Success Quotes

"God will not look you over for medals degrees or diplomas, but for scars."

"A graduation ceremony is an event where the commencement speaker tells thousands of students dressed in identical caps and gowns that 'individuality' is the key to success."

"Never go to your high school reunion pregnant or they will think that is all you have done since you graduated."

"Knowledge is invariably a matter of degree: you cannot put your finger upon even the simplest datum and say this we know."

"I learned law so well, the day I graduated I sued the college, won the case, and got my tuition back."

"For a man to attain to an eminent degree in learning costs him time, watching, hunger, nakedness, dizziness in the head, weakness in the stomach, and other inconveniences."

"I always wanted to have my own album released before I graduated from high school."

"This man used to go to school with his dog. Then they were separated. His dog graduated!"

"I was never a Certified Public Accountant. I just had a degree in accounting. It would require passing a test, which I would not have been able to do."

"In this outward and physical ceremony we attest once again to the inner and spiritual strength of our Nation. As my high school teacher, Miss Julia Coleman, used to say: 'We must adjust to changing times and still hold to unchanging principles."

"Being considerate of others will take your children further in life than any college degree."

"Even though I disagree with many of the changes, when I see the privates graduate at the end of the day, when they walk off that drill field at the end of the ceremony, they are still fine privates outstanding, well motivated privates."

"When I was going for my graduate degree, I decided I was going to make a feature film as my thesis. That's what I was famous for-that I had my thesis film be a feature film, which was 'You're a Big Boy Now."

"It is soooooo necessary to get the basic skills, because by the time you graduate, undergraduate or graduate, that field would have totally changed from your first day of school."

"We had times in '66 and '67 when we would pick up a platoon of privates out of the receiving barracks the week before we even graduated the platoon that we were on!"

"We don't stop going to school when we graduate."

"I'm not impressed by someone's degree... I'm impressed by them making movies."

"It is virtually impossible to compete in today's global economy without a college degree."

"Everyone has a right to a university degree in America, even if it's in Hamburger Technology."

"I got all my work done to graduate in two months and then they were like, I'm sorry, you have to take driver's ed. I just kind of went, Oh, forget it."

"I graduated a the top of my class in the '84 Olympic Games I won a gold medal."

"I have actually five honorary degrees."

"I don't look to find an educated person in the ranks of university graduates, necessarily. Some of the most educated people I know have never been near a university."

"I think young writers should get other degrees first, social sciences, arts degrees or even business degrees. What you learn is research skills, a necessity because a lot of writing is about trying to find information."

"For students today, only 10 percent of children from working-class families graduate from college by the age of 24 as compared to 58 percent of upper-middle-class and wealthy families."

"At the School of Visual Arts in New York, you can get your degree in Net art, which is really a fantastic way of thinking of theater in new ways."

"When I graduated from Santa Monica High in 1927, I was voted the girl most likely to succeed. I didn't realize it would take so long."

"My father, who was from a wealthy family and highly educated, a lawyer, Yale and Columbia, walked out with the benefit of a healthy push from my mother, a seventh grade graduate, who took a typing course and got a secretarial job as fast as she could."

"College atheletes used to get a degree in bringing your pencil."

"I went to college at the University of Kansas, where I got a degree in political science."

"I didn't get my degree at NYU I got it later, they gave me an honourary one."

"Some go on to trade schools or get further training for jobs they are interested in. Some go into the arts, some are craftsmen, some take a little time out to travel, and some start their own businesses. But our graduates find and work at what they want to do."

"The knowledge of languages was very useful. I have a university degree in foreign languages and literature."

"My main objective is to prepare candidates for professional baseball however, the majority of our graduates will go home as much better qualified amateurs."

"You must realize that honorary degrees are given generally to people whose SAT scores were too low to get them into schools the regular way. As a matter of fact, it was my SAT scores that led me into my present vocation in life, comedy."

