Bon mots: success and failure

"One essential to success is that your desire be an all-obsessing one, your thoughts and aims be co-ordinated, and your energy be concentrated and applied without letup."
--Claude M. Bristol

"If the day and the night are such that you greet them with with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, more elastic, more starry, more immortal--that is your success."
--Henry David Thoreau

"Many of life's failures are experienced by people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up."
--Thomas Edison

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

"Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor."
--Truman Capote

"The toughest thing about success is that you've got to keep on being a success."
--Irving Berlin

"Success is the point of self-deception. Failure is the point of self-knowledge."
--Graham Greene

"I am a success today because I had a friend who believed in me, and I didn't have the heart to let him down."
--Abraham Lincoln

"Failure is not the only punishment for laziness; there is also the success of other."
--Jules Renard

"If there is any great secret of success in life, it lies in the ability to put yourself in the other's place and to see things from his point of view--as well as your own."
--Henry Ford

"In most things success depends on knowing how long it takes to succeed."
--Charles Louis de Montesquieu

"Success is more permanent when you achieve it without destroying your principles."
--Walter Cronkite

"Success requires first expending ten units of effort to produce one unit of results. Your momentum will then produce ten units of results with each unit of effort."
--Givens, Charles J.

"Success isn't permanent and failure isn't fatal."
--Mike Ditka

"Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can't lose."
--Bill Gates

"I cannot give you the formula for success, but I can give you the formula for failure--which is: Try to please everybody."
--Herbert Bayard Swope

"Failure is not the only punishment for laziness; there is also the success of others."
--Jules Renard

"Failure is instructive. The person who really thinks learns quite as much from his failures as from his successes."
--John Dewey

"Success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome while trying to succeed."
--Booker T. Washington

"One does not get anywhere simply by going over the success again and again, whereas by talking over the difficulties people can hope to make some progress."
--P. A. M. Dirac

"In order to succeed, your desire for success should be greater than your fear of failure."
--Bill Cosby

"As long as an experiment yields data, it's a success."
--Adam Savage

"If at first you don't succeed, destroy all evidence that you tried."
--Steven Wright

"It is possible to fail in many ways, while to succeed is possible only in one way."
--Aristotle

"Fail again. Fail better."
--Samuel Beckett

"Let us be thankful for the fools. But for them the rest of us could not succeed."
--Mark Twain

"If you want to succeed, double your failure rate."
--Thomas Watson, founder of IBM

"If at first you don't succeed, failure may be your style."
--Quentin Crisp

"At first you don't succeed, try, try again. Then quit. There's no point in being a damn fool about it."
--W.C. Fields

"If at first you don't succeed, remove all evidence that you have ever tried."
--Ricky Gervais

"It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation."
--Herman Melville

"I've missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times, I've been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I've failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed."
--Michael Jordan

"Ninety-nine percent of failures come from people who have the habit of making excuses."
--George Washington Carver

"Failure is unimportant. It takes courage to make a fool of yourself."
--Charlie Chaplin

"When ideas fail, words come in very handy."
--Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"This thing we call 'failure' is not the falling down, but the staying down."
--Mary Pickford

"Failure is only the opportunity to begin again more intelligently."
--Henry Ford

"There are two kinds of failure: those who thought and never did, and those who did and never thought."
--Laurence J. Peter

"The big failures aren't data failures; they aren't issues of 'We don't know.' They're issues of 'We don't want to make the effort to be rigorous.'"
--Dan diBartolomeo

"It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something."
--Franklin Delano Roosevelt

"It is not enough to succeed, others must fail."
--Francois De La Rochefoucauld

"The surest way to fail is not to determine to succeed."
--Richard Brinsley Sheridan