People often remark that I'm pretty lucky. Luck is only important in so far as getting the chance to sell yourself at the right moment. After that, you've got to have talent and know how to use it.
Interpretation
Luck plays a role in opportunities, but success depends on talent and skill.
In this quote, Frank Sinatra emphasizes that while luck can provide opportunities, it is ultimately an individual’s talent and ability to utilize it that determine their success. The notion of 'luck' is downplayed, suggesting that it is less about chance and more about preparation and skill when seizing opportunities.
In practice
In a motivational speech about career opportunities.
With few exceptions, every major pop singer in the US during her generation has been touched in some way by her genius. It is Billie Holiday who was, and still remains, the greatest single musical influence on me. Lady Day is unquestionably the most important influence on American popular singing in the last twenty years.
When lip service to some mysterious deity permits bestiality on Wednesday and absolution on Sunday, cash me out.
There have been many accolades uttered about Elvis' talent and performances through the years, all of which I agree with wholeheartedly. I shall miss him dearly as a friend. He was a warm, considerate and generous man.
Dare to wear the foolish clown face.
I want to wake up in a city that never sleeps
I think my greatest ambition in life is to pass on to others what I know.
It is well to cultivate a friendly feeling towards error, to treat it as a companion inseparable from our lives, as something having a purpose, which it truly has.
I think that to have known one good, old man-one man, who, through the chances and mischances of a long life, has carried his heart in his hand, like a palm-branch, waving all discords into peace-helps our faith in God, in ourselves, and in each other more than many sermons
I found I wasn't asking good enough questions because I assumed I knew something.
Don't accept or be crippled by the media hype that aging is bad or shameful.
Good beats upon the damned incessantly as sound waves beat on the ears of the deaf, but they cannot receive it. Their fists are clenched, their teeth are clenched, their eyes fast shut. First they will not, in the end they cannot, open their hands for gifts, or their mouth for food, or their eyes to see.
Stupidity is something unshakable; nothing attacks it without breaking itself against it; it is of the nature of granite, hard and resistant.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.