Success Quotes

If you think you're beaten, you are;
If you think you dare not, you don't;
If you'd like to win, but think, you can't
It's almost a cinch you won't.
If you think you will lose, you're lost;
For out in the world we find,
Success begins with a fellow's will,
It's all in the state of mind.

If you think you're outclassed, you are;
You've got to think high to rise.
You've got to hustle before
You can ever win a prize.
Life's battles don't always go
To the stronger or faster man,
But sooner or later the man who wins
Is the one who thinks he can.
– Walter D. Wintle
People fail forward to success.
– Mary Kay Ash
You must keep sending work out; you must never let a manuscript do nothing but eat its head off in a drawer. You send that work out again and again, while you're working on another one. If you have talent, you will receive some measure of success - but only if you persist.
– Isaac Asimov
A really great man is known by three signs... generosity in the design, humanity in the execution, moderation in success.
– Otto von Bismarck
The truth is that all of us attain the greatest success and happiness possible in this life whenever we use our native capacities to their greatest extent.
– Dr. Smiley Blanton
Aim for success, not perfection. Never give up your right to be wrong, because then you will lose the ability to learn new things and move forward with your life.
– Dr. David M. Burns
The man of virtue makes the difficulty to be overcome his first business, and success only a subsequent consideration.
– Confucius
If we say a little it is easy to add, but having said too much it is hard to withdraw and never can it be done so quickly as to hinder the harm of our success.
– Saint Francis de Sales
Success is counted sweetest by those who ne'er succeed.
– Emily Dickinson
The ideals which have lighted my way, and time after time have given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been Kindness, Beauty, and Truth. The trite subjects of human efforts, possessions, outward success, luxury have always seemed to me contemptible.
– Albert Einstein
Try not to become a man of success but rather to become a man of value.
– Albert Einstein
Success is relative. It is what we can make of the mess we have made of things.
– T. S. Eliot
The measure of a master is his success in bringing all men around to his opinion twenty years later.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Of course, our failures are a consequence of many factors, but possibly one of the most important is the fact that society operates on the theory that specialization is the key to success, not realizing that specialization precludes comprehensive thinking.
– Richard Buckminster Fuller
My mother drew a distinction between achievement and success. She said that 'achievement is the knowledge that you have studied and worked hard and done the best that is in you. Success is being praised by others, and that's nice, too, but not as important or satisfying. Always aim for achievement and forget about success.'
– Helen Hayes
The secret of all success is to know how to deny yourself. Prove that you can control yourself, and you are an educated man; and without this all other education is good for nothing.
– R. D. Hitchcock
Nothing feebler than a man does the earth raise up, of all the things which breathe and move on the earth, for he believes that he will never suffer evil in the future, as long as the gods give him success and he flourishes in his strength; but when the blessed gods bring sorrows too to pass, even these he bears, against his will, with steadfast spirit, for the thoughts of earthly men are like the day which the father of gods and men brings upon them.
– Homer
Nothing changes your opinion of a friend so surely as success - yours or his.
– Franklin P. Jones
Don't be discouraged by a failure. It can be a positive experience. Failure is, in a sense, the highway to success, inasmuch as every discovery of what is false leads us to seek earnestly after what is true, and every fresh experience points out some form of error which we shall afterwards carefully avoid.
– John Keats
Success is not the result of spontaneous combustion. You must set yourself on fire.
– Reggie Leach
We lift ourselves by our thought, we climb upon our vision of ourselves. If you want to enlarge your life, you must first enlarge your thought of it and of yourself. Hold the ideal of yourself as you long to be, always, everywhere - your ideal of what you long to attain - the ideal of health, efficiency, success.
– Orison Swett Marden
Real success is finding your lifework in the work that you love.
– David C. McCullough
Nothing fails like success.
– Gerald Nachman
A thinker sees his own actions as experiments and questions--as attempts to find out something. Success and failure are for him answers above all.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
To follow, without halt, one aim: There's the secret of success.
– Anna Pavlova
If your success is not on your own terms, if it looks good to the world but does not feel good in your heart, it is not success at all.
– Anna Quindlen
Failure is not the only punishment for laziness; there is also the success of others.
– Jules Renard
Success in business requires training and discipline and hard work. But if you're not frightened by these things, the opportunities are just as great today as they ever were.
– David Rockefeller
You always pass failure on the way to success.
– Mickey Rooney
Of course there is no formula for success except perhaps an unconditional acceptance of life and what it brings.
– Arthur Rubinstein
The only place where success comes before work is a dictionary.
– Vidal Sassoon
To freely bloom - that is my definition of success.
– Gerry Spence
The real power behind whatever success I have now was something I found within myself - something that's in all of us, I think, a little piece of God just waiting to be discovered.
