Success Quotes

Source: Buddha's Little Instruction Book

It's always seemed to me that this is precisely the sort of dynamic, positive thinking that we so desperately need today in these trying times of crisis and universal brouhaha.
Introduction to "We Will All Go Together When We Go"
An Evening (Wasted) With Tom Lehrer (1959)

"It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation."
"The road to success and the road to failure are almost exactly the same."
"Success usually comes to those who are too busy to be looking for it."
"Opportunities don’t happen. You create them."
"Don’t be afraid to give up the good to go for the great."
"I find that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have."
"There are two types of people who will tell you that you cannot make a difference in this world: those who are afraid to try and those who are afraid you will succeed."
"Successful people do what unsuccessful people are not willing to do. Don’t wish it were easier; wish you were better."
"Try not to become a man of success. Rather become a man of value."
"Never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense."
"Stop chasing the money and start chasing the passion."
"Success is walking from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm."
"I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite."
"Would you like me to give you a formula for success? It’s quite simple, really: Double your rate of failure. You are thinking of failure as the enemy of success. But it isn’t at all. You can be discouraged by failure or you can learn from it, so go ahead and make mistakes. Make all you can. Because remember that’s where you will find success."
"If you are not willing to risk the usual, you will have to settle for the ordinary."
"The ones who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones that do."
"Do one thing every day that scares you."
"All progress takes place outside the comfort zone."
"People who succeed have momentum. The more they succeed, the more they want to succeed, and the more they find a way to succeed. Similarly, when someone is failing, the tendency is to get on a downward spiral that can even become a self-fulfilling prophecy."
"Don't let the fear of losing be greater than the excitement of winning."
"If you really look closely, most overnight successes took a long time."
"The real test is not whether you avoid this failure, because you won't. It's whether you let it harden or shame you into inaction, or whether you learn from it; whether you choose to persevere."
"The only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today."
"Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired, and success achieved."
"The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing."
"The successful warrior is the average man, with laser-like focus."
"There are no secrets to success. It is the result of preparation, hard work, and learning from failure."

"Success seems to be connected with action. Successful people keep moving. They make mistakes, but they don’t quit."
"If you really want to do something, you’ll find a way. If you don’t, you’ll find an excuse."
"I cannot give you the formula for success, but I can give you the formula for failure--It is: Try to please everybody."
"Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success. If you love what you are doing, you will be successful."
"Success isn’t just about what you accomplish in your life; it’s about what you inspire others to do."
"Fall seven times and stand up eight."
"Some people dream of success while others wake up and work."
"If you can dream it, you can do it."
"The difference between who you are and who you want to be is what you do."
"A successful man is one who can lay a firm foundation with the bricks that other throw at him."
"In order to succeed, your desire for success should be greater than your fear of failure."
"In order to succeed, we must first believe that we can."
"Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up."
"Don’t be distracted by criticism. Remember--the only taste of success some people get is to take a bite out of you."
"The secret of success is to do the common thing uncommonly well."
"You know you are on the road to success if you would do your job, and not be paid for it."
"There is a powerful driving force inside every human being that, once unleashed, can make any vision, dream, or desire a reality."
"The secret to success is to know something nobody else knows."
"I failed my way to success."
"I never dreamed about success, I worked for it."
"I never did anything worth doing by accident, nor did any of my inventions come indirectly through accident, except the phonograph. No, when I have fully decided that a result is worth getting, I go about it, and make trial after trial, until it comes."
"The only place where success comes before work is in the dictionary."
"Keep on going, and the chances are that you will stumble on something, perhaps when you are least expecting it. I never heard of anyone ever stumbling on something sitting down."

