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Success Quotes

There are not many famous names on this page. Shakespeare leads, then Steve Maraboli and Emerson, and most of the authors appear only once. The quotes with real citations are more interesting than the motivational ones: James Richardson’s “Success is whatever humiliation everyone has agreed to compete for” (Vectors, 2001), or Jean Ingelow in 1886 observing that if one cannot have success, the next most agreeable thing is failure.

“Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts” is credited to Churchill almost everywhere it appears. No source has been found. One of the places it shows up is a 2003 book, with none given. It is on the Courage page too, with the same flag.

Random quote on Success

Most quoted on success:

The moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess SUCCESS. That — with the squalid cash interpretation put on the word success — is our national disease.

William James The Letters of William James (1920)

All successful revolutions are the kicking in of a rotten door. The violence of revolutions is the violence of men who charge into a vacuum.

John Kenneth Galbraith The Age of Uncertainty (1977)

If you want to succeed you should strike out on new paths, rather than travel the worn paths of accepted success.

John D. Rockefeller Steps to the Top (1985)

Success is brought by continued labor and continued watchfulness. We must struggle on, not for one moment hesitate, nor take one backward step.

William Jennings Bryan Illinois College Valedictory (1881)

What is success? It is a toy balloon among children armed with pins.

Gene Fowler Skyline: A Reporter's Reminiscence of the 1920s (1961)

I would rather be beaten in Right than succeed in Wrong.

James A. Garfield Maxims of James Abram Garfield (1880)

It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.

Gore Vidal

It is only when the correct practice is followed for a long time, without interruptions and with a quality of positive attitude and eagerness, that it can succeed.

Patañjali

If successful, improvisation runs against its own dogmatism.

Mattin Anti-Copyright: Why Improvisation and Noise Run Against the Idea of Intellectual Property (2008)

Success in the long run has less to do with finding the best idea, organizational structure, or business model for an enterprise, than with discovering what matters to us as individuals.

Jerry I. Porras

The best augury of a man's success in his profession is that he thinks it the finest in the world.

George Eliot Daniel Deronda (1876)

The key to success for Sony, and to everything in Business, Science, and Technology for that matter, is never to follow the others. We bet the company on that basic technology (the Trinitron TV), and in 23 years nobody has been able to match it.

Masaru Ibuka

Failure is inevitable. Success is elusive.

Steven Spielberg

Any time you see someone more successful than you are, they are doing something you aren't.

Malcolm X The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965)

Success teaches us nothing; only failure teaches.

Hyman G. Rickover

There are two thoughts that will ensure success in all you do; (1) Don't tell everything you know, and (2) until Ace Ventura, no actor had considered talking through his ass.

Jim Carrey Major in Success (2003)

A recurrent theme of this book is that luck plays a large role in every story of success; it is almost always easy to identify a small change in the story that would have turned a remarkable achievement into a mediocre outcome.

Daniel Kahneman Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)

To achieve a goal, you have to believe in it, sometimes irrationally. This increases the chances of success.

Gianroberto Casaleggio

My success will not depend on what A or B thinks of me. My success will be what I make of my work.

Homi J. Bhabha

There is a major disaster when a person allows some success to become a stopping place rather than a way station on to a larger goal. It often happens that an early success is a greater moral hazard than an early failure.

Halford E. Luccock Lifetime Speaker's Encyclopedia (1962)

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