Quotes on Motivation and Success

I’m not sure where I collected the 78 quotes below over the years but I thought that they were worth sharing.  You never know where your source or spark of motivation will come from.

1. There are old pilots and there are bold pilots, but there are no old, bold pilots. - Unknown
2. The value of an investing strategy is not in the strategy itself, but how it is followed and implemented. - Unknown
3. What the market is doing is far more important than what you think the market should be doing. - Unknown
4. Your choice is your talent, this is where the value lies. - Unknown
5. It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning. - Henry Ford
6. The harder you work, the luckier you get. - Unknown
7. You can always count on Americans to do the right thing, after they've tried everything else - Churchill
8. Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off your goal. - Henry Ford
9. Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently. - Henry Ford
10. When money can buy you happiness, spend it. - Unknown
11. The question in life is not whether you get knocked down.  You will. The question is , are you ready to get back up, are you willing to get back up and fight for what you believe in? - Dan Quayle
12. Saying I did my best is only spoken by people who did not achieve their goals - Henry Ford
13. Good things take a long time to build.  Bad things can happen fast - Camille Jayne
14. Happiness lies in the joy of achievement and the thrill of creative effort - FDR
15. Most people are nowhere near as successful as they wish there were. - Unknown
16. If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader - John Quincy Adams
17. More than anything else, what differentiates people who live up to their potential from those who don’t is a willingness to look at themselves and others objectively - Ray Dailo
18. This idea of anticipation is key to investing and to business generally. You can’t wait for an opportunity to become obvious. You have to think, “Here’s what other people and companies have done under certain circumstances. Now, under these new circumstances, how is this management likely to behave?” - Eddie Lambert
19. The individual investor should act consistently as an investor and not as a speculator. This means that he should be able to justify every purchase he makes and each price he pays by impersonal, objective reasoning that satisfies him that he is getting more than his money’s worth for his purchase. - Ben Graham
20. Were you want to be is always in control, never wishing, always trading, and always, first and foremost protecting your butt. After a while size means nothing. It gets back to whether you’re making 100% rate of return on $10,000 or $100 million dollars. It doesn’t make any difference. - Paul Tudor
21. Most folks are as happy as they make up their minds to be – Abraham Lincoln
22. It is not the critic that counts.  Not the man who points out how strong the man stumbled or where the doer of deeds could have done better.  The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly’ who errs and comes short again and again; who knows the great enthusiasms; the great devotions; who spends himself in worthy causes.  Who, at best, knows the triumph of high achievement and who, at worst, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.  - Theodore Roosevelt
23. If you live long enough, you're bound to encounter some rough storms.  No one is immune to tragedy in this life.  The house is the same, the storms the same, but what makes the difference is the foundation…How secure is the foundation on which I'm building my life?  - Lisa Beamer
24. Wealth, it therefore seems, is like health: Although its utter absence can breed misery, having it does not guarantee happiness.  Happiness is less a matter of getting what we want than of wanting what we have. - David Myers (Hope College)
25. ''The way to develop self-confidence is to do the thing you fear and get a record of successful experiences behind you. Destiny is not a matter of chance; it is a matter of choice. It is not a thing to be waited for; it is a thing to be achieved.'' - William Jennings Bryan
26. The trouble with so many of us is that we underestimate the power of simplicity.  We have a tendency, it seems, to over-complicate our lives and forget what’s important and what’s not.  We tend to mistake movement for achievement.  We tend to focus on activities instead of results. – Robert Stuberg, American Author
27. There are two ways of being happy: We must either diminish our wants or augment our means – either may do – the result is the same and it is for each man to decide for himself and to do that which happens to be easier. – Ben Franklin
28. Happiness is not a possession to be prized.  It is a quality of thought, a state of mind. – Daphne du Maurier, English novelist
29. Success is a lousy teacher.  It seduces smart people into thinking they can’t loose. – Bill Gates
30. To perceive the world differently, we must be willing to change our belief system, let the past slip away, expand our sense of now, and dissolve the fear in our mind. – Gerald Jampolsky, American author
31. What is needed, rather than running away or controlling or suppressing or any other resistance, is understanding fear; that means, watch it, learn about it, come directly into contact with it.  We are to learn about fear, not how to escape from it. - Jiddu Krishnamurti, Indian philosopher
32. You must see your goals clearly and specifically before you can set out for them.  Hold them in your mind until they become second nature. – Les Brown, motivational speaker
33. Our lives improve only when we take chances – and the first and most difficult risk we can take is to be honest with ourselves. – Walter Anderson, American artist
34. Our real blessings often appear to us in the shape of pains, losses, and disappointments. – Joseph Addison, British politician
35. The most glorious moments in your life are not the so-called days of success, but rather those days when out of dejection and despair, you feel rise in you a challenge to life and the promise of future accomplishments. – Gustave Flaubert, French novelist
36. Happiness is not something you get, but something you do. – Marcelene Cox, American writer
37. If past history was all there was to the game, the richest people would be librarians. – Warren Buffet
38. An invincible determination can accomplish almost anything, and in this lies the great distinction between great men and little men. – Thomas Fuller, English clergyman
39. The mere foundation of a problem is often far more essential that its solution.  To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle require creative imagination and marks real advances in science. – Albert Einstein
