Quotes About Failure

Love Comes Quickly is our favourite record ever, and it did really badly.

A mediocre failure is as insufferable as a mediocre success. Embrace failure! Seek it out. Learn to love it. That may be the only way any of us will ever be free.

Whatever career you're in, assume it's going to be a massive failure. That way, you're not making decisions based on success, money and career. You're only making it based on doing what you love.

the fundamental moral question is not how to shelter children completely from misadventure and failure, so they never experience any fear or pain, but how to maximize their learning so that useful knowledge may be gained with minimal cost.

But we can aim too high. Or too low. Or too chaotically. So we fail and live in disappointment, even when we appear to others to be living well.

But you will learn something from that, and use what you learn in the future—and the alternative to that single sharp pain is the dull ache of continued hopelessness and vague failure and the sense that time, precious time, is slipping by.

A hurricane is an act of God. But failure to prepare, when the necessity for preparation is well known—that's sin.

To fail, you merely have to cultivate a few bad habits. You just have to bide your time. And once someone has spent enough time cultivating bad habits and biding their time, they are much diminished. Much of what they could have been has dissipated, and much of the less that they have become is now real. Things fall apart, of their own accord, but the sins of men speed their degeneration. And then comes the flood.

Not everyone who is failing is a victim, and not everyone at the bottom wishes to rise, although many do, and many manage it.

Failure is the price we pay for standards and, because mediocrity has consequences both real and harsh, standards are necessary.

But not everyone who is failing is a victim, and not everyone at the bottom wishes to rise, although many

Success: that's the mystery. Virtue: that's what's inexplicable. To fail, you merely have to cultivate a few bad habits. You just have to bide your time. And once someone has spent enough time cultivating bad habits and biding their time, they are much diminished.

Ressentiment8—hostile resentment—occurs when individual failure or insufficient status is blamed both on the system within which that failure or lowly status occurs and then, most particularly, on the people who have achieved success and high status within that system.

People create their worlds with the tools they have directly at hand. Faulty tools produce faulty results. Repeated use of the same faulty tools produce the same faulty results. It is in this manner that those who fail to learn from the past doom themselves to repeat it. It's partly fate. It's partly inability. It's partly… unwillingness to learn? Refusal to learn? Motivated refusal to learn?

Vice is easy. Failure is easy, too. It's easier not to shoulder a burden. It's easier not to think, and not to do, and not to care. It's easier to put off until tomorrow what needs to be done today, and drown the upcoming months and years in today's cheap pleasures. As the infamous father of the Simpson clan puts it, immediately prior to downing a jar of mayonnaise and vodka, "That's a problem for Future Homer. Man, I don't envy that guy!

Everything—that's far too much. It was specific things that fell apart, not everything; identifiable beliefs failed; particular actions were false and inauthentic.

every single voluntarily unprocessed and uncomprehended and ignored reason for marital failure will compound and conspire and will then plague that betrayed and self-betrayed woman for the rest of her life.

We'll start our analysis with a truism, stark, self-evident and understated: Sometimes things do not go well.

damaged machinery will continue to malfunction if its problems are neither diagnosed nor fixed.

Why refuse to specify? Because while you are failing to define success (and thereby rendering it impossible) you are also refusing to define failure, to yourself, so that if and when you fail you won't notice, and it won't hurt.

Vice is easy. Failure is easy, too. It's easier not to shoulder a burden. It's easier not to think, and not to do, and not to care. It's easier to put off until tomorrow what needs to be done today, and drown the upcoming months and years in today's cheap pleasures. As the infamous father of the Simpson clan puts it, immediately prior to downing a jar of mayonnaise and vodka, "That's a problem for Future Homer. Man, I don't envy that guy!"66

You are either a success, a comprehensive, singular, over-all good thing, or its opposite, a failure, a comprehensive, singular, irredeemably bad thing. The words imply no alternative and no middle ground. However, in a world as complex as ours, such generalizations (really, such failure to differentiate) are a sign of naive, unsophisticated or even malevolent analysis.

Not everyone who is failing is a victim, and not everyone who is at the bottom wishes to rise.

People create their worlds with the tools they have directly at hand. Faulty tools produce faulty results. Repeated use of the same faulty tools produces the same faulty results. It is in this manner that those who fail to learn from the past doom themselves to repeat it. It's partly fate. It's partly inability. It's partly…unwillingness to learn? Refusal to learn? Motivated refusal to learn?