Great Throughts Treasury

"Gossip, unlike river water, flows both ways."

"Success on any major scale requires you to accept responsibility... in the final analysis, the one quality that all successful people have... is the ability to take on responsibility."

"Never reveal all of yourself to other people; hold back something in reserve so that people are never quite sure if they really know you."

"Success has always been easy to measure. It is the distance between one's origins and one's final achievement."

"If you don't believe in yourself, then who will believe in you? The next man's way of getting there might not necessarily work for me, so I have to create my own ways of getting there."

"Never walk away from failure. On the contrary, study it carefully and imaginatively for its hidden assets."

"Luck can often mean simple taking advantage of a situation at the right moment, It is possible to ''make'' your luck by being always prepared."

"One way to keep momentum going is to have constantly greater goals."

"What you hear repeatedly you will eventually believe."

"This is true enough, but success is the next best thing to happiness, and if you can't be happy as a success, it's very unlikely that you would find a deeper, truer happiness in failure."

"Your chances of success are directly proportional to the degree of pleasure you desire from what you do. If you are in a job you hate, face the fact squarely and get out."

"One of the first rules of playing the power game is that all bad news must be accepted calmly, as if one already knew and didn't care."

"Act well at the moment, and you have performed a good action for all eternity."

"To succeed, we must first believe that we can."

"To succeed it is necessary to accept the world as it is and rise above it."

"Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life."

"An ounce of hypocrisy is worth a pound of ambition."

"The freedom to fail is vital if you're going to succeed, most successful men fail time and time again, and it is a measure of their strength that failure merely propels them into some new attempt at success."

"The more you can dream, the more you can do."

"A word of caution: people will tell you that success can't buy you happiness. This is true enough, but success is the next best thing to happiness, and if you can't be happy as a success, it's very unlikely that you would find a deeper, truer happiness in failure."

"Act impeccably! Perform every act as if it were the only thing in the world that mattered."

"Escapism sold books, to be sure, but not nearly as many as were sold by exposing America?s flaws and making the average American reader (and book club member) look closely at his or her most cherished social assumptions. Americans might not be eager to accept integration, feminism, homosexuality, juvenile delinquency, and the drug culture? or to shoulder the blame for the existence of these problems? but they were certainly willing to read about them."

"By concentrating our efforts upon a few major goals, our efficiency soars, our projects are completed, we are going somewhere."

"In America, success has always been easy to measure. It is the distance between one's origins and one's final achievement that matters."

"Ask a book publisher how many copies a book has sold, and he or she, presuming you?re not the author, will probably try to remember the size of the first printing, then double it. If you?re the author, the publisher will try to remember the number of copies that were shipped and cut that in half in order to avoid encouraging you to expect a big royalty check."

"It's not a field, I think, for people who need to have success every day: if you can't live with a nightly sort of disaster, you should get out. I wouldn't describe myself as lacking in confidence, but I would just say that the ghosts you chase you never catch."

"It's O.K. to be ambitious. It's O.K. to look out for Number One? It's O.K. to be a winner. And it's always O.K. to be rich."

"It must be nice, Queenie thought, to be one thing or another, to know where you belonged."

"In order to succeed, we must first believe that we can."

"Learn to accept your mistakes. Don't be a perfectionist about everything."

"Learn to use time, think of it as a friend, not an enemy. Don't waste it in going after things you don't want."

"The American system demands success, and in order to succeed we must first believe that we can. Yet our society, with its intolerance of failure and poverty, traps millions of people in positions where any kind of success seems impossible to contemplate, and in which failure itself is a kind of passive rebellion against their own misery and the social system which created it in the first place. To succeed it is necessary to accept the world as it is and rise above it."

"Men naturally resent it when women take greater liberties in dress than men are allowed."

"Remember: never walk away from failure. On the contrary, study it carefully ? and imaginatively ? for its hidden assets."

"The biggest fool in the world is he who merely does his work supremely well, without attending to appearance."

"Success is the next best thing to happiness, and if you can't be happy as a success, it's very unlikely that you would find a deeper, truer happiness in failure."

"The fastest way to succeed is to look as if you're playing by other people's rules, while quietly playing by your own."

"The purely agitation attitude is not good enough for a detailed consideration of a subject."

"The first step to success is to accept the consequences of knowing that you're right, when that is the case. It is not so much a matter of being assertive, as of giving up the comfortable cocoon of apologies and guilt in which most of us have chosen to live."