The 75 Best Quotes About Success and Happiness of All-Time
(Culturcidal will be getting a little “listier” in December because there are a few end-of-year lists that I like to release. So, it seemed like a good time to drop an article like this. Many hours of work went into it, so enjoy!)
A good quote can condense a book's worth of wisdom into a profound sentence or two. A good quote will teach you more about life, happiness, economics, politics, and culture than a thousand hours of watching TV, TikTok, or scrolling through Twitter. A good quote can guide you through the worst of times or point you in the right direction when you're lost. Good quotes matter and these are the 50 that have had the biggest impact on my thinking. Turn these quotes over in your mind. Deeply consider them from every angle. Where your mind says, "that can't be right," allow them to challenge your thinking. Allow these quotes can help lead you towards a happier and more successful life.
1) "No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted." - Aesop
2) "If you can't afford it, you don't deserve it." - Anonymous
3) "It's likely that whatever challenges you have faced in your life currently could have been avoided but some better decisions upstream." - Anonymous
4) "Find something you love to do so much that you'd do it for free and find a way to make it into a career." - Anonymous
5) "Hold yourself responsible for a higher standard than anybody else expects of you. Never excuse yourself. Never pity yourself. Be a hard master to yourself - and be lenient to everybody else." -Henry Ward Beecher
6) "Virtue is persecuted more by the wicked than it is loved by the good." - Buddha
7) 'People like people who help them like themselves." - Dale Carnegie
8) "Our greatest fear should not be of failure but of succeeding at things in life that don't really matter." - Francis Chan
9) "The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing." - Stephen Covey
10) "I have offended God and mankind because my work didn't reach the quality it should have." -- The unproven last words of Leonardo da Vinci
11) "What gets measured, gets managed." - Peter Drucker
12) "All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
13) "There's many a slip twixt the cup and the lip." -- English Proverb
14) "If you desire to be good, begin by believing that you are wicked." - Epictetus
15) "That's precisely the question everyone should be asking - why the hell not? - Why not you, why not now…" - Tim Ferriss
16) "He who lives by the crystal ball soon learns to eat ground glass." - Edgar R. Fiedler
17) "The last of human freedoms - the ability to choose one's attitude in a given set of circumstances." - Viktor E. Frankl
18) "Don't try to be different. Just be good. To be good is different enough." - Arthur Freed
19) "For whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap." - Galatians 6:7
20) "The will to win is meaningless without the will to prepare!" - Joe Gibbs
21) "Everybody wants a quick fix. You may get results, but they won't be permanent. The permanent results come from you having to suffer." - David Goggins
22) "Hard choices, easy life. Easy choices, hard life." - Jerzy Gregorek
23) "The life we end up with is simply an accumulation of the choices we make." - Darren Hardy
24) "Evolution is the DNA of a continued existence. Those who don't evolve become the subject of a 'Whatever Happened To' story." -- Paul Heyman
25) "We can be absolutely certain only about things we do not understand." - Eric Hoffer
26) "Don't tell your problems to people: eighty percent don't care and the other twenty percent are glad you have them." - Lou Holtz
27) "The great use of life is to spend it for something that will outlast it." - William James
28) "7 months straight. No stopping, no maintenance weeks, no cheat meals. Why? Because if someone beat me, I didn't want to look back at any cheat meals and ask 'what if'. I did what it took every single day, and THAT is why I looked the way I did. You either want it or you don't. Just so you know, there wasn't a day that went by in the last 8-10 weeks of that prep where I didn't want just ONE extra yogurt or 5 less intervals of cardio. But, I was not going to be outworked! I was NOT going to be denied! And you know what? It was all worth it." - Tommy Jeffers
29) "Pressure is what you feel when you don't know what's going on." - Chuck Knoll
30) The trouble is, you think you have time." -- Jack Kornfield
31) "Wait too long and life will pass you by. Don't make the mistake of thinking everything will give you a second chance." - Ed Latimore
32) "Affection is responsible for nine-tenths of whatever solid and durable happiness there is in our lives." - C.S. Lewis
33) "We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst." - C.S. Lewis
34) "I walk slowly, but I never walk backward." - Abraham Lincoln
35) "Winning is not a sometime thing: it's an all the time thing. You don't win once in a while; you don't do the right thing once in a while; you do them right all the time. Winning is a habit. Unfortunately, so is losing." - Vince Lombardi
36) "Once you agree upon the price you and your family must pay for success, it enables you to ignore the minor hurts, the opponent's pressure, and the temporary failures." - Vince Lombardi
37) "Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree." - Martin Luther
38) "And what physicians say about disease is applicable here: that at the beginning a disease is easy to cure but difficult to diagnose; but as time passes, not having been treated or recognized at the outset, it becomes easy to diagnose but difficult to cure. The same thing occurs in affairs of state; for by recognizing from afar the diseases that are spreading in the state (which is a gift given only to a prudent ruler), they can be cured quickly; but when they are not recognized and are left to grow to the extent that everyone recognizes them, there is no longer any cure." - Niccolo Machiavelli
39) "From this arises an argument: whether it is better to be loved than feared. I reply that one should like to be both one and the other; but since it is difficult to join them together, it is much safer to be feared than to be loved when one of the two must be lacking." - Niccolo Machiavelli
