Beyond Success and Failure Quotes

“The perfectionist is a frightened, competitive individual who wants always to win and be secure. He mistakenly believes that he is a lover of the truth for its own sake. But the reality is that he only wants to be above criticism and, therefore, superior to those who are less perfect. He is constantly comparing himself with others. He feels exposed to danger if any error is allowed to creep into his own activity. He is seldom aware of his hostile downgrading of those whom he regards as less perfect than he; he
belittles their standards and their personal value in order to exalt his own.
The perfectionist is a faultfinder, and nothing is ever good enough for him. He disrupts situations by his belittling of others and disturbs cooperation in a group by trying to exalt and impose his standards on them. He sees only the hole in the doughnut and insists on others condemning it along with him.
The perfectionist loves to collect and tabulate evidence against others to prove their inferiority as human beings and thus put himself in a clear light of superiority. He is proud of his ability to find the Achilles heel and the imperfections of other people-to expose them.
Perfectionism is a side-show activity which destroys the spontaneity and creative power he might otherwise bring to the solution of his own problems. He flees from reality into a search for ideal solutions and thus isolates himself from effective contact with confronting problems; he blinds and deafens himself to the What Is in his illusions of What Should Be.”
― Willard Beecher, Beyond Success and Failure: Ways to Self-Reliance and Maturity

“The alcoholic has to be in such pain that he is willing to do anything, even get well! He has to be thoroughly disenchanted with alcohol and what it does for him. He has to know that there is no way for him to drink even a small amount of alcohol without going on to the hitter end. He must know every aspect of his enemy. He has to see the whole wasteland alcohol makes for him in daily life. He has to see it so clearly that he sees he is not giving up an old, delightful companion. On the contrary, he is getting rid of a curse. He is ditching a had companion and happy to see the last of it.
Getting rid of something we dislike is quite a different
thing to us than giving up something we like. This probably stems from the acquisitive, possessive habit we originally had as children. Every parent knows that if you want to take something away from a baby, you have to offer the baby something else with the other hand. It is much the same with us; we resist any kind of surrender if we interpret it as being deprived of a want! But we gladly get rid of a pin that is sticking us! Everything seems to depend on the value judgment we make about a habit. And we can do nothing about a habit unless we change the value judgment and put the habit in another context. It all depends on how you look at it!”
― Willard Beecher, Beyond Success and Failure: Ways to Self-Reliance and Maturity

“Grudges, like animals in a zoo, must be fed daily. If we do not revive them in our memory and water them with our tears, they perish. The practiced grudge collector isn't out of bed in the morning before he has picked up his rosary and begun his endless rounds on it. His greatest fear is that he will lose a bead and have less to feel put back about. He won't part with a single one of them.
Why does he fear to forget a single grudge when he has so many of them? Blaming others is an easy way to build up the feeling of our own importance, so that we can console ourselves for not making a bigger splash in the outside world. It is an easy way to feel that we are big shots that are being overlooked. Blaming others gives us a fictitious elevation. It allows us to look down on others.
Not many of us are entirely free of the habit of blaming others and holding grudges. Psychological memory is a curse to most of us. But if we listen to our voice blaming, condemning, judging, belittling others, we soon become nauseated with our own holier-than-thou pretense of moral superiority, and we soon become allergic to our own big-me and little-you posture. Self-praise stinks, and we can't stand our own variety. It soon produces instant nausea as an antidote to our habit of injustice collecting, so that we are happy to see the end of it.”
― Willard Beecher, Beyond Success and Failure: Ways to Self-Reliance and Maturity

“Grudges, like animals in a zoo, must be fed daily. If we do not revive them in our memory and water them with our tears, they perish. The practiced grudge collector isn't out of bed in the morning before he has picked up his rosary and begun his endless rounds on it. His greatest fear is that he will lose a bead and have less to feel put back about. He won't part with a single one of them.
Why does he fear to forget a single grudge when he has so many of them? Blaming others is an easy way to build up the feeling of our own importance, so that we can console ourselves for not making a bigger splash in the outside world. It is an easy way to feel that we are big shots that are being overlooked. Blaming others gives us a fictitious elevation. It allows us to look down on others.
Not many of us are entirely free of the habit of blaming others and holding grudges. Psychological memory is a curse to most of us. But if we listen to our voice blaming, condemning, judging, belittling others, we soon become nauseated with our own holier-than-thou pretense of moral superiority, and we soon become allergic to our own big-me and little-you posture.”
― Willard Beecher, Beyond Success and Failure: Ways to Self-Reliance and Maturity

“You cannot change the world except to the extent you change yourself. It is your move! You cannot change other people. They are as they are. You can change yourself, however, only to the degree you alter, modify or become aware of your unrealistic ideal expectations of what-should-be. It is the what-should-be that bars the gate to reality. You and you alone can change your fate.”
― Willard Beecher, Beyond Success and Failure: Ways to Self-Reliance and Maturity

“No amount of success can make up to an individual for his own lack of agape. Above all, agape is nonjudgmental; we do not condemn ourself or others.”
― Willard Beecher, Beyond Success and Failure: Ways to Self-Reliance and Maturity

“We please others best-and best satisfy ourselves-only
when we have done our own job fully and thus fulfilled our own potential.”
― Willard Beecher, Beyond Success and Failure: Ways to Self-Reliance and Maturity

“Until a person has discovered and dares to follow his own inner gleam, we may be sure of one thing: he will be leaning in either negative or positive dependence on someone outside himself!”
― Willard Beecher, Beyond Success and Failure: Ways to Self-Reliance and Maturity

“Dependence leads to fear; fear leads to comparisons; comparisons lead to competition, and competition eventually destroys us by degrading us to imitation, conformity, infantilism or mediocrity.”
― Willard Beecher, Beyond Success and Failure: Ways to Self-Reliance and Maturity

“Competition is frequently praised as a great virtue to be developed by everyone. This is a costly misunderstanding, since human skills develop adequately only in cooperation, a condition of reinforcement. Competition always lies at cross-purposes with cooperation and thus frustrates individual human initiative.”
― Willard Beecher, Beyond Success and Failure: Ways to Self-Reliance and Maturity

“Let us face the fact: how else can we endure life on this earth unless we can achieve a large degree of tolerance of oneself and others? Life is far too painful if we are hypersensitive and look for the flaws in everything.”
― Willard Beecher, Beyond Success and Failure: Ways to Self-Reliance and Maturity

“The way out of a trap is to know the way the trap is built. Only then will it cease being a trap.”
― Marguerite Beecher, Beyond Success and Failure: Ways to Self-Reliance and Maturity