#achieve

What'll Geoffrey do when you pull off your First, my child?" demanded Miss Haydock. "Well, Eve -- it will be awkward if I do that. Poor lamb! I shall have to make him believe I only did it by looking fragile and pathetic at the viva. ↗

— Dorothy L. Sayers

#academia #academic-degrees #achievements #clichés #double-standards

Gates is the ultimate programming machine. He believes everything can be defined, examined, reduced to essentials, and rearranged into a logical sequence that will achieve a particular goal. ↗

— Stewart Alsop

#achieve #believes #defined #essentials #everything

We like to stress the commonness of heroes. Essences seem undemocratic. We feel oppressed by the call to greatness. We regard an interest in glory or perfection as a sign of mental unhealthiness, and have decided that high achievers, who are called overachievers, owe their surplus ambition to a defect in mothering (either too little or too much). We want to admire but think we have a right not to be intimidated. We dislike feeling inferior to an ideal. So away with ideals, with essences. The only ideals allowed are healthy ones -- those everyone may aspire to, or comfortably imagine oneself possessing. ↗

— Susan Sontag

#ambition #democracy #egalitarianism #equality #essence

When the awareness of what is achievable brushes your life, your journey has begun. ↗

— Lorii Myers

#awareness #life #lorii-myers #make-it-happen #success

I believe that we are all born for greatness yet most of us mire in the mediocrity of life. We become complacent or worse, discouraged and stagnate. We damn ourselves by not progressing. ↗

— Toni Sorenson

#greatness #life #progress #life

...no matter how much Theo achieves and acquires and out-dazzles everyone else, she never seems content. She's taught you that people who shine more lavishly that everyone else seem to be penalized by discontent, as if they're being punished for craving a brighter life. I've been knocked down so many times I can't remember the number plates, she said once. ↗

— Nikki Gemmell

#discontent #life

A tenacious grip on our own ideals, irrespective of hurdles, would propel us towards self-actualization! ↗

— Deeba Salim Irfan

#goal #goal-achievement #goals #hurdles #love-hurts

The generality of mankind is lazy. What distinguishes men of genuine achievement from the rest of us is not so much their intellectual powers and aptitudes as their curiosity, their energy, their fullest use of their potentialities. Nobody really knows how smart or talented he is until he finds the incentives to use himself to the fullest. God has given us more than we know what to do with. ↗

— Sydney J. Harris

#achievement #curiosity #god #laziness #potential

Achievement seems to be connected with action. Successful men and women keep moving. They make mistakes, but they don't quit. ↗

— Conrad Hilton

#men

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

#career