40) "One can make this generalization about men: they are ungrateful, fickle, liars, and deceivers, they shun danger and are greedy for profit; while you treat them well, they are yours. They would shed their blood for you, risk their property, their lives, their children, so long, as I said above, as danger is remote; but when you are in danger they turn against you." - Niccolo Machiavelli
41) "If you want to double your success ratio, you have to double your failure ratio." - Harvey Mackay
42) "There is an immeasurable distance between late and too late." - Og Mandino
43) "If I were dropped out of a plane into the ocean and told the nearest land was a thousand miles away, I'd still swim. And I'd despise the one who gave up." - Abraham Maslow
44) "If you plan on being anything less than you are capable of being, you will probably be unhappy all the days of your life." - Abraham Maslow
45) "I made up my mind long ago that life was too short to do anything for myself that I could pay others to do for me." - W. Somerset Maugham
46) "If people knew how hard I worked to get my mastery, it wouldn't seem so wonderful at all." - Michelangelo
47) "Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage." - Anais Nin
48) "The finest steel has to go through the hottest fire." - Richard Nixon
49) "If you don't know what you want, you end up with a lot you don't." - Chuck Palahniuk
50) "A good plan violently executed right now is far better than a perfect plan executed next week." - George S. Patton
51) "What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments, but what is woven into the lives of others." - Pericles
52) "The final test of a gentleman is his respect for those who can be of no possible service to him." - William Lyon Phelps
53) "The curse of me and my nation is that we always think things can be bettered by immediate action of some sort, any sort rather than no sort." - Plato
54) "When you're playing against a stacked deck, compete even harder. Show the world how much you'll fight for the winner's circle. If you do, someday the cellophane will crackle off a fresh pack, one that belongs to you, and the cards will be stacked in your favor." - Pat Riley
55) "The secret to bluffing is to not bluff." - Robert Ringer
56) "…Perhaps only 45% of success is showing up, while another 45% of success is asking. Asking is the simplest, most efficient, and potentially most rewarding action a person can take. I've become such a believer in the power of asking that I am compelled to share with you my Ten Sacred Rules of Success:
Rule No. 1: Ask
Rule No. 2: Ask again.
Rule No. 3: Ask again.
Rule No. 4: Ask again.
Rule No. 5: Ask again.
Rule No. 6: Ask again.
Rule No. 7: Ask again.
Rule No. 8: Ask again.
Rule No. 9: Ask again.
Rule No. 10: Ask again." - Robert Ringer
57) "To remind yourself of the power of persistence, consider the metaphor of the stonecutter. How does he break open a giant boulder? He whacks it as hard as he can. The first hit doesn't leaven even a scratch, but he strikes hundreds, maybe even thousands of times. He persists even when his actions seem to be futile. But he knows that just because you don't see immediate results, it doesn't mean you're not making progress. So he keeps striking the rock. At some point, it doesn't just chip but literally splits in two. Did the final blow break the boulder open? Of course not. It was the constant pressure being applied to the challenge at hand." - Anthony Robbins
58) "Nothing in life has any real meaning except the meaning you give it." - Tony Robbins
59) "Your emotions are nothing but biochemical storms in your brain and you are in control of them at any point in time." - Tony Robbins
60) "I say: Be the hero in your own movie. Pretend that your life was a movie and it started now, what would the hero do? What would the person that you respect do? What would the person that you admire, and inspires you do? Do that." - Joe Rogan
61) "Don't wish it were easier, wish you were better." - Jim Rohn
62) "Success is not to be pursued, it is to be attracted by the person you become". - Jim Rohn
63) "It is not the critic that counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or the doer of deeds could have them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the Arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but he who does actually strive to do the deed; who knows the great devotion; who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails while daring greatly, knows that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls, who know neither victory nor defeat." - Teddy Roosevelt
64) "Don't hit at all if it is honorably possible to avoid hitting; but never hit soft." - Teddy Roosevelt
65) "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest". - Adam Smith
66) "There are no solutions, only trade-offs." - Thomas Sowell
67) "A succinct summary of the tragic vision was given by historians Will and Ariel Durant: Out of every hundred new ideas ninety-nine or more will probably be inferior to the traditional responses which they propose to replace. No one man, however brilliant or well-informed, can come in one lifetime to such fullness of understanding as to safely judge and dismiss the customs or institutions of his society, for those are the wisdom of generations after centuries of experiment in the laboratory of history." - Thomas Sowell
68) "Of course, it's the same old story. Truth usually is the same old story." - Margaret Thatcher
69) "The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it." - Henry David Thoreau
70) "Always protect against the downside-the upside will take care of itself." - Donald Trump
71) "There is certainly nothing more important in life than what we do at the present moment. A person's entire life consists of nothing more than one moment piled on top of another, over and over again. Once enlightened to this, the warrior has nothing else to worry about, because he realizes that he has only to live in the present moment with the utmost intensity." -- Yamamoto Tsunetomo
72) "Don't go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first." - Mark Twain
73) "Always do right-this will gratify some and astonish the rest." - Mark Twain
74) "The truth is never the problem; The problem is always the problem." - Jeff Vanvonderen
75) "If you don't have a competitive advantage, don't compete." - Jack Welch