"I took three years off. I differentiated myself from the industry. Found my identity - sort of... I haven't graduated yet. I'm not legitimately educated yet, but maybe one day."

"In 1858 I received the degree of D. S. from the Lawrence Scientific School, and thereafter remained on the rolls of the university as a resident graduate."

"I could be happy doing something like architecture. It would involve another couple of years of graduate school, but that's what I studied in college. That's what I always wanted to do."

"I was the first boy in the Kennedy family to graduate from college."

"Everybody wants you to do good things, but in a small town you pretty much graduate and get married. Mostly you marry, have children and go to their football games."

"The college graduate is presented with a sheepskin to cover his intellectual nakedness."

"When nearly a third of our high school students do not graduate on time with their peers, we have work to do. We must design our middle and high schools so that no student gets lost in the crowd and disconnected from his or her own potential."

"Yeah, I spent about 20 years in a dorm room. It took me a while to graduate."

"I teach one semester a year, and this year I'm just teaching one course during that semester, a writing workshop for older students in their late 20s and early 30s, people in our graduate program who are already working on a manuscript and trying to bring it to completion."

"I have no problems with private schools. I graduated from one and so did my mother. Private schools are useful and we often use public funds to pay for their infrastructures and other common needs."

"Our record number of teenagers must become our record number of high school and college graduates and our record number of teachers, scientists, doctors, lawyers, and skilled professionals."

"ACT and SAT each have their own parts of the country. The GRE has its lock on graduate admissions. And so, one could blame the companies, but really, economically, they have no incentive to change things very much because they're getting the business."

"Having a college degree gave me the opportunity to be... well-rounded. Also, the people I met at the university, most of them are still my colleagues now. People I've known for years are all in the industry together."

"If a student takes the whole series of my folklore courses including the graduate seminars, he or she should learn something about fieldwork, something about bibliography, something about how to carry out library research, and something about how to publish that research."

"In my second year in graduate school, I took a computer course and that was like lightening striking."

"So in my uncertainty, I went to graduate school and there it all happened."

"Even though I didn't get a business degree, I enjoyed learning about economics."

"I was about to get a degree in economics when I accepted that I'd be a lousy businessman, and if I didn't give acting a try I'd regret it for the rest of my life."

"I went to military college in Canada and graduated as an officer in the Navy but also as an engineer."

"North Dakota State. What do you have to do there to graduate? Milk a cow with your left hand?"

"Each year India and China produce four million graduates compared with just over 250,000 in Britain."

"I received my undergraduate degree in engineering in 1939 and a Master of Science degree in mathematical physics in 1941 at Steven Institute of Technology."

"Remember, half the doctors in this country graduated in the bottom half of their class."

"One half who graduate from college never read another book."

"I did graduate with a bachelor's degree in civil engineering in 1948."

"I think I finally chose the graduate degree in engineering primarily because it only took one year and law school took three years, and I felt the pressure of being a little behind - although I was just 22."

"Really, the potential for, first of all, any college graduate today is enormously good. These are good times for anyone with a college degree today, particularly African Americans. With a college degree today, you really breach the unemployment rate."

"I wrote a novel for my degree, and I'm very happy I didn't submit that to a publisher. I sympathize with my professors who had to read it."

"I was going to be an architect. I graduated with a degree in architecture and I had a scholarship to go back to Princeton and get my Masters in architecture. I'd done theatricals in college, but I'd done them because it was fun."

"When I was a graduate student, the leading spirits at Harvard were interested in the history of ideas."

"In the summer we graduated we flipped out completely, drinking beer, cruising in our cars and beating up each other. It was a crazy summer. That's when I started to be interested in girls."

"I dropped out of school for a semester, transferred to another college, switched to an art major, graduated, got married, and for a while worked as a graphic designer."

"My father was on the faculty in the Chemistry Department of Harvard University my mother had one year of graduate work in physics before her marriage."

"My graduate studies were carried out at the California Institute of Technology."

