101 Greatest Quotes About Success and How to Achieve It

What makes something smart? It can mean many things for many people.

But the kind of smart I’m talking about is the smart that inspires, the smart that speaks to us and makes sense, the smart that allows us to move past ourselves and do something about the things that keep us stuck.

Let these smart thoughts inspire you and motivate you to power through whatever is blocking your path to success.

1. Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm. –-Winston Churchill

2. There are two things to aim at in life: first, to get what you want; and, after that, to enjoy it. Only the wisest of mankind achieve the second. –-Logan Pearsall Smith

3. You have brains in your head
You have feet in your shoes
You can steer yourself any direction you choose
You’re on your own.
And you know what you know.
And YOU are the guy who’ll decide where to go. –-Dr. Seuss

4. The obstacle is the path. –-Zen saying

5. Whenever you see a successful person, you only see the public glories, never the private sacrifices to reach them. –-Vaibhav Shah

6. Success? I don’t know what that word means. I’m happy. But success, that goes back to what in somebody’s eyes success means. For me, success is inner peace. That’s a good day for me. –-Denzel Washington

7. Opportunities don’t happen. You create them. –-Chris Grosser

8. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered; an adventure is an inconvenience rightly considered. –-G.K. Chesterton

9. It is the part of a wise man to keep himself today for tomorrow, and not to venture all his eggs in one basket. -Miguel de Cervantes

10. To please everybody is impossible; were I to undertake it, I should probably please nobody. –-George Washington

11. Try not to become a person of success, but rather try to become a person of value. –-Albert Einstein

12. It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change. –Charles Darwin

13. Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people. –-Eleanor Roosevelt

14. The best revenge is massive success. –-Frank Sinatra

15. A successful man is one who can lay a firm foundation with the bricks others have thrown at him. —David Brinkley

16. No one can make you feel inferior without your consent. –-Eleanor Roosevelt

17. If you’re going through hell, keep going. –-Winston Churchill

18. What seems to us as bitter trials are often blessings in disguise. –-Oscar Wilde

19. The distance between insanity and genius is measured only by success. –-Bruce Feirstein

20. Don’t be afraid to give up the good to go for the great. –-John D. Rockefeller

21. Happiness is a butterfly, which when pursued, is always beyond your grasp, but which, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you. –-Nathaniel Hawthorne

22. If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough. –-Albert Einstein

23. 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. –-Ray Goforth

24. Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can. –-Arthur Ashe

25. It is necessary for us to learn from others’ mistakes. You will not live long enough to make them all yourself. –Hyman George Rickover

26. Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or better. –-John Updike

27. Eighty percent of success is just showing up. –-Woody Allen

28. Be wiser than other people, if you can; but do not tell them so. –-Philip Dormer Stanhope

29. In the field of observation, chance favors the prepared mind. –-Louis Pasteur

30. The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams. –-Eleanor Roosevelt

31. One of the advantages of being disorderly is that one is constantly making exciting discoveries. –-A.A. Milne

32. The bravest are surely those who have the clearest vision of what is before them, glory and danger alike, and yet notwithstanding go out to meet it. –-Thucydides

33. Fortune favors the brave. –-Terence

34. One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say. –Will Durant

35. It takes less time to do a thing right than it does to explain why you did it wrong. –Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

36. The speed of a runaway horse counts for nothing. –-Jean Cocteau

37. No one ever gets far unless he accomplishes the impossible at least once a day. –-L. Ron Hubbard

38. Things turn out best for the people who make the best of the way things turn out. –-John R. Wooden

39. Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration. –-Thomas Alva Edison

40. Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. –-Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

41. It is true greatness to have in one the frailty of a man and the security of a god. –-Seneca

42. Success is how high you bounce when you hit bottom. –-George S. Patton

43. A bank is a place where they lend you an umbrella in fair weather and ask for it back when it begins to rain. –-Robert Frost

44. The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity. –-Ellen Parr

45. With self-discipline, most anything is possible. –-Theodore Roosevelt

46. It is not enough to be busy…. The question is: What are we busy about? –Henry David Thoreau

47. The indispensable first step to getting the things you want out of life is this: Decide what you want. –Ben Stein

48. All good things which exist are the fruits of originality. –John Stuart Mill

49. The person who makes a success of living is the one who sees his goal steadily and aims for it unswervingly. –Cecil B. DeMille

50. The best way to make your dreams come true is to wake up. —Paul Valry

51. 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. –-Larry McMurtry

52. Never let your head hang down. Never give up and sit down and grieve. Find another way. And don’t pray when it rains if you don’t pray when the sun shines. –Satchel Paige