– Tina Turner
Part of the secret of success in life is to eat what you like and let the food fight it out inside.
– Mark Twain
All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence; then success is sure.
– Mark Twain
Anybody can sympathise with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature to sympathise with a friend's success.
– Oscar Wilde
The key to realizing a dream is to focus not on success but significance - and then even the small steps and little victories along your path will take on greater meaning.
– Oprah Winfrey
Your success and happiness lies in you. Resolve to keep happy, and your joy and you shall form an invincible host against difficulties.
– Helen Keller
Young man, the secret of my success is that an early age I discovered that I was not God.
– Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
You'll never convince me there is a hopeless situation or there is any finality in any success or any failure.
– Carlos Ghosn
You will be a failure, until you impress the subconscious with the conviction you are a success. This is done by making an affirmation which 'clicks.'
– Florence Scovel Shinn
You should put time into learning your craft. It seems like people want success so quickly, way before they're ready.
– Lucinda Williams
You have reached the pinnacle of success as soon as you become uninterested in money, compliments, or publicity.
– Thomas Wolfe
You grow up a bit damaged or broken then you have some success but you don't know how to feel good about the work you're doing or the life you're leading.
– Johnny Depp
You cannot learn anything from success, you only learn from failure.
– Jim Dale
You cannot climb the ladder of success dressed in the costume of failure.
– Zig Ziglar
You can't be afraid of failure and you can't be afraid of success, because either one gets in the way of your work.
– Dave Van Ronk
You are a product of your environment. So choose the environment that will best develop you toward your objective. Analyze your life in terms of its environment. Are the things around you helping you toward success - or are they holding you back?
– W. Clement Stone
Yes I have made a lot of money and I have a lot of respect, my films have done well, and I know there are loads of loads of people who look up to me and really love me. I really just thought this is like a strange dream. I have never thought this is a success - I don't have a standard.
– Shahrukh Khan
World War II had been such a tremendous success story for this country that the political and military leadership began to assume that they would prevail simply because of who they were. We were like the British at the turn of the 19th century.
– Neil Sheehan
Without imagination we can go nowhere. And imagination is not restricted to the arts. Every scientist I have met who has been a success has had to imagine.
– Rita Dove
Without failure there is no sweetness in success. There's no understanding of it.
– Glenn Beck
Without any doubt at all, teacher quality is the fundamental differentiator. Not just, incidentally, of education, but I would argue, probably the biggest single differentiator of success for the nations of the 21st Century.
– David Puttnam
Within the U.S., the Obama presidency will be mainly measured by the success or failure of his economic policies. And here, I fear, the monstrous stimulus package with which this administration stumbled out of the gate will prove to be Obama's Waterloo.
– Camille Paglia
With everything that is complex, we learn. If you don't learn, then it's an utter and abject failure. If you do learn, and you're able to apply that to the next situation, then you take away a measure of success.
– Benjamin Carson
Whether in success or in failure, I'm proud of every single movie I've ever directed.
– Steven Spielberg
When you grow up in the music industry, trying to be Britney Spears because that's what sells records and then you realize, 'All I have to do is be myself? I should have thought of that a long time ago,' it feels good to have success come from what's actually inside of you.
– Jessica Simpson
When I launched the development of the GNU system, I explicitly said the purpose of developing this system is so we can use our computers and have freedom, thus if you use some other free system instead but you have freedom, then it's a success. It's not popularity for our code but it's success for our goal.
– Richard Stallman
When humor can be made to alternate with melancholy, one has a success, but when the same things are funny and melancholic at the same time, it's just wonderful.
– Francois Truffaut
When a small child, I thought that success spelled happiness. I was wrong, happiness is like a butterfly which appears and delights us for one brief moment, but soon flits away.
– Anna Pavlova
Well, the idea is that failure is an inevitable partner on the road to success and, if you're not willing to confront failure, you can never find out how good you are.
– Peter Guber
Well, I think that there's a very thin dividing line between success and failure. And I think if you start a business without financial backing, you're likely to go the wrong side of that dividing line.
– Richard Branson
Well, first of all, we did lots of studies where we show practical intelligence doesn't correlate with G. We have probably two dozen studies that practical intelligence better predicts job success than IQ.
– Robert Sternberg
Well the wedding in the words of the Archbishop of Canterbury was a fairy tale and there was a huge public impress, investment of goodwill, affection and indeed money in this Institution. It was a huge success at the time.
– Anthony Holden
We're not uncomfortable with it, and we've already been through enough of the music business where I'm not really worried that commercial success is going to in some way - we're already past saving, you know what I mean? It's too late for us.
– Jerry Garcia
We're born with success. It is only others who point out our failures, and what they attribute to us as failure.
