Quote#Success & Failure
The way to secure success, is to be more anxious about obtaining than…
Quote byWilliam Hazlitt · 1778–1830
Commonly attributed — not confirmed in an authoritative edition. Cited on Wikiquote to: The Plain Speaker (1826), "On the Qualifications Necessary for Success".
English (original)
The way to secure success, is to be more anxious about obtaining than about deserving it; the surest hindrance to it is to have too high a standard of refinement in our own minds, or too high an opinion of the discernment of the public.
— William Hazlitt
More from William Hazlitt
Those who aim at faultless regularity will only produce mediocrity, and no one ever approaches perfection except by stealth, and unknown to themselves.
We do not see nature with our eyes, but with our understandings and our hearts.
Look up, laugh loud, talk big, keep the colour in your cheek and the fire in your eye, adorn your person, maintain your health, your beauty, and your animal spirits, and you will pass for a fine man.
The slaves of power mind the cause they have to serve, because their own interest is concerned; but the friends of liberty always sacrifice their cause, which is only the cause of humanity, to their own spleen, vanity, and self-opinion.
You know more of a road by having travelled it than by all the conjectures and descriptions in the world.
Do not keep on with a mockery of friendship after the substance is gone — but part, while you can part friends. Bury the carcass of friendship: it is not worth embalming.