This article is devoted to the analysis of motivation as a cognitive process that leads to the creation of phraseological units in the English and Romanian linguistic pictures, focusing on the antonymic relationship between the concepts of “success” and “unsuccess”. Motivation is also analysed as the ability of the individual to understand idiomatic expressions. The aim of the article is to find both common and particular parametric components of English and Romanian antonymic phraseologies and investigate the relationship between the phraseological units that build them up. The methods used for this research are those of general linguistics, but also those specific to cognitive linguistics.