Self-Made Success Quotes

Ancestry is most important to those who have done nothing themselves.

Imagine if your success in life is determined only by your guts, your hard work, and your willpower, and not by the wealth of your parents. I think it'll be a much more interesting world. I think this could change the way the planet is run.

Madam Walker, as part of the first generation out of slavery, really was inventing the way that she operated in the world.

Conservatism means re-embracing true free enterprise. True free enterprise, which I believe and not because my parents were wealthy, not because I inherited millions of dollars because I did not, but because as I walked on to the stage here today, I walked through the kitchen of this hotel and I met people and shook the hands of people who are doing the jobs my parents once did.

Top performers in their fields such as Debbie Moore, Jean-Christophe Novelli, Deborah Meaden and Jo Malone, did not go to university and are just a handful of the individuals who show that with drive and determination, you can succeed by treading your own path.

Biography, especially of the great and good, who have risen by their own exertions to eminence and usefulness, is an inspiring and ennobling study. Its direct tendency is to reproduce the excellence it records.

I think what you inherit is not real. I haven't inherited anything. What I have is really mine because I made it myself.

I know where I am headed and how will I evolve. There's nothing stopping you. I don't have a family background on films, and I will need to work for it.

The money is of no concern to me, whatsoever. I started out with nothing.

In Naples, Fla., I met a self-made man, a multimillionaire, whose round penthouse apartment is home to Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Claude Monet, Henry Moore, and Mickey Mantle. He had purchased the most coveted items auctioned by the Mantle family at Madison Square Garden in December 2003.

I think I've got my business notions and my sense for that sort of thing from my dad. My dad never had a chance to go to school. He couldn't read and write. But he was so smart. He was just one of those people that could just make the most of anything and everything that he had to work with.

My father always said working for somebody else never amounted to anything. You have to be an entrepreneur

Every business decision I ever made I learned from my grandfather Papa Sam. He moved here from Russia when he was a boy. He worked his way up selling newspapers and ladies' handbags, and eventually, he became Cadillac Sam, one of the biggest car dealers in Chicago.

Back in the day, I used to get really upset when people used to say that I didn't really make all my own things - like my art or my videos or whatever. I work really hard on everything, so it used to upset me when people would try to discredit me or say that I wouldn't have what I had without this person or that person.

I'm gonna fight, and I'm gonna make something out of nothing. That's pretty much the American dream. So, for me, the realization that I could speak to people like that came first on a small scale. Then it just started happening. I started having this vibration.

I'm very proud of my career. A lot of people get their career from the judges of 'Drag Race' saying they're great. I had to go and build that reputation from the ground up.

Fortune is for all, judgment is theirs who have won it for themselves.

Great innovators like Thomas Alva Edison, Henry Ford, and Andrew Carnegie didn't rely on government. There was hardly any of it in those days. More recently, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Larry Ellison used genius to put brand-new ideas into production.

My father was an immigrant who literally walked across Europe to get out of Russia. He fought in World War I. He was wounded in action. My father was a great success even though he never had money. He was a very determined man, a great role model.

I've had smarter people around me all my life, but I haven't run into one yet that can outwork me. And if they can't outwork you, then smarts aren't going to do them much good. That's just the way it is. And if you believe that and live by it, you'd be surprised at how much fun you can have. “Any time you give a man something he doesn't earn, you cheapen him. Our kids earn what they get, and that includes respect.

Men are naturally lazy, and require some great stimulus to goad their flagging ambitions and enable them to overcome the inertia which comes from ease and the consciousness of inherited wealth. Whatever lessens in a young man the feeling that he must make his way in the world cripples his chance of success. Poverty has ever been the priceless spur that has goaded man up to his own loaf.

Waiting for opportunities in the entertainment industry is an impossibility; they are not coming. You have to make your own.

I cannot think of anything characteristically American that was not produced by toil. I cannot think of any American man or woman preeminent in the history of our nation who did not reach their place through toil. I cannot think of anything that represents the American people as a whole so adequately as honest work.

I was a poor kid. I came from nothing. We didn't have any money; a lot of times we didn't have any food, and now, all of a sudden, I'm a superhero in a Marvel movie? Talk about the American dream, man - I'm living it.

I was told I had to go to business school to succeed. I gave it a shot, but eventually dropped out to bootstrap a restaurant with just a Visa card and a $20,000 line of credit. Everyone told me restaurants were hard work (and they were right! I have so much respect for anyone in the restaurant business). I ran the restaurant for two years, sold a franchise, decided to change paths, and sold the whole operation at a modest profit.