William Makepeace Thackeray Quotes

It's so easy for all the success in the world to suddenly end, and I'm quite aware of that.

The Worldly Hope men set their Hearts upon Turns Ashes - or it prospers; and anon, Like Snow upon the Desert's dusty Face, Lighting a little hour or two - is gone.

There's two kinds of rock n' roll casualty: the one that has huge success and adoration, and then suddenly it stops. Or there's when you're in a band: it is all-consuming, so then you have the dream of that, and then the dream's taken away from you even before it happens.

Every winning streak will have to end sometime.

The human race is intoxicated with narrow victories, for life is a string of them like pearls that hit the floor when the rope breaks, and roll away in perfection and anarchy.

Life is a video game. No matter how good you get, you are always zapped in the end.

Even success needs its consolations.

I'm not afraid of total failure. In the end, we're all just food for worms, so what are we so worried about?

The world will fall, the gods will die, and I will never achieve a perfect score on this stupid machine. -Dionysus

The two hardest things to contemplate in life ... are failure and age; those are one and the same.

Everyone wants to learn how to win, but no one wants to learn how to accept defeat.

Now, more than ever, I realize just how illusory my undeserved success has been. I still hold out some hope of doing better, but age and unhappiness have sapped my strength.

For one brief moment victory was within our grasp!" "And then the game started!

Sometimes I think the purpose of life is to reconcile us to its eventual loss by wearing us down, by proving, however long it takes, that life isn't all it's cracked up to be.

You and I are like the first two people on earth who at the beginning of the world had nothing to cover themselves with - at the end of it, you and I are just as stripped and homeless. And you and I are the last remembrance of all that immeasurable greatness which has been created in all the thousands of years between their time and ours, and it is in memory of all that vanished splendour that we live and love and weep and cling to one another.

I would be glad to worship success if I could find her.

He could not play the game without hope; could not play the game without a dream. They had taken it all away from him now, they had turned away from him and there was nothing for him now...He was alone and there was nothing for him.

Life is more about losing than winning.

I'd rather be a football coach. That way you only lose eleven games a year.

Every fair from fair sometime declines

In the end, everyone loses everyone. There was no invention to get around that, and so I felt, that night, like the turtle that everything else in the universe was on top of.

If it works out, it's the best thing in the world. If it doesn't work out, it's like having your heart torn out and chopped up into little pieces while you watch. It leaves a big hollow space that never really heals.

Defeat is most devastating at the moment of victory" Saint Dane

He shrugged his shoulders to shift the pain of failure---the pain that is so much greater than the pleasure of success.