Themes

"Do not say before hand what you are going to do; for if you fail, you will be laughed at."

"Nam quamvis prope to, quamvis temone sub uno Vertentem sese, frustra sectabere cantum Cum rota posterior curras et in axe secundo."

"If this fail, The pillar'd firmament is rottenness, And earth's base built on stubble."

""All honor to him who shall win the prize," The world has cried for a thousand years; But to him who tries and fails and dies, I give great honor and glory and tears."

"You may boldly say, you did not plough Or trust the barren and ungrateful sands With the fruitful grain of your religious counsels."

"Failed the bright promise of your early day?"

"He ploughs in sand, and sows against the wind, That hopes for constant love of woman kind."

"Camelus desiderans cornua etiam aures perdidit."

"He that is down can fall no lower."

"Now a' is done that men can do, And a' is done in vain."

"[Oxford] Home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs and unpopular names and impossible loyalties."

"Failure is an event, not a person. Yesterday ended last night."

"Success is simply a matter of luck. Ask any failure."

"Value of age is it gives you visceral understanding that the journey never ends, the ultimate answer is never “No”, and new opportunities are endlessly creating themselves. Grief and loss at times are simply part of the process. What’s important is who we choose to be as we go through the grief. If we can allow ourselves to feel the pain but avoid bitterness, learning whatever lessons are inherent in the loss, then we’re stronger and the opportunities are greater on the other side of the hurt we feel now"

"Ambition is the last refuge of the failure."

"Every failure is a step to success. Every detection of what is false directs us towards what is true: every trial exhausts some tempting form of error. Not only so; but scarcely any attempt is entirely a failure; scarcely any theory, the result of steady thought, is altogether false; no tempting form of Error is without some latent charm derived from Truth."

"Never mind failures; they are quite natural, they are the beauty of life, these failures. What would life be without them? It would not be worth having if it were not for struggles. Where would be the poetry of life? Never mind the struggles, the mistakes. I never heard a cow tell a lie, but it is only a cow—never a man. So never mind these failures, these little backslidings; hold the ideal a thousand times, and if you fail a thousand times, make the attempt once more."

"Any action is often better than no action, especially if you have been stuck in an unhappy situation for a long time. If it is a mistake, at least you learn something, in which case it's no longer a mistake. If you remain stuck, you learn nothing. Is fear preventing you from taking action? Acknowledge the fear, watch it, take your attention into it, be fully present with it. Doing so cuts the link between the fear and your thinking. Don't let the fear rise up into your mind. Use the power of the Now. Fear cannot prevail against it. If there is truly nothing that you can do to change your here and now, and you can't remove yourself from the situation, then accept your here and now totally by dropping all inner resistance. The false, unhappy self that loves feeling miserable, resentful, or sorry for itself can then no longer survive. This is called surrender. Surrender is not weakness. There is great strength in it. Only a surrendered person has spiritual power."

"Failure makes success so much sweeter, and allows you to thumb your nose at the crowds."

"We learn wisdom from failure much more than from success. We often discover what will do by finding out what will not do; and probably he who never made a mistake never made a discovery."

"Perhaps its destruction has been brought about only that it may be raised up again to a better destiny. Oftentimes a reverse has but made room for more prosperous fortune. Many structures have fallen only to rise to a greater height."

"It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all — in which case, you fail by default."

"It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed."

"I have no use for men who fail. The cause of their failure is no business of mine, but I want successful men as my associates."

"In God's world, for those who are in earnest there is no failure. No work truly done, no word earnestly spoken, no sacrifice freely made, was ever made in vain."

"Everyone should fail in a big way at least once before they’re forty. I don’t mean little disappointments, like screwing up an important assignment or quitting a good job or even getting fired from a normal job. It needs to be a big failure. You can only fail big if you take a big risk. The bigger you fail, the bigger you’re likely to succeed later."

"With engineering, I view this year's failure as next year's opportunity to try it again. Failures are not something to be avoided. You want to have them happen as quickly as you can so you can make progress rapidly."

"It is better to fail in originality, than to succeed in imitation. He who has never failed somewhere, that man cannot be great. Failure is the true test of greatness. And if it be said, that continual success is a proof that a man wisely knows his powers, — it is only to be added, that, in that case, he knows them to be small."

"That’s what failure did to: run you out, plucked your bones, sucked you dry. It was revolting. A failed man is a loathsome thing."

"Just remember that even the most successful lives have chapters of failure."

"Problems or successes, they all are the results of our own actions. Karma. The philosophy of action is that no one else is the giver of peace or happiness. One's own karma, one's own actions are responsible to come to bring either happiness or success or whatever... As you sow, so shall you reap. It's a very old proverb of mankind. As you sow, so shall you reap."

"Greatly begin! Though thou have time But for a line, be that sublime— Not failure, but low aim is crime."

"Every man is in some sort a failure to himself. No one ever reaches the heights to which he aspires."

"Don't fear failure. — Not failure, but low aim, is the crime. In great attempts it is glorious even to fail."

"There is not a fiercer hell than the failure in a great object."

"I would sooner fail than not be among the greatest."

"I chose my path. You chose the way of the hero. And they found you amusing for a while... the people of this city. But the one thing they love more than a hero is to see the hero fail, fall, die trying."

"Doubt kills more dreams than failure ever will."

"I can accept failure. Everyone fails at something. But I can't accept not trying (no hard work)."

"If one cannot have success, the next most agreeable thing is failure."

"Genius is often only the power of making continuous efforts. The line between failure and success is so fine that we scarcely know when we pass it — so fine that we are often on the line and do not know it. How many a man has thrown up his hands at a time when a little more effort, a little more patience, would have achieved success. As the tide goes clear out, so it comes clear in. In business sometimes prospects may seem darkest when really they are on the turn. A little more persistence, a little more effort, and what seemed hopeless failure may turn to glorious success. There is no failure except in no longer trying. There is no defeat except from within, no really insurmountable barrier save our own inherent weakness of purpose."

"It's not hard to stand behind one's successes. But to accept responsibility for one's failures... that is devishly hard!"

"The acceptance of ambiguity implies more than the commonplace understanding that some good things and some bad things happen to us. It means that we know that good and evil are inextricably intermixed in human affairs; that they contain, and sometimes embrace, their opposites; that success may involve failure of a different kind, and failure may be a kind of triumph."

"Half the failures in life arise from pulling in one's horse as he is leaping."

"You are responsible for all of your successes, and the lack thereof. And that is the essential point that failure, your ever-faithful friend, wants to make: that your failure could not exist without you—without your stupidity, without your lies, without your mistakes, your uselessness, your lack of faith, your ineptitude, your unjustifiable confidence in your alleged abilities, you stupid loser—failure is your only friend. Failure is your only lover. Failure is your only hope."

"To me the greatest moment in an experiment is always just before I learn whether the particular idea is a good or a bad one. Thus even a failure is exciting, and most of my ideas have of course been wrong."

"To fail spectacularly is a loser’s paradise."

"Failure concentrates the mind wonderfully. If you don’t make mistakes, you’re not trying hard enough."

"Qui vincit non est victor nisi victus fatetur."

"I'm proof against that word failure. I've seen behind it. The only failure a man ought to fear is failure of cleaving to the purpose he sees to be best."