PERSEVERENCE/PERSISTENCE & SUCCESS       Once you have decided what is important to you, keep that clear and honorable objective in mind and begin to move toward it.       Your path may not be a straight line, and it is virtually sure that obstacles will seem to block your path.       Deal with any adversities, but keep your objective in mind...and never quit moving toward it. "Fortune favours the brave." -- Terence "Courage and perseverance have a magical talisman, before which difficulties disappear and obstacles vanish into air." -- John Quincy Adams "Obstacles are things a person sees when he takes his eyes off his goal." -- E. Joseph Cossman "Let me tell you the secret that has led to my goal: My strength lies solely in my tenacity." -- Louis Pasteur "Achieve success in any area of life by identifying the optimum strategies and repeating them until they become habits." -- Charles J. Givens "Success seems to be largely a matter of hanging on after others have let go." -- William Feather "A racehorse that consistently runs just a second faster than another horse is worth millions of dollars more. Be willing to give that extra effort that separates the winner from the one in second place." -- H. Jackson Brown, Jr. "Effort only fully releases its reward after a person refuses to quit." -- Napoleon Hill "Great works are performed not by strength but by perseverance." -- Samuel Johnson "Achievement is not always success, while reputed failure often is. It is honest endeavor, persistent effort to do the best possible under any and all circumstances." -- Orison Swett Marden "Every adversity carries with it the seed of an equal or greater benefit." -- Napoleon Hill "The manner in which one endures what must be endured is more important than the thing that must be endured." -- Dean Gooderham Acheson "The most glorious moments in your life are not the so-called days of success, but rather those days when out of dejection and despair you feel rise in you a challenge to life, and the promise of future accomplishments." -- Gustave Flaubert "Failure is an indispensable prerequisite of success. It is how you learn the lessons you need." -- Brian Tracy "Not many people are willing to give failure a second opportunity. They fail once and it is all over. The bitter pill of failure is often more than most people can handle. If you are willing to accept failure and learn from it, if you are willing to consider failure as a blessing in disguise and bounce back, you have got the essential of harnessing one of the most powerful success forces." -- Joseph Sugarman "If God would have meant for us to all fail... He would have not invented success." -- Doug Firebaugh "I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is another step forward." -- Thomas Alva Edison "Table your mistakes, learn from them, then move on." -- Confucius "On course doesn't mean perfect. On course means that even when things don't go perfectly -- you are still going in the right direction." -- Charles Garfield, Author "Success is never final and failure never fatal. It's courage that counts." -- Jules Ellinger "It is a mistake to suppose that men succeed through success; they much oftener succeed through failures. Precept, study, advice, and example could never have taught them so well as failure has done." -- Samuel Smiles "Smooth seas do not make skillful sailors." -- African Proverb "You are a product of your environment. So choose the environment that will best develop you toward your objective. Analyze your life in terms of its environment. Are the things around you helping you toward success -- or are they holding you back? -- Clement Stone "Every successful man I have heard of has done the best he could with conditions as he found them..." -- Edgar Watson Howe "If I had to select one quality, one personal characteristic that I regard as being most highly correlated with success, whatever the field, I would pick the trait of persistence. Determination. The will to endure to the end, to get knocked down seventy times and get up off the floor saying, 'Here comes number seventy-one!' -- Richard M. DeVos "Being defeated is often a temporary condition. Giving up is what makes it permanent." -- Marilyn vos Savant "The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can't find them, make them." -- George Bernard Shaw "If your ship doesn't come in, swim out to it." -- Jonathan Winters "Scorn also to diminish your competitor by any dishonest or unworthy method; strive to raise yourself above him only by excelling him; thus will your contest for superiority be crowned with honour, as with success." -- Akhenaton "First and foremost, your ability to achieve success at a targeted, predetermined goal will be a direct function of the degree of consistent intensity which drives the momentum of your efforts." -- Pete Johnson "Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, vision cleared, ambition inspired, and success achieved." -- Helen Keller "A certain amount of opposition is a great help to a man. Kites rise against, not with the wind." -- John Neal "The price of success is hard work, dedication to the job at hand, and the determination that whether we win or lose, we have applied the best of ourselves to the task at hand." -- Vince Lombardi "Success is not measured by the position one has reached in life, rather by the obstacles overcome while trying to succeed." -- Booker T. Washington "When you get in a tight place and everything goes against you, till it seems as though you could not hold on a minute longer, never give up then, for that is just the place and time that the tide will turn." -- Harriet Beecher Stowe "When you come to the end of your rope, tie a knot and hang on." -- Franklin D. Roosevelt "Whenever I hear, 'It can't be done,' I know I'm close to success." -- Michael Flatley "Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more commmon than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent." -- Calvin Coolidge "Never give in. Never give in. Never, never, never, never--in nothing, great or small, large or petty--never give in, except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force. Never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy." -- Winston Churchill "Accept the challenges, so that you may feel the exhilaration of victory." -- General George S. Patton    Definitions of Success    Recognition & Success    Dreams & Success    Purpose & Success    Self-Expression & Success    Mind/Thought & Success    Visualization & Success    Personal Growth & Success    Commitment/Enthusiasm & Success    Strategy/Preparation & Success    Service & Success    Projection/Energy & Success    Action & Success    Perseverence/Persistence & Success   Return to RSVP For Success home page