If life were measured by accomplishments, most of us would die in infancy.
A. P. Gouthey
Familiarize yourself with the chains of bondage and you prepare your own limbs to wear them. Accustomed to trample on the rights of others, you have lost the genius of your own independence and become the fit subjects of the first cunning tyrant who rises among you.
Abraham Lincoln
A few observations and much reasoning lead to error; many observations and a little reasoning to truth.
Alexis Carrel
The only worthwhile achievements of man are those which are socially useful.
Alfred Adler
Periods of tranquility are seldom prolific of creative achievement. Mankind has to be stirred up.
Alfred North Whitehead
Encouraged people achieve the best; dominated people achieve second best; neglected people achieve the least.
Anonymous
Any change, even a change for the better, is always accompanied by drawbacks and discomforts.
Arnold Bennett
She looked at the crowd and she felt, simultaneously, astonishment that they should stare at her, when this event was so personally her own that no communication about it was possible, and a sense of fitness that they should be here, that they should want to see it, because the sight of an achievement was the greatest gift a human being could offer to others.
Ayn Rand
Making your mark on the world is hard. If it were easy, everybody would do it. But it’s not. It takes patience, it takes commitment, and it comes with plenty of failure along the way. 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.
Barack Obama
Energy and persistence conquer all things.
Benjamin Franklin
This became a credo of mine . . . attempt the impossible in order to improve your work.
Bette Davis
Your most valuable asset can be your willingness to persist longer than anyone else.
Brian Tracy
Nothing splendid has ever been achieved except by those who dared believe that something inside them was superior to circumstances.
Bruce Barton
The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still favorable. Favorable conditions never come.
C.S. Lewis
It is not the strongest of the species that survive nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.
Charles Darwin
Difficulty attracts the man of character because it is in embracing it that he realizes himself.
Charles de Gaulle
There are no secrets to success. It is the result of preparation, hard work, and learning from failure.
Colin Powell
Do not be desirous of having things done quickly. Do not look at small advantages. Desire to have things done quickly prevents their being done thoroughly. Looking at small advantages prevents great affairs from being accomplished.
Confucius
Achievement seems to be connected with action. Successful men and women keep moving. They make mistakes, but they don’t quit.
Conrad Hilton
Never measure the height of a mountain, until you have reached the top. Then you will see how low it was.
Dag Hammarskj’ld
Most of the important things in the world have been accomplished by people who have kept on trying when there seemed to be no help at all.
Dale Carnegie
We live in deeds, not years: In thoughts not breaths; In feelings, not in figures on a dial. We should count time by heart throbs. He most lives Who thinks most, feels the noblest, acts the best.
David Bailey
Don’t be afraid to take a big step when one is indicated. You can’t cross a chasm in two small steps.
David Lloyd George
When you make a mistake or get ridiculed or rejected, look at mistakes learning experiences, and ridicule as ignorance. . . . Look at rejection as part of one performance, not as a turndown of the performer.
Dennis Waitey
Don’t let the fear of the time it will take to accomplish something stand in the way of your doing it. The time will pass anyway; we might just as well put that passing time to the best possible use.
Earl Nightingale
The will to win, the desire to succeed, the urge to reach your full potential, these are the keys that will unlock the door to personal excellence.
Eddie Robinson
The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.
Ernest Hemingway
Originality and the feeling of one’s own dignity are achieved only through work and struggle.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don’t believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and if they can’t find them, make them.
George Bernard Shaw
The difference between perseverance and obstinacy is: that one often comes from a strong will, and the other from a strong won’t.
Henry Ward Beecher
There will be little rubs and disappointments everywhere, and we are all apt to expect too much; but then, if one scheme of happiness fails, human nature turns to another; if the first calculation is wrong, we make a second better: we find comfort somewhere.
Jane Austen
Man is not the sum of what he has but the totality of what he does not yet have, of what he might have.
Jean-Paul Sartre
He, who moves not forward, goes backward.
Johann Wolfgang van Goethe
We should not let our fears hold us back from pursuing our hopes.
John F. Kennedy
Patience and perseverance have a magical effect before which difficulties disappear and obstacles vanish.
John Quincy Adams
Courage is being scared to death and saddling up anyway.
John Wayne
To understand the heart and mind of a person, look not at what he has already achieved, but at what he aspires to.
Kahlil Gibran
Begin at the beginning, the king said gravely, and go till you come to the end; then stop.
Lewis Carroll
All pain is either severe or slight, if slight, it is easily endured; if severe, it will without doubt be brief.
Marcus T. Cicero
The miracle, or the power, that elevates the few is to be found in their industry, application, and perseverance under the prompting of a brave, determined spirit.
Mark Twain
The quality of strength lined with tenderness is an unbeatable combination, as are intelligence and necessity when unblunted by formal education.
Maya Angelou
Every adversity, every failure, and every heartache carries with it the Seed of an equivalent or a greater Benefit.
Napoleon Hill
Persistence is to the character of man as carbon is to steel.
Napoleon Hill
Become a possibilitarian. No matter how dark thing seem to be or actually are, raise your sights and see the possibilities, always see them for they are always there.
Norman Vincent Peale
Look at a day when you are supremely satisfied at the end. It’s not a day when you lounge around doing nothing; it’s when you’ve had everything to do, and you’ve done it.
Margaret Thatcher
Life affords no higher pleasure than that of surmounting difficulties, passing from one step of success to another, forming new wishes and seeing them gratified.
Samuel Johnson
In Switzerland they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock!
Orson Welles
My most brilliant achievement was my ability to be able to persuade my wife to marry me.
Winston Churchill
To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I determined never to stop until I had come to the end and achieved my purpose.
David Livingstone
For a man to achieve all that is demanded of him he must regard himself as greater than he is.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
Every great achievement is the victory of a flaming heart.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together.
Vincent Van Gogh
It’s no use saying: We are doing our best. You have got to succeed in doing what is necessary.
Winston Churchill
An achievement is a bondage. It obliges one to a higher achievement.
Albert Camus
Dissatisfaction with possession and achievement is one of the requisites to further achievement.
John Hope
The discipline you learn and character you build from setting and achieving a goal can be more valuable than the achievement of the goal itself.
Bo Bennett
A man may fulfill the object of his existence by asking a question he cannot answer, and attempting a task he cannot achieve.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Simplicity is the final achievement. After one has played a vast quantity of notes and more notes, it is simplicity that emerges as the crowning reward of art.
Frederic Chopin