Source: The Night We Buried Road Dog (1993), p. 488

Variant transcription from "Death of a Genius" in Life Magazine: "Try not to become a man of success but rather try to become a man of value. He is considered successful in our day who gets more out of life than he puts in. But a man of value will give more than he receives."
Source: Attributed in posthumous publications, Einstein and the Poet (1983), p. 143

Source: Self-Help; with Illustrations of Character and Conduct (1859), Ch. XI : Self-Culture — Facilities and Difficulties

Source: The Worldly Philosophers (1953), Chapter II, The Economic Revolution, p. 15
Context: It may strike us as odd that the idea of gain is a relatively modern one; we are schooled to believe that man is essentially an acquisitive creature and that left to himself he will behave as any self-respecting businessman would. The profit motive, we are constantly being told, is as old as man himself.
Nothing could be further from the truth.

Donovan: "We are all one shining Being" (1998)
Context: Today I can’t comment on what the problem is in China, Russia, or Africa without realizing again and again the Diamond Sutra, which says that we look at the world and see it as separate but in fact, this is an illusion, but the reality is that we are one shining being. Until this can be understood, I can’t see any change. But I see some change now. There is a world consciousness. In the "old" New Age, they talked about the Age of Aquarius being an age of enlightenment. And now when a man goes to the moon he sees the earth. Before when someone did meditation he or she could meditate on the earth and the moon but now a man and a woman can see that we are on one planet and that the water is polluted and that the air is dirty. So these are changes that are important. But when we spoke about these things in the 60s people said we were dreamers.

Source: Life, the Truth, and Being Free (2010), p. 23
Context: How would your life be different if … You stopped making negative judgmental assumptions about people you encounter? Let today be the day … You look for the good in everyone you meet and respect their journey.

Memoirs of Childhood and Youth (1924)
Variant: A great secret of success is to go through life as a man who never gets used up.
Context: The great secret of success is to go through life as a man who never gets used up. That is possible for him who never argues and strives with men and facts, but in all experience retires upon himself, and looks for the ultimate cause of things in himself.

The Last Lecture (2008)
Variant: The questions are always more important than the answers."

Source: The Absorbent Mind (1949), Ch. 27 : The Teacher's Preparation, p. 283; part of this has become paraphrased as :
Context: One who has drunk at the fountain of spiritual happiness says good-by of his own accord to the satisfactions that come from a higher professional status … What is the greatest sign of success for a teacher thus transformed? It is to be able to say, "The children are now working as if I did not exist."

Misattributed
Source: Elbert Hubbard, Little Journeys to the Homes of American Statesmen (1898), p. 370 http://hdl.handle.net/2027/osu.32435065322687?urlappend=%3Bseq=458: "If you would escape moral and physical assassination, do nothing, say nothing, be nothing—court obscurity, for only in oblivion does safety lie." Other versions of the saying were repeated in several of Hubbard's later writings.

Letter to her husband George P. Putnam, on the eve of her last flight
Last Flight (1937)
Context: Please know that I am aware of the hazards. I want to do it because I want to do it. Women must try to do things as men have tried. When they fail, their failure must be a challenge to others.

Message regarding unacceptable behaviour (2013)
Context: I will be ruthless in ridding the army of people who cannot live up to its values. And I need everyone of you to support me in achieving this. The standard you walk past, is the standard you accept. that goes for all of us, but especially those, who by their rank, have a leadership role. NB While on Q & A, ABC TV on 1st February 2016, Australian of the Year, Lieutenant General David Lindsay Morrison attributed; "The standard you walk by is the standard you accept"; to David ­Hurley, former Chief, Australian Defence Force, explaining the quote; "... doesn't belong to me or [my former speechwriter] Cate McGregor, it belongs to the Governor of NSW, David Hurley."

