"Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly."
— Robert F. Kennedy

"Whenever you want to achieve something, keep your eyes open, concentrate and make sure you know exactly what it is you want. No one can hit their target with their eyes closed."
— Paulo Coelho (The Devil and Miss Prym: A Novel of Temptation)

"If you can't do great things, do small things in a great way."
— Napoleon Hill

"The freedom to do your best means nothing unless you are willing to do your best."
— Colin Powell

"Don't mistake activity with achievement."
— John Wooden

"If my mind can conceive it,
My heart can believe it,
I know I can achieve it!"
— Jesse Jackson

"Once a musician has enough ability to get into a top music school, the thing that distinguishes one performer from another is how hard he or she works. That's it. And what's more, the people at the very top don't work just harder or even much harder than everyone else. They work much, much harder."
— Malcolm Gladwell (Outliers)

"The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life."
— William Faulkner

"There is one other error in the Gondsman's line of resoning, I believe, on ap urely emotional level. If machines replace achievement, then to what will people aspire? And who are we, truly, without such goals?
Beware the engineers of society, I say, who would make everyone in all the world equal. Opportunity should be equal, must be equal, but achievement must remain individual."
— R.A. Salvatore (Streams of Silver)

"“There is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve: the fear of failure.”"
— Paulo Coelho (The Alchemist)

"For almost a generation, psychologists around the world have been engaged in a spirited debate over a question that most of us would consider to have been settled years ago. The question is this: is there such a thing as innate talent? The obvious answer is yes. Not every hockey player born in January ends up playing at the professional level. Only some do – the innately talented ones. Achievement is talent plus preparation. The problem with this view is that the closer psychologists look at the careers of the gifted, the smaller the role innate talent seems to play and the bigger role preparation seems to play."
— Malcolm Gladwell (Outliers)

"I always wanted to be somebody, but now I realize I should have been more specific.

"
— Lily Tomlin (Jane Wagner)

"I used to want the words "She tried" on my tombstone. Now I want "She did it."



"
— Katherine Dunham

""No bird soars too high if he soars with his own wings."
"
— William Blake

"People pretend not to like grapes when the vines are too high for them to reach."
— Marguerite de Navarre

"Achievement is achievement no matter how small it is."
— Veronica Purcell

"Most of us plateau when we lose the tension between where we are and where we ought to be."
— John Gardiner

"Be the CHANGE that you want to see in the World"
— Mahatma Ghandi

"Kites rise highest against the wind - not with it.
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— Winston Churchill

"If this book has a lesson, it is that we are awfully lucky to be here-and by 'we' I mean every living thing. To attain any kind of life in this universe of ours appears to be quite an achievement. As humans we are doubly lucky, of course: We enjoy not only the privilege of existence but also the singular ability to appreciate it and even, in a multitude of ways, to make it better. It is a talent we have only barely begun to grasp."
— Bill Bryson (A Short History of Nearly Everything)

"I've wanted to win at everything, every day, since I was a kid. And time doesn't change a person, it just helps you get a handle on who you are. Even at age 41, I still hate losing--I'm just more gracious about it. I'm also aware that setbacks have an upside; they fuel new dreams."
— Dara Torres (Age is Just a Number: Achieve Your Dreams At Any Stage In Your Life)

"The most important thing about goals is having them"
— Lisa Cummings

"When your desires are strong enough, you will appear to possess superhuman powers to achieve."
— Napoleon Hill

"In a variation on James's recipe for interesting experience--the familiar leavened by the novel--Hobbs's "art of choosing difficulties" requires selecting projects that are "just manageable." If an activity is too easy, you lose focus and get bored. If it's too hard, you become anxious, overwhelmed, and unable to concentrate. Tellingly, one group is distinguished by its zeal for the kind of work that requires you to give it all you've got: high achievers particularly relish taking on risky projects that have only a 50/50 chance of success."
— Winifred Gallagher

"Your motivations--get that promotion, throw the best parties, run for public office--aren't impersonal abstractions but powerfully reflect who you are and what you focus on. An individual's goals figure prominently in the theories of personality first developed by the Harvard psychologist Henry Murray. According to his successor David McClelland, what Friedrich Nietzsche called "the will to power," which he considered the major driving force behind human behavior, is one of the three basic motivations, along with achievement and affiliation, that differentiate us as individuals.

A simple experiment show show these broad emotional motivations can affect what you pay attention to or ignore on very basic levels. When they examine images of faces that express different kinds of emotion, power-oriented subjects are drawn to nonconfrontational visages, such as "surprise faces," rather than to those that suggest dominance, as "anger faces" do. In contrast, people spurred by affiliation gravitate toward friendly or joyful faces."
— Winifred Gallagher (Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life)

""The roughest roads often lead to the top.""
— Christina Aguilera

""If we did all the things we are capable of doing, we would literally astound ourselves.”"
— Thomas Edison

"Your achievements are only as good as your dreams."
— Harwinder Singh Bhatia

"Every achievement is a servitude. It compels us to a higher achievement."
— Albert Camus