I see it in the antique and in Michael Angelo. To work by the profiles, in depth not by surfaces, always thinking of the few geometrical forms from which all nature proceeds, and to make these eternal forms perceptible in the individual case of the object studied, that is my criterion. That is not idealism, it is a part of the handicraft. My ideas have nothing to do with it but for that method; my Danaids and my Dante figures would be weak, bad things. From the large design that I get your mind deduces ideas.”

Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) French sculptor

Source: Auguste Rodin: The Man, His Ideas, His Works, 1905, p. 61-63

Hemu photo
Karl Jaspers photo
Helen Sharman photo

“Once the press learnt of her success, she was called 'the girl from Mars.”

Helen Sharman (1963) British chemist who became the first Briton in space

She worked for Mars the sweet manufacturer.
Women in Space: Following Valentina by David Shayler, Ian A. Moule, pub. Springer, ISBN 1852337443, p. 315
About

George Washington Plunkitt photo
Arthur Schopenhauer photo
Berthe Morisot photo
Ernesto Che Guevara photo
Sri Aurobindo photo

“A thought is an arrow shot at the truth; it can hit a point, but not cover the whole target. But the archer is too well satisfied with his success to ask anything farther.”

Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950) Indian nationalist, freedom fighter, philosopher, yogi, guru and poet

Thoughts and Aphorisms (1913), Jnana

Max Schmeling photo

“I received a letter from the Reich Ministry of Sports. They want me to split from Joe Jacobs, my manager since 1928…. I really need Joe Jacobs. I owe all my success in America to him.”

Max Schmeling (1905–2005) German boxer

To Adolf Hitler, 1935 http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/fight/peopleevents/p_jacobs.html

Will Eisner photo
Robert T. Kiyosaki photo

“Failure is part of the process of success.”

Robert T. Kiyosaki (1947) American finance author , investor

Rich Dad Poor Dad: What the Rich Teach Their Kids About Money-That the Poor and the Middle Class Do Not!

Babe Ruth photo
Ryan North photo

“Failure is just success rounded down.”

Ryan North (1980) Canadian webcomic writer and programmer

Comic dialogue http://www.qwantz.com/index.pl?comic=955

Benjamin Franklin photo

“The art of concluding from experience and observation consists in evaluating probabilities, in estimating if they are high or numerous enough to constitute proof. This type of calculation is more complicated and more difficult than one might think. It demands a great sagacity generally above the power of common people. The success of charlatans, sorcerors, and alchemists — and all those who abuse public credulity — is founded on errors in this type of calculation.”

Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790) American author, printer, political theorist, politician, postmaster, scientist, inventor, civic activist, …

Benjamin Franklin and Antoine Lavoisier, Rapport des commissaires chargés par le roi de l'examen du magnétisme animal (1784), as translated in "The Chain of Reason versus the Chain of Thumbs", Bully for Brontosaurus (1991) by Stephen Jay Gould,. p. 195.
Decade unclear

Ariel Sharon photo

“[Iran, Libya and Syria] are irresponsible states, which must be disarmed of weapons [of] mass destruction, and a successful American move in Iraq as a model will make that easier to achieve.”

Ariel Sharon (1928–2014) prime minister of Israel and Israeli general

haaretzdaily.com, February 17, 2003 Haaretz http://www.haaretzdaily.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=263941
2000s

Chris Cornell photo
Sebastian Vettel photo
Elbert Hubbard photo

“There is no such thing as success in a bad business.”

Elbert Hubbard (1856–1915) American writer, publisher, artist, and philosopher fue el escritor del jarron azul

The Note Book of Elbert Hubbard (1927)

Gertrude Stein photo
Albert Lutuli photo
Camille Pissarro photo

“Renoir is a great success on the Salon; I think he is 'launched'. All the better! It's a very hard life, being poor.”

Camille Pissarro (1830–1903) French painter

Quote in a letter to Mr. Murer, 27th May 1879, as quoted in Renoir – his life and work Francois Fosca, Book Club Associates /Thames and Hudson Ltd, London 1975, p. 129
1870's