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Eighty percent of success is showing up.

Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.

Success means we go to sleep at night knowing that our talents and abilities were used in a way that served others.

Show me a guy who is afraid to look bad, and I'll show you a guy you can beat every time.

[Winning is] a lot like cologne. If you splash it on, it makes you feel good. But it you drink it, that's when it becomes a problem.

Whenever an individual or a business decides that success has been attained, progress stops.

The secret of success is constancy to purpose.

A winner is someone who recognizes his God-given talents, works his tail off to develop (those talents) into skills, and uses these skills to accomplish goals.

You can deal with failure. Sure it's tough, but you just work hard and try to get going again. But success -- success is an opiate. A lot of people can't handle it.

You will always succeed in life if you will always think and act in terms of the other person's self-interest.

The dictionary is the only place where success comes before work.

The best place to succeed is where you are with what you have.

Success is finding, or making, that position which enables you to contribute to the world the very greatest services of which you are capable, through the diligent, preserving, resolute cultivation of all the faculties God has endowed you with, and doing it all with cheerfulness, scorning to allow difficulties or defeats to drive you to pessimism or despair. Success consists of being and doing, not simply accumulating. The business person or business enterprise that aspires to win the highest recognition for success might distinguish himself or itself, not by the magnitude of the profits, but the value of service performed.

Success represents the 1 percent of your work which results only from the 99 percent that is called failure.

People can't do what they can't imagine.

Show me a hero and I'll tell you a tragedy.

My experience...taught me the three critical drivers of professional success, the three elemental particles of love in business. They are knowledge, networks, and compassion. To be an impact player in business, you simply have to know more than most other people know. That means taking the power of ideas seriously, reading books voraciously, and developing a system of organizing what you've learned. But all of your knowledge won't amount to much if you don't have a network of people to share it with -- and enough compassion for the people in that network to understand that your success is a direct result of their success.

Asked by a member of the audience for his definition of success, Ricardo Levy said, "I'd rather use the word fulfillment. Success is a metric; you never have enough. But only you can define fulfillment. We as individuals are the only judges."

Success is the ability to go from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm.

Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence.
Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with great talent.
Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb.
Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts.
Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.

Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.

Whom the gods want to destroy, they send 30 years of success. In the midst of your success, the seeds of failure are sown, and the signals are often very subtle.

It is a funny thing about life: if you refuse to accept anything but the best you very often get it.

Every life is shaped to some extent by circumstances: a lucky break or a fortunate decision...Things happen to us that drive our destinies in unforeseen ways. More fundamentally, we are all dealt a hand of cards-- ranging from our genes to the family and neighborhood we grew up in-which shapes how we adapt to these circumstances.

Personal alignment is how well we play that hand so that our decisions match our capabilities and aspirations. The game is complex and gradual. As children, our parents guide us, then ease away until we are virtually independent. We select a college and then a first job, often making choices without even beginning to know what we really don't know.We move on, reacting to opportunities, coping with disappointments.As we succeed, and especially as we fail, we mature and learn more and more about the consequences of our choices. The nature of the game and its choices change dramatically from age 30 to age 45 to age 60, yet the fundamentals remain largely constant.We must build on the hand of cards we're dealt and adapt to changing circumstances.

What distinguishes the men and women who succeed from those who fail is the efficacy of their actions, not the spaciousness of their hopes. If they believe their lives are out of alignment with their capabilities, goals, and needs, they make choices and take actions to correct the situation.

Maximizing one of life's variables (such as net worth) usually comes at the direct expense of others (such as free time). More money is better only if the tradeoffs it requires don't undermine other dimensions of your desired point of arrival. Even the wealthiest among us agree that at some level, money has diminishing marginal returns. But since money is a common scorecard, it can gradually become an end in and of itself-with the consequence that more always seems better.

People succeed when they run toward something rather than away from something.

Building an impressive resume is a lot easier than building a fulfilling life because life is a lot more complicated. It's not a ladder at all, but rather a continuum with confusing twists and turns. Being smart helps; being wise, thoughtful, and disciplined is an absolute necessity. We've seen stars succeed at life, and we've seen stars fail life miserably, despite professional success.Those that succeed build lives as well as resumes.

One of the most misleading lessons imparted by those who have reached their goal is that the ones who win are the ones who persevere. Not always. If you keep trying without learning why you failed, you'll probably fail again and again. Perseverance must be accompanied by the embrace of failure. Failure is what moves you forward. Listen to failure.

According to George Bernard Shaw, a reasonable man adapts himself to the conditions that surround him while an unreasonable man adapts the surrounding conditions to himself. A person's success is thus a product of whether he is Master of Circumstances (MC) or a Victim of Circumstances (VC).

original Shaw quote:
Reasonable people adapt themselves to the world. Unreasonable people attempt to adapt the world to themselves. All progress, therefore, depends on unreasonable people.