What is success? Oftentimes, I ask myself that question. The funny thing is that success to one person might have an entirely different description than the other. When most people think about success, they think about money, power and prestige. But not everyone thinks that way.
To the person living under the guise of an oppressive regime, success to them might mean escape. Success might mean leaving their home and heading for the shores of hope in some foreign land far, far away. To others, success might mean being healthy, especially if they’ve just been diagnosed with a major disease or illness, just had a heart attack, stroke or another malady.
Others might discover success in the pure joys of finding the perfect spouse, falling in love and raising a beautiful family. The point? Success can mean many things to many people. Oftentimes, success coincides with happiness. People state that once they have or attain something, then they’ll be happy and successful. It’s oftentimes contingent on reaching some financial metric or enjoying some life event.
The question is, what does success mean to you? Through the annals of time, many people have had many different takes on success. Some of the best quotes about success describe it as wildly different. But this much is true — success is usually something that’s attained after a great amount of arduous effort, failure and perseverance.
It doesn’t happen overnight. But then again, nothing worthwhile ever really does.
Success Quotes
While there have been plenty of success quotes throughout the ages, it’s only a select group of them that are the most inspirational and motivational. The truth? It’s easy to lose sight of our goals when we’re so immersed in our fears and the potential for failure.
However, what we don’t realize is that even the most famous and successful people in the world have failed. And it’s through their failures and the resultant experiences that we’ve gleaned some of life’s most important lessons. Because, failure isn’t something unique. What’s unique is the relentless determination and the unwavering pursuit of our goals no matter what the circumstances might be.
That’s what true success is all about. And it’s through those very same failure lessons that we gain the most poignant experiences in our lives, blazing a trail for truly understanding what we want and just what it’s going to take to achieve it.
Never listen to the naysayers or the people that attempt to chop you down. Instead, keep your head up and keep pushing towards your goals, no matter how lofty they might be.
#1 – Colin Powell
“There are no secrets to success. It is the result of preparation, hard work, and learning from failure.”
#2 – Japanese Proverb
“Fall seven times and stand up eight.”
#3 – Nikos Kazantzakis
“In order to succeed, we must first believe that we can.”
#4 – Thomas Edison
“Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.”
#5 – Vidal Sassoon
“The only place where success comes before work is in the dictionary.”
#6 – Jim Rohn
“If you really want to do something, you’ll find a way. If you don’t, you’ll find an excuse.”
#7 – Henry Ward Beecher
“One’s best success comes after their greatest disappointments.”
#8 – Frank Sinatra
“The best revenge is massive success.”
#9 – Vince Lombardi
“The price of success is hard work, dedication to the job at hand, and the determination that whether we win or lose, we have applied the best of ourselves to the task at hand.”
#10 – Nelson Mandela
“Do not judge me by my successes, judge me by how many times I fell down and got back up again.”
#11 – Herbert Bayard Swope
“I cannot give you the formula for success, but I can give you the formula for failure – which is: Try to please everybody.”
#12 – Winston Churchill
“Success is the ability to go from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.”
#13 – Zig Ziglar
“Success means doing the best we can with what we have. Success is the doing, not the getting; in the trying, not the triumph. Success is a personal standard, reaching for the highest that is in us, becoming all that we can be.”
#14 – Mark Twain
“To succeed in life, you need two things: ignorance and confidence.”
#15 – Winston Churchill
“If you’re going through hell, keep going.”
#16 – Oscar Wilde
“What seems to us as bitter trials are often blessings in disguise.”
#17 – John Wooden
“Things work out best for those who make the best of how things work out.”
#18 – Lisa M. Amos
“Entrepreneurs average 3.8 failures before final success. What sets the successful ones apart is their amazing persistence.”
#19 – Walt Disney
“All our dreams can come true if we have the courage to pursue them.”
#20 – Charles Darwin
“It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.”
#21 – Henry Ford
“The whole secret of a successful life is to find out what is one’s destiny to do, and then do it.”
#22 – Steve Jobs
“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something–your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.”
#23 – Mike Gafka
“To be successful you must accept all challenges that come your way. You can’t just accept the ones you like.”
#24 – Stephen Covey
“Be patient with yourself. Self-growth is tender; it’s holy ground. There’s no greater investment.”
#25 – Abraham Lincoln
“Always bear in mind that your own resolution to success is more important than any other one thing.”
#26 – Anonymous
“If you are willing to do more than you are paid to do, eventually you will be paid to do more than you do.”
#27 – John D. Rockefeller
“Don’t be afraid to give up the good to go for the great.”
#28 – Steve Jobs
“The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.”
#29 – Henry Ford
“Whether You Think You Can Or Think You Can’t, You’re Right.”
#30 – C.S. Lewis
“You Are Never To Old To Set Another Goal Or To Dream A New Dream.”
#31 – Dale Carnegie
“Develop success from failures. Discouragement and failure are two of the surest stepping stones to success.”
#32 – Jim Rohn
“If you are not willing to risk the usual, you will have to settle for the ordinary.”
#33 – George Bernard Shaw
“Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.”
#34 – Mark Twain
“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”
#35 – Milton Berle
“If opportunity doesn’t knock, build a door.”
#36 – George Eliot
“It is never too late to be what you might have been.”
#37 – Randy Pausch
“We cannot change the cards we are dealt, just how we play the hand.”