Work becomes at once a delight and a tyrant. For even when the time comes and you can relax, you hardly know how.

Success is an absurd, erratic thing. She arrives when one least expects her and after she has come may depart again almost because of a whim.

Competition is. In every business, no matter how small or how large, someone is just around the corner forever trying to steal your ideas and build his success out of your imagination, struggling after that which you have toiled endless years to secure, striving to outdo you in each and every way. If such a competitor would work as hard to originate as he does to copy, he would much more quickly gain success.

for the poor the whole world is a self-constituted critic; your smallest action is open to debate. No secret place of your soul is safe from invasion.

Poverty is relative, and the lack of food and of the necessities of life is not necessarily a hardship. Spiritual and social ostracism, the invasion of your privacy, are what constitute the pain of poverty

Life means opportunity, and the thing men call death is the last wonderful, beautiful adventure.

I simply don't believe in failure. In itself, it doesn't exist. We create it. We make ourselves fail.