"The essays in The Great Taos Bank Robbery were my project to win a Master of Arts degree in English when I quit being a newspaper editor and went back to college."

"The economy in the Valley will need to grow if students want to come back and work with their specialized degrees. We need to develop more to create more opportunities."

"Yale places great stress on undergraduate and graduate teaching. I like teaching, and I do a lot of it."

"I was really desperate. I don't know if you can remember back that far, but when I went to graduate school they didn't want females in graduate school. They were very open about it. They didn't mince their words. But then I got in and I got my degree."

"Our promise to our children should be this: if you do well in school, we will pay for you to obtain a college degree."

"The idea of winning a doctor's degree gradually assumed the aspect of a great moral struggle, and the moral fight possessed immense attraction for me."

"I think women as well as men are concerned about jobs and the economy and spending and, and other issues. They're concerned that when their kids graduate from college they have an economy and they have a future in this country and they, they have the same opportunity that we've had and our grandparents have had."

"From kindergarten to graduation, I went to public schools, and I know that they are a key to being sure that every child has a chance to succeed and to rise in the world."

"I disagree with a lot of those changes, however at the end of the day - I go down to recruit graduation at least once or twice a year."

"I was a lesbian for a semester at Wesleyan - it was a graduation requirement."

"I'm not retiring. I am graduating. Today is my graduation day. Retirement means that you'll just go ahead and live on your laurels and surf all day in Oceanside. It ain't going to happen."

"A few months after graduation I was working in films. It took off pretty quick."

"People in my family and camp who grew up listening to rap music love 'We Are Young.' I've heard it play at weddings. I've heard it in graduation parties. It's a big idea and big song."

"I have the loving support of my girlfriend who still attends Wake Forest and is nearing graduation. She helps me cope with the everyday rigors of being an NBA player."

"I was on the yearbook staff, so I would take out film cameras and Nikons and take photos around school and at sporting events and things like that. We had a darkroom as well. I just loved it. I also saved up for a video camera to video my friends and cut and paste the videos together and I gave them to all of my friends for graduation."

"The morning after my high-school graduation found me up early job hunting. The dream of college I put on the back burner."

"I thought I should go to New York because it was the place to go to study. I went and tried to get an application from the Juilliard School but they wouldn't even give me one because I didn't have my high school graduation."

"While I do commend the Administration on its commitment and focus on high school reform, I believe that we must focus on graduation as the key accountability measure."

"I received $100 per week when I started working at the Globe after graduation."

"Americans in particular are myopic. They're not traveling as much. When you were a college student, the next thing you would do on graduation was to take a year off and travel. That's what I did. I went to Indonesia."

"I fell in love with theater there, and after graduation I moved to Los Angeles to pursue acting."

"It was only when I finished the course and left my graduation diploma on the bus that I realised I'd become an actor."

"One of the most difficult speeches to prepare is an address to a graduation class, which is why I don't often do them."

"At the end of four years' time, at graduation, we were down to 12. At our reunion that we had several years ago, only 1 out of the 52 actually made it to ordination and priesthood. So there you go, there's your numbers."

"I woke up on May 15, 1991, the day of my Barnard graduation, and I said to myself, 'By the end of today you will decide what you want to do with the rest of your life."

"A month before graduation I got an off-Broadway job. Then I did some commercials, including one for MCI. You can only see half of me, but it paid well. Thank God for commercials."

"All my graduation money went to paying for bartending classes so I could have a side gig. I bartended for two months before I was supposed to move to New York and then two months later I got the job as an understudy in 'Sister Act' and haven't looked back since."

"If you're picking your best friend based on what kind of clothes she wears or how popular she is, chances are you aren't going to stay in touch after graduation."

"In order to succeed, your desire for success should be greater than your fear of failure."

"A successful man is one who can lay a firm foundation with the bricks others have thrown at him."

"Think twice before you speak, because your words and influence will plant the seed of either success or failure in the mind of another."

"Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm."

"Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value."

"I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody."

"Always bear in mind that your own resolution to succeed is more important than any other."

"Coming together is a beginning keeping together is progress working together is success."

"Formula for success: rise early, work hard, strike oil."

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

"All you need is ignorance and confidence and the success is sure."

"Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can't lose."

"Action is the foundational key to all success."

"Failure is success if we learn from it."

"What is success? I think it is a mixture of having a flair for the thing that you are doing knowing that it is not enough, that you have got to have hard work and a certain sense of purpose."

"I don't measure a man's success by how high he climbs but how high he bounces when he hits bottom."

"Defeat is not the worst of failures. Not to have tried is the true failure."

"A person with a new idea is a crank until the idea succeeds."

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

"Success is a science if you have the conditions, you get the result."

"The most important single ingredient in the formula of success is knowing how to get along with people."

"As kids we're not taught how to deal with success we're taught how to deal with failure. If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. If at first you succeed, then what?"

"Winning isn't everything, it's the only thing."

"Belief in oneself is one of the most important bricks in building any successful venture."

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

"If you have no critics you'll likely have no success."

"Don't confuse fame with success. Madonna is one Helen Keller is the other."

"Man needs his difficulties because they are necessary to enjoy success."

"Success is simple. Do what's right, the right way, at the right time."

"The successful man will profit from his mistakes and try again in a different way."

"Flaming enthusiasm, backed up by horse sense and persistence, is the quality that most frequently makes for success."

"Pray that success will not come any faster than you are able to endure it."

"Failure is the key to success each mistake teaches us something."

"Eighty percent of success is showing up."

"In order to succeed you must fail, so that you know what not to do the next time."

"Success is how high you bounce when you hit bottom."

"The starting point of all achievement is desire."

"In this world it is not what we take up, but what we give up, that makes us rich."

"Success isn't a result of spontaneous combustion. You must set yourself on fire."

"Most people give up just when they're about to achieve success. They quit on the one yard line. They give up at the last minute of the game one foot from a winning touchdown."

"I couldn't wait for success, so I went ahead without it."

"If you want to achieve things in life, you've just got to do them, and if you're talented and smart, you'll succeed."

"The greatest sign of success for a teacher... is to be able to say, 'The children are now working as if I did not exist."

"The common idea that success spoils people by making them vain, egotistic and self-complacent is erroneous on the contrary it makes them, for the most part, humble, tolerant and kind."

"The thermometer of success is merely the jealousy of the malcontents."

"Success is falling nine times and getting up ten."

"Success is dependent on effort."

"They succeed, because they think they can."

"Success seems to be largely a matter of hanging on after others have let go."

"The measure of success is not whether you have a tough problem to deal with, but whether it is the same problem you had last year."

"Success is blocked by concentrating on it and planning for it... Success is shy - it won't come out while you're watching."

"Success is the child of drudgery and perseverance. It cannot be coaxed or bribed pay the price and it is yours."

"Definiteness of purpose is the starting point of all achievement."

"Failure is not an option. Everyone has to succeed."

"Success is the one unpardonable sin against our fellows."

"Success is counted sweetest by those who never succeed."

"How can they say my life is not a success? Have I not for more than sixty years got enough to eat and escaped being eaten?"

"After I won the Oscar, my salary doubled, my friends tripled, my children became more popular at school, my butcher made a pass at me, and my maid hit me up for a raise."

"Obedience is the mother of success and is wedded to safety."

"Success is not a good teacher, failure makes you humble."

"Sometimes I worry about being a success in a mediocre world."

"Success is like death. The more successful you become, the higher the houses in the hills get and the higer the fences get."

"Those who have succeeded at anything and don't mention luck are kidding themselves."

"Success is the progressive realization of predetermined, worthwhile, personal goals."

"Nothing succeeds like success."

"We fall forward to succeed."

"Success is simply a matter of luck. Ask any failure."