53. You’ll always miss 100 percent of the shots you don’t take. –-Wayne Gretzky

54. There is hardly anything in the world that some man can’t make a little worse and sell a little cheaper, and the people who consider price only are this man’s lawful prey. –John Ruskin

55. The dreadful burden of having nothing to do. –-Nicolas Boileau

56. Some people believe that holding on and hanging in there are signs of great strength. However, there are times when it takes much more strength to know when to let go–and then do it. –-Ann Landers

57. It does not matter how slowly you go so long as you do not stop. –-Confucius

58. I learned much from my teachers, more from my books, and most from my mistakes. –Anonymous

59. A wise man will make more opportunities than he finds. –Sir Francis Bacon

60. If the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. –-Abraham Maslow

61. Measure twice, cut once. –-Craftsman’s aphorism

62. Take calculated risks. That is quite different from being rash. –-George S. Patton

63. Formula for success: Underpromise and overdeliver. –-Thomas Peters

64. What is harder than rock, or softer than water? Yet soft water hollows out hard rock. Persevere. –Ovid

65. Prosperity is a great teacher; adversity a greater. –William Hazlitt

66. If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants. –-Sir Isaac Newton

67. The spirit, the will to win, and the will to excel are the things that endure. These qualities are so much more important than the events that occur. –-Vince Lombardi

68. In reading the lives of great men, I found that the first victory they won was over themselves … self-discipline with all of them came first. –-Harry S. Truman

69. The best way to escape from a problem is to solve it. –-Anonymous

70. When in doubt, win the trick. –-Edmond Hoyle

71. I not only use all the brains that I have, but all that I can borrow. –-Woodrow Wilson

72. They say that time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself. –-Andy Warhol

73. It is a paradoxical but profoundly true and important principle of life that the most likely way to reach a goal is to be aiming not at that goal itself but at some more ambitious goal beyond it. –Arnold Joseph Toynbee

74. A creative man is motivated by the desire to achieve, not by the desire to beat others. –Ayn Rand

75. Know from whence you came. If you know whence you came, there are absolutely no limitations to where you can go. –James Baldwin

76. There is no disinfectant like success. –Daniel J. Boorstin

77. Nothing succeeds like success. –Alexander Dumas

78. If it be now, ’tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all. –William Shakespeare

79. The secret of successful managing is to keep the five guys who hate you away from the four guys who haven’t made up their minds. –Charles “Casey” Stengel

80. A wise man sees as much as he ought, not as much as he can. –-Michel de Montaigne

81. Being a hero is about the shortest-lived profession on earth. –-Will Rogers

82. One day Alice came to a fork in the road and saw a Cheshire cat in a tree. “Which road do I take?” she asked. “Where do you want to go?” was his response. “I don’t know,” Alice answered. “Then,” said the cat, “it doesn’t matter.” –Lewis Carroll

84. Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon. –-E.M. Forster

85. If I have ever made any valuable discoveries, it has been owing more to patient attention than to any other talent. –Sir Isaac Newton

86. Without leaps of imagination, or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning. –Gloria Steinem

87. Nothing is a waste of time if you use the experience wisely. –Auguste Rodin

88. What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us. –-Ralph Waldo Emerson

89. 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

90. One thing life taught me: If you are interested, you never have to look for new interests. They come to you. When you are genuinely interested in one thing, it will always lead to something else. –Eleanor Roosevelt

91. To do good things in the world, first you must know who you are and what gives meaning to your life. —Robert Browning

92. You just don’t luck into things as much as you’d like to think you do. You build step by step, whether it’s friendships or opportunities. –Barbara Bush

93. During my 87 years, I have witnessed a whole succession of technological revolutions. But none of them has done away with the need for character in the individual or the ability to think. —Bernard Mannes Baruch

94. When clouds form in the skies, we know that rain will follow but we must not wait for it. Nothing will be achieved by attempting to interfere with the future before the time is ripe. Patience is needed. –-I Ching

95. Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you too can become great. –-Mark Twain

96. A good solution applied with vigor now is better than a perfect solution applied 10 minutes later. —George S. Patton 

97. Next to knowing when to seize an opportunity, the next important thing is to know when to forgo an advantage. –Benjamin Disraeli

98. The manner in which a man chooses to gamble indicates his character or his lack of it. –William Saroyan

99. If you wish in this world to advance
Your merits you’re bound to enhance;
You must stir it and stump it, and blow your own trumpet.
Or trust me, you haven’t a chance. –Sir William S. Gilbert

100. You can’t always get what you want. But if you try sometime you might find you get what you need. —Mick Jagger and Keith Richards

101. Clear your mind of can’t. –Solon