Misattributed
Variant: We are what we repeatedly do, therefore excellence is not an act, but a habit.
Source: Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the World's Greatest Philosophers (1926), reprinted in Simon & Schuster/Pocket Books, 1991, ISBN 0-671-73916-6], Ch. II: Aristotle and Greek Science; part VII: Ethics and the Nature of Happiness: "Excellence is an art won by training and habituation: we do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have these because we have acted rightly; 'these virtues are formed in man by his doing the actions'; we are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit: 'the good of man is a working of the soul in the way of excellence in a complete life... for as it is not one swallow or one fine day that makes a spring, so it is not one day or a short time that makes a man blessed and happy'" (p. 76). The quoted phrases within the quotation are from the Nicomachean Ethics, Book II, 4; Book I, 7. The misattribution is from taking Durant's summation of Aristotle's ideas as being the words of Aristotle himself.

Harvard address (2008)

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

Independent (London, April 4, 1991)

See You at the Top (2000)

What is success?, quoted in He Has Achieved Success Who Has Lived Well, Laughed Often and Loved Much, in QuoteInvestigator.com (26 June 2012) http://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/06/26/define-success/.

As quoted in Thomas Alva Edison : Sixty Years of an Inventor's Life (1908) by Francis Arthur Jones, p. 14.
1900s

Source: Life, the Truth, and Being Free (2010), p. 64

The earliest citation yet found does not attribute this to Roosevelt, but presents it as a piece of anonymous piece folk-wisdom: "When one reaches the end of his rope, he should tie a knot in it and hang on" ( LIFE magazine (3 April 1919), p. 585 http://hdl.handle.net/2027/wu.89063018576?urlappend=%3Bseq=65).
Misattributed
Variant: When you come to the end of your rope, tie a knot and hang on.

Not by Shakespeare, but from Finding Your Strength in Difficult Times: A Book of Meditations, a 1993 self-help book by David S. Viscott.
Misattributed
Source: http://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/06/16/purpose-gift/

On his presidential plans New York Times (14 September 1986)

From "Self-Portrait" (1972)
Truman Capote: Conversations (1987)

Attributed quotes

Bell Telephone Talk (1901)

Source: Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium (Moral Letters to Lucilius), Letter LXXXIV: On gathering ideas, Line 13

Attributed to Watson in: William G. Dickerson (1995) In search of the ultimate practice. p. 19.

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

Michael Korda, in Success! (1977), p. 284
Misattributed

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

Glenn
Liebman
Hockey Shorts: 1,001 of the games funniest one liners
1996
70, 113 & 229
Contemporary Books
0-8092-3351-7

As quoted in An Enemy Called Average (1990) by John L. Mason, p. 55.
Date unknown

This quote is commonly attributed to Churchill, but appears in the "Red Herrings: False Attributions" appendix of Churchill by Himself : The Definitive Collection of Quotations (2008) by Richard Langworth, without citation as to where it originates.
In American Character, a 1905 address by Brander Matthews, a similar quotation is attributed to L. P. Jacks ( link http://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015059451156?urlappend=%3Bseq=238).
""Our civilization is a perilous adventure for an uncertain prize... Human society is not a constructed thing but a human organization... We are adopting a false method of reform when we begin by operations that weaken society, either morally or materially, by lower its vitality, by plunging it into gloom and despair about itself, by inducing the atmosphere of the sick-room, and then when its courage and resources are at a low ebb, expecting it to perform some mighty feat of self-reformation... Social despair or bitterness does not get us anywhere... Low spirits are an intellectual luxury. An optimist is one who sees an opportunity in every difficulty. A pessimist is one who sees a difficulty in every opportunity... The conquest of great difficulties is the glory of human nature." L. P. Jacks, quoted in American character, by Brander Matthews, 1906
Misattributed
Variant: A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.

As quoted in: [J. L.] Elkhorne. Edison — The Fabulous Drone, in 73 Vol. XLVI, No. 3 (March 1967) http://www.arimi.it/wp-content/73/03_March_1967.pdf, p. 52
Disputed

As quoted in You've Got Style : Your Personal Guide for Relating to Others‎ (2000) by Robert Rohm , p. 29
Variant: Don't spend time beating on a wall, hoping to transform it into a door.