Success Illusion Quotes

Success is an ugly thing. Men are deceived by its false resemblances to merit.... They confound the brilliance of the firmament with the star-shaped footprints of a duck in the mud.

In order to succeed in the world people do their upmost to appear successful.

I think many people have an illusion of success based on entering in at a level that's higher than their experiences.

Some people are born on third base and go through life thinking they hit a triple.

I managed 26 years and found out when I retired I didn't own the game. I thought I owned it when I was managing all those years. You can climb to the top of the mountain, get down on your knees and kiss the ground, because you'll never own that mountain. That mountain is only owned by one single person, and he'll never give it up. That's the way baseball is.

I get bitter, angry and disbelieving and I tell my kids there a lot of idiots out there. I also want them to know that being successful is not the real world - that their parents get treated better because they're on TV.

I was invincible. I believed all my problems were gone and I finally made it, that L.A. was my answer to everything.

I had an Oscar, an Emmy, and yet I had this big hole in my soul.

I didn't graduate from college, so I might as well be on Atlantic Records, right?

There's nothing like a hit movie to make you think you're one of the chosen people. It's amazing how smart we are the morning after a hit opens.

I think no matter how successful our lives may seem to the outside world, we all have our personal struggles.

Failure is really a matter of conceit. People don't work hard because, in their conceit, they imagine they'll succeed without ever making an effort. Most people believe that they'll wake up some day and find themselves rich. Actually, they've got it half right, because eventually they do wake up.

I can go to my premiere at the Chinese Theatre, and everyone will know me, and everyone will cater to me. And then I'll go to an audition and get rejected left, right and centre. They don't watch my videos, and they don't really know who I am. It is like starting from scratch when it comes to traditional Hollywood.

Before it happened to me, I'd look at other people who had become really successful and think, 'What a dream. That must be absolutely everything they ever wanted.' When it does happen to you, you realize yes, it's incredible. But it also comes with a bit of a weird aftertaste.

I'm not even aware of my success. Success is such an illusion.

The library is full of stories of supposed triumphs which makes me very suspicious of it. It's misleading for people to read about great successes, since even for middle-class and upper-class white people, in my experience, failure is the norm.

I don't believe in the transformation myth, where if you have more success, life changes for you.

For each of us who appear to have had a successful experiment there are many to whom their own experiments seem barren and negative.

There's no such thing as 'making it.'

I think becoming an actor because it's a ridiculously insecure profession to go into. I feel very comfortable but very lucky. I think any time that you imagine that it's plain sailing for hereon in, then you're kidding yourself.

I think that the Oscar gives you some kind of guts or something, it gives you the illusion that you can do it. It's good for business.

Frankly, to be honest, I hadn't worked for two years before 'Murphy Brown.' It's a nice illusion now to think of all of us as terribly successful and talented people at the top of our profession, but that's hindsight. I had to pray for a job like this.

When you get to Hollywood, it takes you out of your life. It makes you feel cool when you think about all the great things to come out of this town.

There's this great fantasy of going to work, every day, and getting to play out what people think my life is, as a successful actor.

The probability of ten consecutive heads is 0.1 percent; thus, when you have millions of coin tossers, or investors, in the end there will be thousands of very successful practitioners of coin tossing, or stock picking.