– Whoopi Goldberg
We will have bigger bureaucracies, bigger labor unions, and bigger state-run corporations. It will be harder to be an entrepreneur because of punitive taxes and regulations. The rewards of success will be expropriated for the sake of attaining greater income equality.
– Arthur C. Brooks
We now live in a world where the only thing to have is success, but failure is marvelous. It's fertiliser, it's like living fertiliser, because you're forced on yourself.
– Rupert Everett
We need to accept that we won't always make the right decisions, that we'll screw up royally sometimes - understanding that failure is not the opposite of success, it's part of success.
– Arianna Huffington
We learned about honesty and integrity - that the truth matters... that you don't take shortcuts or play by your own set of rules... and success doesn't count unless you earn it fair and square.
– Michelle Obama
We learned about gratitude and humility - that so many people had a hand in our success, from the teachers who inspired us to the janitors who kept our school clean... and we were taught to value everyone's contribution and treat everyone with respect.
– Michelle Obama
We learn wisdom from failure much more than from success. We often discover what will do, by finding out what will not do and probably he who never made a mistake never made a discovery.
– Samuel Smiles
We in science are spoiled by the success of mathematics. Mathematics is the study of problems so simple that they have good solutions.
– Whitfield Diffie
We go there with confidence, but we know there is a very fine line between success and failure in this game.
– Alan Shearer
We do not realise that we are children of eternity. If we did, then success would be no success, and failure would be no failure to us.
– Joseph Barber Lightfoot
We create success or failure on the course primarily by our thoughts.
– Gary Player
We are equally glad and surprised at Winston's return to office. It shows that he was built for success that he should have declined to withdraw and sulk over a superficial failure.
– Shane Leslie
We are a people that have always celebrated other people's success so long as we always had the opportunity to meet that success ourselves. That is the American nature. That is the American character. That is one of the things that makes us different from the rest of the world. And I'm afraid we could lose that or are on the verge of losing that.
– Marco Rubio
We are a consumer company and our success is directly linked to our users trusting us. Therefore we have the same incentive as the user: they want to see relevant advertising so their experience of Google is positive and we want to deliver it.
– Susan Wojcicki
True success is overcoming the fear of being unsuccessful.
– Paul Sweeney
To me success means effectiveness in the world, that I am able to carry my ideas and values into the world - that I am able to change it in positive ways.
– Maxine Hong Kingston
To get down to the quick of it, respect motivates me - not success.
– Hugh Jackman
Throughout my 20s I spent a lot of time just playing and not really working, but fortunately for me I continued to get just enough work, and have a reason to wake up in the morning. I really empathize with some of my peers who had success in the early years then it dries up, and so there's no reason to get up in the morning.
– Jason Bateman
Though I was excited about the Sojourner Truth play, it was not reassuring to think that my entire future might depend on the success of that one show.
– Ethel Waters
Those who have always had faith in its final success can do no less than rejoice as if it was our own triumph after five years of daily struggle to impose Cuban music on the European continent.
– Alejo Carpentier
Think twice before you speak, because your words and influence will plant the seed of either success or failure in the mind of another.
– Napoleon Hill
Think little goals and expect little achievements. Think big goals and win big success.
– David Joseph Schwartz
They're not willing to admit that I've also shed blood and tears and often paid dearly for my success. This makes me feel extremely sad.
– Zhang Ziyi
They talk about the failure of socialism but where is the success of capitalism in Africa, Asia and Latin America?
– Fidel Castro
These rules may seem simple enough, but it will require great morale and physical courage to adhere to them. But if carried out in the strict sense of the word it will surely lead to a greater success than could otherwise be attained.
– Major Taylor
There's no such thing as failure - just waiting for success.
– John Osborne
There's no right or wrong, success or failure.
– Miley Cyrus
There's enormous progressive activism and, more often than not, success at the grassroots level - everything from living wage campaigns to efforts to finance our elections are having terrific success.
– Jim Hightower
There's a lot of blood, sweat, and guts between dreams and success.
– Paul Bryant
There is probably a perverse pride in my administration... that we were going to do the right thing, even if short-term it was unpopular. And I think anybody who's occupied this office has to remember that success is determined by an intersection in policy and politics and that you can't be neglecting of marketing and P.R. and public opinion.
– Barack Obama
There is only one success - to be able to spend your life in your own way.
– Christopher Morley
There is no middle ground in Hollywood you're a failure or you're a success. That mentality is wild.
– Javier Bardem
There is no force like success, and that is why the individual makes all effort to surround himself throughout life with the evidence of it as of the individual, so should it be of the nation.
– Marcus Garvey
There are no secrets to success. It is the result of preparation, hard work, and learning from failure.
– Colin Powell
The winner's edge is not in a gifted birth, a high IQ, or in talent. The winner's edge is all in the attitude, not aptitude. Attitude is the criterion for success.
– Denis Waitley