Success and Failure

When one is trying to do something beyond one's known powers it is useless to seek the approval of friends. Friends are at their best in moments of defeat.

Henry Miller, in Success and Failure

Modesty is the opium of the mediocre.

Marty Milner, in Success and Failure

Be nice to people on your way up because you'll need them on your way down.

Wilson Mizner, in Success and Failure and Vice and Virtue

Don't let fear stop you.

William F. Light, (to someone threatening to knock him out), in Success and Failure

It's not whether you get knocked down, it's whether you get up.

Vincent T. Lombardi, in Success and Failure

The average person thinks he isn't.

Larry Lorenzoni, in Success and Failure

Do, or do not. There is no try.

George Lucas, The Empire Strikes Back (Yoda), in Success and Failure

Nothing very good or very bad lasts very long.

D. W. Luthanen, in Success and Failure

There is no security on this earth; there is only opportunity.

Douglas MacArthur, in Success and Failure

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

We have had an Imperial lesson; it may make us an Empire yet!

Rudyard Kipling, in Success and Failure

There cannot be a crisis next week. My schedule is already full.

Henry Kissinger, in Success and Failure and Work and Recreation

If you optimize everything, you will always be unhappy.

Don Knuth, in Success and Failure

Pick battles big enough to matter, but small enough to win.

Jonathan Kozol, in Success and Failure

Nothing succeeds like the appearance of success.

Christopher Lasch, in Success and Failure

After spending many years in Wall Street and after making and losing millions of dollars I want to tell you this: It never was my thinking that made the big money for me. It always was my sitting.

Edwin Lefèvre, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, in Success and Failure

The world is all gates, all opportunities, strings of tension waiting to be struck.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, in Success and Failure

Most of life is choices, and the rest is pure dumb luck.

Marian Erickson, in Success and Failure

With every passing hour, our solar system comes forty-three thousand miles closer to globular cluster M13 in the constellation Hercules, and still there are some misfits who continue to insist that there is no such thing as progress.

Ransom K. Ferm, in 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