"The toughest thing about success is that you've got to keep on being a success."

"Nothing recedes like success."

"Success is often the result of taking a misstep in the right direction."

"The five essential entrepreneurial skills for success: Concentration, Discrimination, Organization, Innovation and Communication."

"Success to me is having ten honeydew melons and eating only the top half of each slice."

"It's not enough that I should succeed - others should fail."

"Success is the space one occupies in the newspaper. Success is one day's insolence."

"The one phrase you can use is that success has a thousand fathers, and failure is an orphan."

"We should measure welfare's success by how many people leave welfare, not by how many are added."

"Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty."

"The only place success comes before work is in the dictionary."

"Before anything else, preparation is the key to success."

"It's fine to celebrate success but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure."

"Dictionary is the only place that success comes before work. Hard work is the price we must pay for success. I think you can accomplish anything if you're willing to pay the price."

"Desire is the key to motivation, but it's determination and commitment to an unrelenting pursuit of your goal - a commitment to excellence - that will enable you to attain the success you seek."

"Applause waits on success."

"The superior man makes the difficulty to be overcome his first interest success only comes later."

"Success does not consist in never making mistakes but in never making the same one a second time."

"Money won't create success, the freedom to make it will."

"You cannot climb the ladder of success dressed in the costume of failure."

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

"Success is steady progress toward one's personal goals."

"The way a team plays as a whole determines its success. You may have the greatest bunch of individual stars in the world, but if they don't play together, the club won't be worth a dime."

"The secret to success is to offend the greatest number of people."

"The only thing I'm addicted to is winning. This bootleg cult, arrogantly referred to as Alcoholics Anonymous, reports a 5 percent success rate. My success rate is 100 percent."

"Success is neither magical nor mysterious. Success is the natural consequence of consistently applying the basic fundamentals."

"Success is nothing more than a few simple disciplines, practiced every day."

"Successful people make money. It's not that people who make money become successful, but that successful people attract money. They bring success to what they do."

"Discipline is the soul of an army. It makes small numbers formidable procures success to the weak, and esteem to all."

"Success is dependent upon the glands - sweat glands."

"If there is any one secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other person's point of view and see things from that person's angle as well as from your own."

"Four things for success: work and pray, think and believe."

"Success is doing ordinary things extraordinarily well."

"You do not pay the price of success, you enjoy the price of success."

"Every person who wins in any undertaking must be willing to cut all sources of retreat. Only by doing so can one be sure of maintaining that state of mind known as a burning desire to win - essential to success."

"Success is not to be pursued it is to be attracted by the person you become."

"Success is the maximum utilization of the ability that you have."

"That man is a success who has lived well, laughed often and loved much."

"The test of success is not what you do when you are on top. Success is how high you bounce when you hit bottom."

"The line between failure and success is so fine that we scarcely know when we pass it: so fine that we are often on the line and do not know it."

"Old age is like everything else. To make a success of it, you've got to start young."

"Before everything else, getting ready is the secret of success."

"Every success story has a parent who says, 'over my dead body.' Every success story has an old person who walks up to you and says, when you're acting the fool, 'you know I worry about you sometimes."

"He has achieved success who has worked well, laughed often, and loved much."

"Microsoft has had two goals in the last 10 years. One was to copy the Mac, and the other was to copy Lotus' success in the spreadsheet - basically, the applications business. And over the course of the last 10 years, Microsoft accomplished both of those goals. And now they are completely lost."

"For unflagging interest and enjoyment, a household of children, if things go reasonably well, certainly all other forms of success and achievement lose their importance by comparison."

"Our goals can only be reached through a vehicle of a plan, in which we must fervently believe, and upon which we must vigorously act. There is no other route to success."

"The path to success is to take massive, determined action."

"America is the most grandiose experiment the world has seen, but, I am afraid, it is not going to be a success."

"Success is often achieved by those who don't know that failure is inevitable."

