Failure Quotes - Page 29

• Each year the big garden grew smaller and Jane - who grew flowers by choice, not corn or stringbeans - worked at the vegetables more than I did. Each winter I dreamed crops, dreamed marvels of canning . . . and each summer I largely failed. Shamefaced, I planted no garden at all.

  Donald Hall

  Summer, Flower, Winter

  Donald Hall (2012). “Life Work”, p.28, Beacon Press

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• We are spirits clad in veils; Man by man was never seen; All our deep communing fails To remove the shadowy screen.

  Christopher Pearse Cranch

  Men, Veils, Spirit

  Christopher Pearse Cranch (1844). “Poems”, p.51

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• It is possible to fail in many ways . . . while to succeed is possible only in one way (for which reason also one is easy and the other difficult - to miss the mark easy, to hit it difficult).

  Aristotle

  Missing, Way, Succeed

  Nichomachean Ethics (c. 330 b.c.).

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• REBEL, n. A proponent of a new misrule who has failed to establish it.

  Ambrose Bierce

  Rebel

  Ambrose Bierce (2001). “The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary”, p.194, University of Georgia Press

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• PITY, n. A failing sense of exemption, inspired by contrast.

  Ambrose Bierce

  Inspired, Failing, Pity

  Ambrose Bierce (2016). “The Devil's Dictionary: The Devil World”, p.165, 谷月社

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• GNOSTICS, n. A sect of philosophers who tried to engineer a fusion between the early Christians and the Platonists. The former would not go into the caucus and the combination failed, greatly to the chagrin of the fusion managers.

  Ambrose Bierce

  Christian, Fusion, Philosopher

  Ambrose Bierce (2001). “The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary”, p.97, University of Georgia Press

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• The more congenial page of some tenth-rate poeticule worn out with failure after failure and now squat in his hole like the tailless fox, he is curled up to snarl and whimper beneath the inaccessible vine of song.

  Algernon Charles Swinburne

  Song, Pages, Foxes

  Algernon Charles Swinburne, Clyde Kenneth Hyder (1966). “Swinburne Replies: Notes on Poems and Reviews, Under the Microscope [and] Dedicatory Epistle”, p.64, Syracuse University Press

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• It is the sternest philosophy, but on the whole the truest, that, in the wide arena of the world, failure and success are not accidents, as we so frequently suppose, but the strictest justice.

  Alexander Smith

  Justice, Success And Failure, Accidents

  "Dreamthorp: A Book of Essays Written in the Country".

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• Pleasures, riches, honor and joy are sure to have care, disgrace, adversity and affliction in their train. There is no pleasure without pain, no joy without sorrow. O the folly of expecting lasting felicity in a vale of tears, or a paradise in a ruined world.

  Gotthold Ephraim Lessing

  Pain, Adversity, Discipline

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• Perfectionism is a dangerous state of mind in an imperfect world. The best way is to forget doubts and set about the task in hand. . . . If you are doing your best, you will not have time to worry about failure.

  Robert Hillyer

  Imperfect World, Hands, Worry

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• When we are unable to love and appreciate ourselves and our efforts, we run away from our mistakes and failures, rather than learning from them.

  Meredith L. Young-Sowers

  Running, Mistake, Appreciate

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• What can any of us do with his talent but try to develop his vision, so that through frequent failures we may learn better what we have missed in the past.

  William Carlos Williams

  Past, Vision, Trying

  "The Paris Review : Writers at Work", 3rd series, Viking Penguin, (p. 29), April 1962.

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• Who would not rather flounder in the fight than not have known the glory of the fray?

  Richard Hovey

  Fighting, Glory, Fray

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• Most men fail, not through lack of education or agreeable personal qualities, but from lack of dogged determination, from lack of dauntless will.

  Orison Swett Marden

  Determination, Men, Failing

  "An Iron Will, He Can Who Thinks He Can & Pushing To The Front".

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• Remember your past mistakes just long enough to profit by them.

  Clinton D. McKinnon

  Mistake, Past, Long

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• In my personal view, a failure to discover unimagined objects and answer unasked questions, once HST functions properly, would indicate a lack of imagination in stocking the Universe on the part of the Deity.

  John N. Bahcall

  Science, Discovery, Views

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• Honorable errors do not count as failures in science, but as seeds for progress in the quintessential activity of correction.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Science, Errors, Progress

  Stephen Jay Gould (2011). “Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms”, p.163, Harvard University Press

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• The better a man is, the more mistakes he will make, for the more new things he will try. I would never promote to a top-level job a man who was not making mistakes...otherwise he is sure to be mediocre.

  Peter Drucker

  Jobs, Mistake, Men

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• Although such research [into the paranormal] has yet to produce anything in the way of a repeatable controlled experiment, its practitioners argue that its revolutionary potentialities justify its continuation. My own feeling is that after a century of total failure it has become a bloody bore.

  Dennis Flanagan

  Science, Feelings, Research

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• Every discoverer of a new truth, or inventor of the method which evolves it, makes a dozen, perhaps fifty, useless combinations, experiments, or trials for one successful one. In the realm of electricity or of mechanics there is no objection to this. But when such rejected failures involve a torture of animals, sometimes fearful in its character, there is a distinct objection to it.

  Henry Jacob Bigelow

  Character, Successful, Science

  "Surgical Anaesthesia: Addresses and Other Papers". Pp. 369-370. Book by Henry Jacob Bigelow, 1894.

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• If success were easy, then it would not necessarily be true success. Some of history's most successful people learned to cope with failure as a natural offshoot of the experimental and creative process and often learned more from their failures than their successes. By taking the attitude that failure is merely a detour on the way to our destination, hope can blossom into success.

  John Templeton

  Attitude, Successful, People

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• Those who hope to avoid all failure and misfortune are trying to live in a fairyland; wise people realistically accept failures as a part of life and build philosophies to meet them and make the best of them.

  Wilferd Peterson

  Wise, Philosophy, People

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• Real failure comes when we consider ourselves good enough at something to be able to repeat it rather than to develop it. "Success is dangerous," the painter Pablo Picasso said. "One begins to copy oneself, and to copy oneself is more dangerous than to copy others. It leads to sterility."

  Joan D. Chittister

  Real, Able, Good Enough

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• What a shame to be so afraid of failure that you stop living. My wife has a great one-liner about failure: "Never consider yourself a failure-you can always serve as a bad example." She is right. Failure can be a better teacher than success.

  Bernie Siegel

  Teacher, Wife, Example

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• There is a distinction between failing and being a failure. Few things are learned in life without failing at least once. Did you learn to roller skate without falling a few times? Did you learn to ride a bike without losing your balance? Chances are you didn't. You may have wanted to do those things so intensely that you quickly put unsuccessful attempts behind you and kept trying. Soon you acquired the skill to do the thing you wanted. Even though in the process of learning you may have failed many times, you were not a failure. "Failing" simply became an open door to try again.

  John Templeton

  Fall, Doors, Skills

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