Michael Korda

Your chances of success are directly proportional to the degree of pleasure you desire from what you do. If you are in a job you hate, face the fact squarely and get out.

If you don’t believe in yourself, then who will believe in you? The next man’s way of getting there might not necessarily work for me, so I have to create my own ways of getting there.

Success has always been easy to measure. It is the distance between one’s origins and one’s final achievement.

The biggest fool in the world is he who merely does his work supremely well, without attending to appearance.

One way to keep momentum going is to have constantly greater goals.

Success on any major scale requires you to accept responsibility… in the final analysis, the one quality that all successful people have… is the ability to take on responsibility.

It’s not a field, I think, for people who need to have success every day: if you can’t live with a nightly sort of disaster, you should get out. I wouldn’t describe myself as lacking in confidence, but I would just say that the ghosts you chase you never catch.

To succeed it is necessary to accept the world as it is and rise above it.

Luck can often mean simply taking advantage of a situation at the right moment. It is possible to make your luck by being always prepared.

Never reveal all of yourself to other people; hold back something in reserve so that people are never quite sure if they really know you.

Act well at the moment, and you have performed a good action for all eternity.

The more you can dream, the more you can do.

The purely agitation attitude is not good enough for a detailed consideration of a subject.

Men naturally resent it when women take greater liberties in dress than men are allowed.

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.

The freedom to fail is vital if you’re going to succeed. Most successful people fail from time to time, and it is a measure of their strength that failure merely propels them into some new attempt at success.

What you hear repeatedly you will eventually believe.

One of the first rules of playing the power game is that all bad news must be accepted calmly, as if one already knew and didn’t care.

An once of hypocrisy is worth a pound of ambition.

The fastest way to succeed is to look as if you’re playing by somebody else’s rules, while quietly playing by your own.

Never walk away from failure. On the contrary, study it carefully and imaginatively for its hidden assets.

An ounce of hypocracy is worth a pound of ambition.

This is true enough, but success is the next best thing to happiness, and if you can’t be happy as a success, it’s very unlikely that you would find a deeper, truer happiness in failure.