Quotes & Sayings About Lifetime Achievement

That's what building a body of work is all about. It's about the daily labor, the many individual acts, the choices large and small that add up over time, over a lifetime to a lasting legacy. It's about not being satisfied with the latest achievement, the latest gold star, because the one thing I know about a body of work is that it's never finished. It's cumulative. It deepens and expands with each day you give your best. You may have setbacks and you may have failures, but you're not done. — Barack Obama

It seems quite proper to fear achievement, which, after all, is proof that you've successfully moved an experience from the delightfully anticipated future into the forever and sadly lost past. Avoid as long as you can the ultimate indignity: a lifetime achievement award. — Terry Rossio

I'm 62 years old. Am I old enough to win a lifetime achievement award? Yes, I am. Thank you very much. — Steven Spielberg

I could really care less about the TV and the fame, it's all about that lifetime achievement of becoming a world champion. — Jake Ellenberger

Someone like Roman Polanski comes with a lifetime of achievement, cinematically. — Pierce Brosnan

He had in his Bronx apartment a lodger less learned than himself, and much fiercer in piety. One day when we were studying the laws of repentance together, the lodger burst from his room. "What!" he said. "The atheists guzzles his whiskey and eats pork and wallows with women all his life long, and then repents the day before he dies and stands guiltless? While I spend a lifetime trying to please God?" My grandfather pointed to the book. "So it is written," he said gently. - "Written!" the lodger roared. "There are books and there are books." And he slammed back into his room.
The lodger's outrage seemed highly logical. My grandfather pointed out afterward that cancelling the past does not turn it into a record of achievement. It leaves it blank, a waste of spilled years. A man had better return, he said, while time remains to write a life worth scanning. And since no man knows his death day, the time to get a grip on his life is the first hour when the impulse strikes him. — Herman Wouk

Being "ordinary" means that we reject the idolatry of pursuing excellence for selfish reasons. We aren't digging wells in Africa to prove our worth or value. We aren't serving in the soup kitchen or engaging in spiritual disciplines because we long to be unique, radical, and different. When we do these things for selfish reasons, God becomes a tool for winning our lifetime achievement award. Our neighbors become instruments in the crafting of our sense of meaning, impact, and identity. What we do for God is really for ourselves. — Michael S. Horton

Honorary degrees and lifetime achievement awards are very encouraging. I know that it might sound strange that a writer who has published many books still needs encouragement, but this is true. — Joyce Carol Oates

George Clooney married Amal Alamuddin this year. Amal is a human rights lawyer who worked on the Enron case, was an advisor to Kofi Annan regarding Syria, and was selected for a three-person commission investigating rules of war violation in the Gaza Strip. So tonight, her husband is getting a Lifetime Achievement Award. — Tina Fey

It's nice to get any awards, whether it's lifetime achievement or the Keith Richards award for being alive one more year. — Randy Bachman

I got my first lifetime achievement award years ago, and I was very excited, but then I got a sense of: Well, can one get a second lifetime award? — Michael Palin

He believed that all people existed behind varying layers of armor which, like the archaeological layers of earth itself, reflected the historical events and turbulence of a lifetime. An individual's armor that had been developed to resist pain and rejection might also block a capacity for pleasure and achievement, and feelings too deeply trapped might be released only by acts of self-destruction or harm to others. Reich was convinced that sexual deprivation and frustration motivated much of the world's chaos and warfare. — Gay Talese

He loved his family. But he was not proud of them. Their principal achievement was survival. It would take him a lifetime to appreciate what an achievement that was. — Richard Flanagan

It is extraordinary how safe flying has become. You are now statistically more likely to be elected president of the United States in your lifetime than you are to die in a plane crash. What an amazing achievement as a society! But what we end up focusing on are the catastrophic failures that are incredibly rare but happen every now and then. — Steven Johnson

The Country Music Awards were held Wednesday night at Universal City. The best country songs are always about drinking and guns and love gone wrong. Next year they're giving Robert Blake the Lifetime Achievement Award. — Argus Hamilton

I have one piece of advice for those of you who want to receive the Lifetime Achievement Award: Start early! — Shirley Temple

The things you get fired for when you're young are the same things that you get lifetime achievement awards for when you're old. — Francis Ford Coppola

Larry Carlton is an incredibly versatile guitarist who has been a major force for guitar for many years. He is easily recognizable - all you have to do is hear him once and from that point on you'll be a fan, just like me. It gives me great pleasure to extend congratulations to Larry on his 2011 George Benson Lifetime Achievement Award. Congratulations ! — George Benson

Meeting Stevie Wonder was a massive, lifetime achievement for me. He's one of the sweetest people. I sense a kindred spirit in him, and I hope he'd say the same. Actually, he did. — Hunter Hayes

The sort of lifetime achievement stuff that I'm getting now is kind of like Tom Sawyer's funeral because they all know I'm sick. I am getting buildings named after me and awards and stuff. — Sam Simon

I still think 'The Lord of the Rings' is the greatest literary achievement in my lifetime. Like so many other people, I couldn't wait for the second and then the third book. Nothing like it had ever been written. — Christopher Lee

It's crucial that I kind of keep up, without drifting into the backslapping land of cliche and lifetime achievement awards. — Robert Plant

I'd like to thank the Academy for my lifetime achievement award that I will eventually get. — Donald O'Connor

It feels like a rash. It suddenly seems like I've got a contagion of diseases, I mean awards. But it's nice, it's a nice feeling. It's so weird, because I'm only 46. A lifetime Achievement award ... it feels like 'I'm not over yet'. I hope they're not trying to say it's time to stop. I'm only just getting the gist of it. — Helena Bonham Carter

Receiving both the Coretta Scott King - Virginia Hamilton Award for Lifetime Achievement and the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award suggests I have succeeded, at least in terms of my own goals, in my intent to make art that moves children. — Jerry Pinkney

I sometimes wonder how many of these lifetime achievement awards you can accept before you have to do the decent thing and die. — James Taylor

The thing about being powerful is that it may be a limited edition... as the source of the power goes you go; but becoming empowered will last a lifetime. — Johnnie Dent Jr.

I'm not in the Lifetime Achievement area yet-I'm still battling it out in the trenches. — Michael Caine

Jersey chasers are a dime a dozen, always willing to take a ride on the football side, but you've got to be careful with the overly eager ones, the ones who aren't just trying to make a trophy outta you, but a fuckin' Lifetime Achievement award. As in, poking holes in condoms and look at that, you're a baby daddy. I don't know if Josie falls into that latter category, but she's a little too eager for my taste. — Jen Frederick

I don't think I've done any profound work yet ... People ask me, 'How would you want to be remembered?' I tell them I don't want to be remembered! I'm not here to become a Madhubala or receive a Lifetime Achievement Award. I'm not that kind of a person. And I'm not brash about it; it's just the way I am. — Bipasha Basu

Groucho Marx continued to alternately call Margaret Dumont "a great lady" and to denigrate her in interviews. But he seemed, at the end, to realize how important she'd been to his career. When accepting his 1974 Lifetime Achievement Oscar, the ailing Groucho told the audience, "I only wish Harpo and Chico could have been here - and Margaret Dumont. — Eve Golden

To play Swedish folk music is a lifetime achievement, but I'm well on my way. — Gustav Ejstes