40. Often the difference between a successful person and a failure is not one’s better abilities or ideas, but the courage that one has to bet on one’s ideas, to take a calculated risk and to act.  – Maxwell Maltz, American physician
41. Take time to deliberate, but when the time for action times arrives, stop thinking and go in. – Andrew Jackson
42. Show me someone who has done something worthwhile, and I’ll show you someone who has overcome adversity. – Lou Holtz
43. Almost nothing immunizes you from day-to-day frustration more than a healthy sense of humor, particularly the ability to laugh at yourself. – Richard Calrson, American author
44. Be more concerned with your character than your reputation, because your character is what you really are, while your reputation is merely what other think you are. – John Wooden
45. Success seems to be connected to action.  Successful people keep moving.  They make mistakes, but they don’t quit. – Conrad Hilton
46. One cannot solve problems with the same level of knowledge that created them. – Albert Einstein
47. If your work is becoming uninteresting, so are you.  Work is an inanimate thing and can be made lively and interesting only be injecting yourself into it.  Your job is only as big as you are.  Dale Carnegie
48. If you don’t have a dream, how are you going to make a dream come true? – Oscar Hammerstein, American lyricist
49. You must live in the present.  Launch yourself on every wave.  Find your eternity in each moment. – Henry David Thoreau
50. Lost wealth may be replaced by industry, lost knowledge by study, lost health by temperance or medicine, but lost time is gone forever. – Samuel Smiles, American author
51. To accomplish great things, we must not only act, but also dream; not only plan, but also believe. – Anatole France, French writer
52. The only thing that stands between a man and what he wants from life is merely the will to try it and the faith to believe that it is possible. – Richard DeVos, American entrepreneur
53. If you want to take your mission in life to the next level, if your stuck and you don’t know how to rise, don’t look outside yourself.  Look inside.  Don’t let your fears keep you mired in the crowd.  Abolish your fears and raise you commitment level to the point of no return, and I guarantee you that the Champion within will burst forth to propel you toward victory. – Bruce Jenner
54. What you get by achieving your goals is not as important as what you become by achieving your goals. – Zig Ziglar, American author
55. Circumstances may cause interruptions or delays, but never lose sight of the goal.  Prepare yourself in every way you can by increasing your knowledge and adding to your experience, so that you can make the most of opportunity when it occurs. – Mario Andretti
56. The world is full of abundance and opportunity, but far too many people come to the fountain of life with a sleve instead of a tank car, a teaspoon instead of a steam shovel.  They expect little and as a result they get little. – Ben Sweetland, American author
57. The best way to predict the future is to invent it. – Alan Kay, American computer scientist
58. The past is a ghost, the future a dream, and all we ever have is now. - Unknown
59. Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off your goal. - Henry Ford
60. To know what is right and not to do it is the worst cowardice. - Confucius
61. Never mistake motion with action. – Hemingway
62. Entrepreneurs are simply those who understand that there is little difference between obstacle and opportunity and are able to turn both to their advantage. – Victor Kiam
63. The expectations of life depend upon diligence; the mechanic that would perfect his work must first sharpen his tolls. – Confucius
64. The best solution to a problem is almost always the simplest solution. – Occam “Razor”
65. Real wisdom is not the knowledge of everything, but the knowledge of which things in life are necessary, which are less necessary, and which are completely unnecessary to know. Among the most necessary knowledge is the knowledge of how to live well, that is, how to produce the least possible evil and the greatest goodness in one’s life. At present, people study useless sciences, but forget to study this, the most important knowledge. - Jean Jacques Rousseau
66. Discontent is the first necessity of progress. - Thomas Edison
67. Goals are a means to an end, not the ultimate purpose of our lives. They are simply a tool to concentrate our focus and move us in a direction. The only reason we really pursue goals is to cause ourselves to expand and grow. Achieving goals by themselves will never make us happy in the long term; it's who you become, as you overcome the obstacles necessary to achieve your goals, that can give you the deepest and most long-lasting sense of fulfillment. - Tony Robbins
68. Success is not measured by what you accomplish but by the opposition you have encountered, and the courage with which you have maintained the struggle against overwhelming odds. - Orison Swett Marden
69. I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past - Thomas Jefferson
70. Price is what you pay, value is what you get - Warren Buffet 2013 annual letter
71. Games are won by players who focus on the playing field - not by those whose eyes are glued to the scoreboard. - Warren Buffet 2013 annual letter
72. "I think the only reason I've had the career life that I've had is that someone told me some secrets early on about living. You can do the very best you can when you're very, very relaxed, no matter what it is or what your job is, the more relaxed you are the better you are. That's sort of why I got into acting. I realized the more fun I had, the better I did it. And I thought, that's a job I could be proud of. It's changed my life learning that, and it's made me better at what I do." - Bill Murray
73. “When one door closes, another opens; but we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the one which has opened for us.”– Alexander Graham Bell
74. "The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds." -John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money
75. Hyper-focused people living goal-oriented lives attain levels of confidence as a direct result of their familiarity with success - Collin Cowherd
76. If you resent success, you will never achieve it.  Be excited about it, even if the success is not your own.  Bitter people are rarely happy or successful - Collin Cowherd
77. Get great at something and spend less time trying to fix every little problem.  You can win with weakness - Collin Cowherd
78. Being defensive serves no purpose.  As a therapist once told me, the faster you own your own baggage, the faster you can create something new.  It's an opportunity to take more risks, to live boldly, free of fear of being wrong - Collin Cowherd