Quotes About Failure

being nice is what's left when you've failed at everything else. People with ambition don't give a damn what other people think about them.

Politeness. Now, there's a poor man's virtue if ever there was one. What's so admirable about inoffensiveness, I should like to know. After all, it's easily achieved. One needs no particular talent to be polite. On the contrary, being nice is what's left when you've failed at everything else. People with ambition don't give a damn what other people think about them.

Evangelos Christou. In his introduction to Logos of the Soul, Hillman would write about how psychotherapy's legitimacy was "based on the soul" and the failure to make this clear "has resulted in psychologies which are bastard sciences and degenerate philosophies." Christou's was "a document humain attesting to the mystery of the soul.

I knew how one climbing the mountain of worldly success can slip down into the river below without being conscious of the descent till he is already drowning.

Make no mistake about it,' George W. Bush told the American people the day after the attacks. 'We will win.' We haven't. The world is not less, but more, dangerous. It's one thing to launch a war with certain goals and not to attain those goals. It's another entirely to declare war and achieve the exact opposite of your stated intentions. If there is anything worse than losing a war, surely this is it?

A person rises on a word and falls on a syllable.

The future is always a wholeness, a sameness. We're all tall and happy there,' she said. 'This is why the future fails. It always fails. It can never be the cruel happy place we want to make it.

What terrorists gain, novelists lose. The degree to which they influence mass consciousness is the extent of our decline as shapers of sensibility and thought. The danger they represent equals our own failure to be dangerous.' 'And the more clearly we see terror, the less impact we feel from art.

Nagasaki was an embarrassment to the art of war

There is a darkness attached to them, a foreboding. They make me wary not of personal failure and defeat but of something more general, something large in scope and content.

Writing was bad for the soul when you got right down to it. It protected your worst tendencies. Narrowed everything to failure and its devastations. Gave your cunning an edge of treachery and your jellyfish heart a reason to fall deeper into silence.

If designers and researchers do not sometimes fail, it is a sign that they are not trying hard enough—they are not thinking the great creative thoughts that will provide breakthroughs in how we do things. It is possible to avoid failure, to always be safe. But that is also the route to a dull, uninteresting life.

If the system lets you make the error, it is badly designed.

If designers and researchers do not sometimes fail, it is a sign that they are not trying hard enough—they are not thinking the great creative thoughts that will provide breakthroughs in how we do things.

We need to remove the word failure from our vocabulary, replacing it instead with learning experience. To fail is to learn: we learn more from our failures than from our successes. With success, sure, we are pleased, but we often have no idea why we succeeded. With failure, it is often possible to figure out why, to ensure that it will never happen again.

Radical innovation is what many people seek, for it is the big, spectacular form of change. But most radical ideas fail, and even those that succeed can take decades and, as this chapter has already illustrated, they may take centuries to succeed.

We need to remove the word failure from our vocabulary, replacing it instead with learning experience. To fail is to learn: we learn more from our failures than from our successes.

What appears good in principle can sometimes fail when introduced to the world. Sometimes, bad products succeed and good products fail. The world is complex.

Forcing functions are a form of physical constraint: situations in which the actions are constrained so that failure at one stage prevents the next step from happening. Starting a car has a forcing function associated with it—the driver must have some physical object that signifies permission to use the car. In

So we push the boundaries: we stay up far longer than is natural. We try to do too many tasks at the same time. We drive faster than is safe. Most of the time we manage okay. We might even be rewarded and praised for our heroic efforts. But when things go wrong and we fail, then this same behavior is blamed and punished.

we must design our machines on the assumption that people will make errors.

Designers need to focus their attention on the cases where things go wrong, not just on when things work as planned.

As Henry Moore carved or modelled his sculpture every day, he strove to surpass Donatello 4. and failed, but woke the next morning elated for another try.

because much more often than you'd think, sheer persistence is the difference between success and failure. In