Success depends upon previous preparation, and without such preparation there is sure to be failure.

Develop success from failures. Discouragement and failure are two of the surest stepping stones to success.

If thou art a man, admire those who attempt great things, even though they fail.

The future is purchased by the present.

Eradications are special. Zero is a magic number. You either do what it takes to get to zero and you’re glad you did it; or you get close, give up and it goes back to where it was before, in which case you wasted all that credibility, activity, money that could have been applied to other things.

Often, in the real world, it’s not the smart that get ahead but the bold.

A great social success is a pretty girl who plays her cards as carefully as if she were plain.

There are different ways to do innovation. You can plant a lot of seeds, not be committed to any particular one of them, but just see what grows. And this really isn’t how we’ve approached this. We go mission-first, then focus on the pieces we need and go deep on them and be committed to them.

I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.

Don’t wait to be successful at some future point. Have a successful relationship with the present moment and be fully present in whatever you are doing. That is success.

War is a game that is played with a smile. If you can’t smile, grin. If you can’t grin, keep out of the way till you can.

Ambition can creep as well as soar.

I never did anything worth doing by accident, nor did any of my inventions come by accident; they came by work.

If you look at the history of Notre Dame, if you hire a coach who’s been successful at another college program, they’re going to be ultra successful at Notre Dame because the talent will always be there.

The only time my records are going to be broken is by my own spawn. I’m going be training that child out the womb.

Men often oppose a thing merely because they have had no agency in planning it, or because it may have been planned by those whom they dislike.

The moment the alarm goes off is the first test; it sets the tone for the rest of the day. The test is not a complex one: when the alarm goes off, do you get up out of bed, or do you lie there in comfort and fall back to sleep? If you have the discipline to get out of bed, you win – you pass the test.

My name is Adam Sandler. I’m not particularly talented. I’m not particularly good-looking. And yet I’m a multi-millionaire.

What is easy is seldom excellent.

Men of lofty genius when they are doing the least work are most active.

If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.

Gulf Lesson One is the value of airpower.

By appreciation, we make excellence in others our own property.

Everything in war is very simple. But the simplest thing is difficult.

Think of yourself as on the threshold of unparalleled success. A whole, clear, glorious life lies before you. Achieve! Achieve!

Surface R&B doesn’t work any more. The whole heartthrob thing, songs about unrealistic love and tearing your shirt off every show – that’s not really where it’s at any more. It’s becoming harder for those guys to sell records, and harder for them to succeed.

This industry has been really good to me. It’s been a great life. I’m not through yet. I’m ready when you are, Mr. DeMille.

On the summit of Everest, I had a feeling of great satisfaction to be first there.

Optimism is the faith that leads to achievement. Nothing can be done without hope and confidence.

Being acknowledged for your work is always a great accomplishment, whether it’s people in my city, kids in the street, all the way up to the Grammys.

The person who goes farthest is generally the one who is willing to do and dare. The sure-thing boat never gets far from shore.

I get so excited when a song I wrote that’s very personal to me goes No. 1 and I look down and see people singing the words back to me.

If you look at any Muslim society and you make a scale of how developed they are, and how successful the economy is, it’s a straight line. It depends on how much they emancipate their women.

Becoming famous was never what I wanted to do. There’s a lot of things that come with fame – it’s what people in the limelight have to do.

Our plans miscarry because they have no aim. When a man does not know what harbor he is making for, no wind is the right wind.

I’m not gonna be bad at anything, and I want to actually be the best at anything I’m doing. So if I’m playing basketball, if I’m taking the SATs, like, there’s a competitive spirit behind it. With production, it’s the same thing.

It’s rule number one, really – beating your teammate.

If everyone is moving forward together, then success takes care of itself.

The important thing is that your teammates have to know you’re pulling for them and you really want them to be successful.

As soon as I accomplish one goal, I replace it with another one. I try not to get too far ahead of myself. I just say to myself, ‚All right, well, I’d like to headline a tour,‘ and then when I get there, we’ll see what my next goal is.

Beware of endeavoring to become a great man in a hurry. One such attempt in ten thousand may succeed. These are fearful odds.

The will to win, the desire to succeed, the urge to reach your full potential… these are the keys that will unlock the door to personal excellence.

I have learned that success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has had to overcome while trying to succeed.

Bad seed is a robbery of the worst kind: for your pocket-book not only suffers by it, but your preparations are lost and a season passes away unimproved.

To win is always good for the feeling of the whole team.

My preparation is about precision. It is a science.

Competitions are a business, first and foremost.

Most people don’t like change. They revolt against it unless they can clearly see the advantage it brings. For that reason, when good leaders prepare to take action or make changes, they take people through a process to get them ready for it.

Fighting for one’s freedom, struggling towards being free, is like struggling to be a poet or a good Christian or a good Jew or a good Muslim or good Zen Buddhist. You work all day long and achieve some kind of level of success by nightfall, go to sleep and wake up the next morning with the job still to be done. So you start all over again.

If two smart, intelligent, clever guys sit together on a table, and you both want the same, where can be the problem? We all want to be successful.

We record when I have a hole in the schedule. Sometimes night, sometimes afternoon, sometimes morning – we fit it in when we can. I prep for episodes all the time.

Thanksgiving dinners take eighteen hours to prepare. They are consumed in twelve minutes. Half-times take twelve minutes. This is not coincidence.

We must walk consciously only part way toward our goal, and then leap in the dark to our success.

The majority of men meet with failure because of their lack of persistence in creating new plans to take the place of those which fail.

If you want to achieve something, you build the basis for it.

If you sit there and have that mentality of ‚triple down on what you’re good at,‘ you’re never going to grow. You’re always going to stay the same.

It doesn’t matter where you come from, what you have or don’t have, what you lack, or what you have too much of. But all you need to have is faith in God, an undying passion for what you do and what you choose to do in this life, and a relentless drive and the will to do whatever it takes to be successful in whatever you put your mind to.

There is only one failure in life possible, and that is not to be true to the best one knows.

To excel at the highest level – or any level, really – you need to believe in yourself, and hands down, one of the biggest contributors to my self-confidence has been private coaching.

Well, I think we tried very hard not to be overconfident, because when you get overconfident, that’s when something snaps up and bites you.

It’s been my experience in politics that you can try and plan it out: ‚I’m going to hit the three ball which will hit the eight ball.‘ You’ve just got to go run and try to do everything right. And then have a little luck.