"Focused, hard work is the real key to success. Keep your eyes on the goal, and just keep taking the next step towards completing it. If you aren't sure which way to do something, do it both ways and see which works better."

"She's the kind of girl who climbed the ladder of success wrong by wrong."

"Success demands singleness of purpose."

"There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things."

"No man ever achieved worth-while success who did not, at one time or other, find himself with at least one foot hanging well over the brink of failure."

"Personality is the most important thing to an actress's success."

"Success is almost totally dependent upon drive and persistence. The extra energy required to make another effort or try another approach is the secret of winning."

"The key to success is to focus our conscious mind on things we desire not things we fear."

"There's no abiding success without commitment."

"If you wish to be a success in the world, promise everything, deliver nothing."

"There is probably a perverse pride in my administration... that we were going to do the right thing, even if short-term it was unpopular. And I think anybody who's occupied this office has to remember that success is determined by an intersection in policy and politics and that you can't be neglecting of marketing and P.R. and public opinion."

"One man cannot practice many arts with success."

"You know you are on the road to success if you would do your job, and not be paid for it."

"I stand ready to lead us down a different path where we're lifted up by our desire to succeed, not dragged down by a resentment of success."

"If you have a success you have it for the wrong reasons. If you become popular it is always because of the worst aspects of your work."

"Those who cannot work with their hearts achieve but a hollow, half-hearted success that breeds bitterness all around."

"Anything that won't sell, I don't want to invent. Its sale is proof of utility, and utility is success."

"You might well remember that nothing can bring you success but yourself."

"A rejection is nothing more than a necessary step in the pursuit of success."

"Forward, as occasion offers. Never look round to see whether any shall note it... Be satisfied with success in even the smallest matter, and think that even such a result is no trifle."

"We're constantly striving for success, fame and comfort when all we really need to be happy is someone or some thing to be enthusiastic about."

"You never achieve success unless you like what you are doing."

"Ask yourself the secret of your success. Listen to your answer, and practice it."

"Obstacles are necessary for success because in selling, as in all careers of importance, victory comes only after many struggles and countless defeats."

"If a man loves the labour of his trade, apart from any question of success or fame, the gods have called him."

"There is little success where there is little laughter."

"It is not the going out of port, but the coming in, that determines the success of a voyage."

"If we become one of those societies that attack success, why not come as certain there will be a lot less success? And that's not who we are."

"Success is not greedy, as people think, but insignificant. That is why it satisfies nobody."

"I must admit that I personally measure success in terms of the contributions an individual makes to her or his fellow human beings."

"The ability to convert ideas to things is the secret of outward success."

"In all our deeds, the proper value and respect for time determines success or failure."

"Success is dangerous. One begins to copy oneself, and to copy oneself is more dangerous than to copy others. It leads to sterility."

"Success is full of promise till one gets it, and then it seems like a nest from which the bird has flown."

"In inner-city, low-income communities of color, there's such a high correlation in terms of educational quality and success."

"Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts."

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

"Success usually comes to those who are too busy to be looking for it."

"I find that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have."

"Success is walking from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm."

"Do not be afraid to give up the good to go for the great."

"The road to success and the road to failure are almost exactly the same."

"Success is getting what you want. Happiness is wanting what you get."

"I never dreamed about success. I worked for it."

"The secret of success is to do the common thing uncommonly well."

"Do not let the fear of losing be greater than the excitement of winning."

"It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation."

"Successful people do what unsuccessful people are not willing to do."

"If you really look closely, most overnight successes took a long time."

"Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success."

"Try not to become a person of success, but rather try to become a person of value."

"There are no secrets to success. It is the result of preparation, hard work, and learning from failure."

"Success is liking yourself, liking what you do, and liking how you do it."

"The difference between a successful person and others is not a lack of strength or knowledge but rather a lack of will."

"Would you like me to give you a formula for success? It is quite simple, really: double your rate of failure."