Failure means that you would not, or could not, pay for success. Success is a matter of sale. It can (most often) be bought by a large outlay--of hard forethought--of pains--of steadiness--of the golden wisdom coined from experience. But the figure is too high for most of us. We are too poor, or too slothful, to bring the price.

Success in life could be defined as the continued expansion of happiness and the progressive realization of worthy goals. Success is the ability to fulfill your desires with effortless ease. And yet success, including the creation of wealth, has always been considered to be a process that requires hard work, and it is often considered to be at the expense of others. We need a more spiritual approach to success and to affluence, which is the abundant flow of all good things to you. With knowledge and practice of spiritual law, we put ourselves in harmony with nature and create with carefreeness, joy, and love.

You create everything that happens to you.... If you want to be really successful, and I know you do, then you will have to give up blaming and complaining and take total responsibility for your life--that means all your results, both your successes and your failures. That is the prerequisite for creating a life of success. It is only by acknowledging that you have created everything up until now that you can take charge of creating the future you want.

The mighty credit, which is a mantle of cloth of gold and finest silver spun ... by the greatest of the angels of men--Success.

The talent of success is nothing more than doing what you can do well; and doing well whatever you do, without a thought of fame.

Success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles one has overcome while trying to succeed.

Success, instead of giving freedom of choice, becomes a way of life. There's no country I've been to where people, when you come into a room and sit down with them, so often ask you, "What do you do?" And, being American, many's the time I've almost asked that question, then realized it's good for my soul not to know. For a while! Just to let the evening wear on and see what I think of this person without knowing what he does and how successful he is, or what a failure. We're ranking everybody every minute of the day.

Success causes us to be more praised than known.

A common tendency is to set an almost unreachable standard for success while simultaneously creating a standard for failure that is easy to meet. As a result, you may routinely feel a lot less successful than is necessary.

How few successful men are interesting! Hannibal, Alcibiades, with Raleigh, Mithridates, and Napoleon, who would compare them for a moment with their mere conquerors?

All successful men have agreed in one thing--they were causationists. They believed that things went not by luck, but by law; that there was not a weak or a cracked link in the chain that joins the first and last of things. A belief in causality, or strict connection between every trifle and the principle of being, and, in consequence, belief in compensation, or, that nothing is got for nothing--characterizes all valuable minds, and must control every effort that is made by an industrious one. The most valiant men are the best believers in the tension of the laws.

People seldom see the halting and painful steps by which the most insignificant success is achieved.

There are two kinds of success, or rather two kinds of ability displayed in the achievement of success. There is, first, the success either in big things or small things which comes to the man who has in him the natural power to do what no one else can do, and what no amount of training, no perseverance or will power, will enable any ordinary man to do. This success, of course, like every other kind of success, may be on a very big scale or on a small scale. The quality which the man possesses may be that which enables him to run a hundred yards in nine and three-fifths seconds, or to play ten separate games of chess at the same time blindfolded, or to add five columns of figures at once without effort, or to write the "Ode to a Grecian Urn," or to deliver the Gettysburg speech, or to show the ability of Frederick at Leuthen or Nelson at Trafalgar. No amount of training of body or mind would enable any good ordinary man to perform any one of these feats. Of course the proper performance of each implies much previous study or training, but in no one of them is success to be attained save by the altogether exceptional man who has in him the something additional which the ordinary man does not have. This is the most striking kind of success, and it can be attained only by the man who has in him the quality which separates him in kind no less than in degree from his fellows. But much the commoner type of success in every walk of life and in every species of effort is that which comes to the man who differs from his fellows not by the kind of quality which he possesses but by the degree of development which he has given that quality. This kind of success is open to a large number of persons, if only they seriously determine to achieve it. It is the kind of success which is open to the average man of sound body and fair mind, who has no remarkable mental or physical attributes, but who gets just as much as possible in the way of work out of the aptitudes that he does possess. It is the only kind of success that is open to most of us. Yet some of the greatest successes in history have been those of this second class--when I call it second class I am not running it down in the least, I am merely pointing out that it differs in kind from the first class. To the average man it is probably more useful to study this second type of success than to study the first. From the study of the first he can learn inspiration, he can get uplift and lofty enthusiasm. From the study of the second he can, if he chooses, find out how to win a similar success himself.

No illusion is more crucial than the illusion that great success and huge money buy you immunity from the common ills of mankind, such as cars that won't start.

Consider what God can do, and you will never despair of success.

There are very few cases of overnight success. Most success cases--including rock bands who seem to explode out of nowhere--involve longer term persistence and commitment to an interest.

Human success is a quotation from overhead.

The chances of a man's succeeding who does not love his work are very small. For all success costs labor.

Success makes life easier. It doesn't make living easier.

The greatest thing a man can possibly do in this world is to make the most possible out of the stuff that has been given him. This is success, and there is no other.

There's no point in success if you don't let it go to your head. That's what it's for.

Can success change the human mechanism so completely between one dawn and another? Can it make one feel taller, more alive, handsomer, uncommonly gifted and indomitably secure with the certainty that this is the way life will always be? It can and it does!

Success, which touches nothing that it does not vulgarize, should be its own reward.

The truth is that all of us attain the greatest success and happiness possible whenever we use our native capacities to their greatest extent.

Most of us go through life borrowing someone else's definition of success rather than coming up with our own!

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