Michael Jones, well known pianist, in his book "Creating an Imaginative Life", wrote:

Success offers us excitement, but failures give us weight, the weight that cracks open the heart to a quality of earthly love that success can never find...

life's pearls are sometimes found in unlikely places.

more about him here

Theodore Dreiser, on different opinions regarding success, even between married couples, wrote the following in his story "Free":

...perhaps it was not just obtuseness to certain of the finer shades and meanings of life, but an irritating aggressiveness at times, backed only by her limited understanding, which caused her to seek and wish to be here, there and the other place; wherever, in her mind, the truly successful --which meant nearly always the materially successful of a second and third rate character-- were, which irritated him most of all. How often had he tried to point out the difference between true and shoddy distinction--the former rarely connected with great wealth.

But no. So often she seemed to imagine such queer people to be truly successful, when they were really not--usually people with just money, or a very little more...

On Change, Barrie Sanford Greiff, MD (in "A Life Worth Living", Regan Books, Harper Collins Publishers) wrote:

There is age change and work change and parents and kids change, success change, and failure change, too. And if you dont take change by the hand, it will surely take you by the neck.


photo by Lin Pernille