You must find out for yourself what it is you love to do. Don’t think in terms of choosing a vocation in order to fit into society, because in that way you will never discover what you love to do. When you love to do something, there is no problem of choice. When you love, and let love do what it will, there is right action, because love never seeks success, it is never caught up in imitation; but if you give your life to something which you don’t love, you will never be free.
—Jiddu Krishnamurti in Think on These Things
Success is most often achieved by those who don’t know that failure is inevitable.
—Coco Chanel
All you need is ignorance and confidence and the success is sure.
—Mark Twain
Take up one idea. Make that one idea your life—think of it, dream of it, live on that idea. Let the brain, muscles, nerves, every part of your body, be full of that idea, and just leave every other idea alone. This is the way to success.
—Swami Vivekananda
The penalty for success is to be bored by the people who used to snub you.
—Nancy Astor
Why be a man when you can be a success?
—Bertolt Brecht
The first duty of a revolutionary is to get away with it.
—Abbie Hoffman
Action is the foundational key to all success.
—Pablo Picasso
There is this idea now in this country that all people who succeed, succeed on their own, and all people who fail, fail on their own, whereas neither is true. The vast majority of people in this country stay where they're born. Very few people move too far from home. Rich people rarely become poor, and poor people rarely become rich. But we live in a society ruled by anecdote, so that we have no sense at all of what actually happens to most people.
—Fran Lebowitz
There is only one success—to be able to spend your life in your own way.
—Christopher Morley in Where the Blue Begins
Nothing changes your opinion of a friend so surely as success - yours or his.
—Franklin P. Jones
Sometimes I worry about being a success in a mediocre world.
—Lily Tomlin
If your success is not on your own terms, if it looks good to the world but does not feel good in your heart, it is not success at all.
—Anna Quindlen
The secrets of success are a good wife and a steady job. My wife told me.
—Howard Nemerov
Anybody can sympathize with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature to sympathise with a friend's success.
—Oscar Wilde