Success and Failure

We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked throughout the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken away from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms -- to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.

Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning, in Success and Failure

Failure to prepare is preparing to fail.

Benjamin Franklin, in Success and Failure and Work and Recreation

By working faithfully eight hours a day, you may eventually get to be boss and work twelve.

Robert Frost, in Success and Failure and Work and Recreation

If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.

John Kenneth Galbraith, in Success and Failure

Art is either plagiarism or revolution.

Paul Gauguin, in Success and Failure

Be braver -- you can't cross a chasm in two small jumps.

David Lloyd George, in Success and Failure

If you can count your money, you don't have a billion dollars.

J. Paul Getty, in Success and Failure and Wealth and Poverty

Things don't go wrong, they simply happen.

Jacob Ghitis, in Success and Failure

The wind and waves are always on the side of the ablest navigators.

Edward Gibbon, in Success and Failure

Only the mediocre are always at their best.

Jean Giraudoux, in Success and Failure

Anything not worth doing is worth not doing well. Think about it.

Elias Schwartz, in Success and Failure

Happiness is nothing more than good health and a bad memory.

Albert Schweitzer, in Success and Failure

Talkers are no good doers.

William Shakespeare, Henry VI, in Success and Failure

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

George Bernard Shaw, in Success and Failure

When I was young, I observed that nine out of ten things I did were failures. So I did ten times more work.

George Bernard Shaw, in Success and Failure and Work and Recreation

You see things and you say, "Why?" But I see things that never were; and I say, "Why not?"

George Bernard Shaw, Back to Methuselah, Part I, Act I (1921), in Success and Failure

You can run with the big dogs or sit on the porch and bark.

Wallace Arnold, in Success and Failure

Happiness: An agreeable sensation arising from contemplating the misery of another.

Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, in Love and Hate and Success and Failure

Hatred: A sentiment appropriate to the occasion of another's superiority.

Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, in Love and Hate and Success and Failure

Man is able to do what he is unable to imagine. His head trails a wake through the galaxy of the absurd.

René Char, in Success and Failure