Success Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

No illusion is more crucial than the illusion that great success and huge money buy you immunity from the common ills of mankind, such as cars that won't start.

You must act as if everything depended on your individual efforts. The secret of success is constancy of purpose.

Benjamin Disraeli

Success is the sum of small efforts, repeated day-in and day-out.

Robert Collier (author)

A desire to be in charge of our own lives, a need for control, is born in each of us. It is essential to our mental health, and our success, that we take control.

Bob Bennett (politician)

A minute's success pays the failure of years.

Robert Browning

Success is more a function of consistent common sense than it is of genius.

Achieve success in any area of life by identifying the optimum strategies and repeating them until they become habits.

Charles J. Givens

I have learned that success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome while trying to succeed. Looked at from this standpoint, I almost reached the conclusion that often the Negro boy's birth and connection with an unpopular race is an advantage, so far as real life is concerned. With few exceptions, the Negro youth must work harder and must perform his tasks even better than a white youth in order to secure recognition. But out of the hard and unusual struggle through which he is compelled to pass, he gets a strength, a confidence, that one misses whose pathway is comparatively smooth by reason of birth and race.

Booker T. Washington

Nothing succeeds, they say, like success. And certainly nothing fails like failure.

Margaret Drabble

Success is the necessary misfortune of life, but it is only to the very unfortunate that is comes early.

Anthony Trollope

I worked half my life to be an overnight success, and still it took me by surprise.

Jessica Savitch

The story of Americans is the story of arrested metamorphoses. Those who achieve success come to a halt and accept themselves as they are. Those who fail become resigned and accept themselves as they are.

Harold Rosenberg

Good people are good because they've come to wisdom through failure. We get very little wisdom from success, you know. Success makes a fool of you, but failure can come only from great effort. One who doesn't try cannot fail and become wise.

William Saroyan

The success or failure of a life, as far as posterity goes, seems to lie in the more or less luck of seizing the right moment of escape

People seldom see the halting and painful steps by which the most insignificant success is achieved.

My own early experiences in war led me to suspect the value of discipline, even in that sphere where it is so often regarded as the first essential for success.

In America, success has always been easy to measure. It is the distance between one's origins and one's final achievement that matters.

It takes twenty years to make an overnight success.

If God has made the world a perfect mechanism, He has at least conceded so much to our imperfect intellect that in order to predict little parts of it, we need not solve innumerable differential equations, but can use dice with fair success.

A religion so cheerless, a philosophy so sorrowful, could never have succeeded with the masses of mankind if presented only as a system of metaphysics. Buddhism owed its success to its catholic spirit and its beautiful morality.

William Winwood Reade

Every failure is a step to success. Every detection of what is false directs us towards what is true: every trial exhausts some tempting form of error. Not only so; but scarcely any attempt is entirely a failure; scarcely any theory, the result of steady thought, is altogether false; no tempting form of Error is without some latent charm derived from Truth.

William Whewell

There is power in thinking. And you can use that power to enhance your success potential if you spend some time every day thinking of yourself as a success.

India of the ages is not dead nor has she spoken her last creative word; she lives and has still something to do for herself and the human peoples. And that which must seek now to awake is not an anglicised oriental people, docile pupil of the West and doomed to repeat the cycle of the occident's success and failure, but still the ancient immemorable Shakti recovering her deepest self, lifting her head higher towards the supreme source of light and strength and turning to discover the complete meaning and a vaster form of her Dharma.

Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end. A counted number of pulses only is given to us of a variegated, dramatic life. How may we see in them all that is to to be seen in them by the finest senses? How shall we pass most swiftly from point to point, and be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy. To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.

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