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Quotes About Failings

Truth is mysterious, elusive, always to be conquered. Liberty is dangerous, as hard to live with as it is elating. We must march toward these two goals, painfully but resolutely, certain in advance of our failings on so long a road.
~ Albert Camus
I have spent a great deal of time seeking documentary evidence which would support or contradict the Stangls' story of how they, and others like them, escaped from Europe; and the real facts, it turns out, are neither dramatic nor unequivocal; they are complex, ambiguous and merely prove again that in the final analysis, history is not made by organizations, but by individual men, with individual failings, and individual responsibilities
~ Gitta Sereny
Critics of home-schooling hate the idea of home-schooling and the freedom from the government school monopoly that it represents. Their attacks on academic success are just a transparent attempt to divert attention from their own failings.
~ Glenn Beck
Most students of Kissinger find it hard to say anything about Kissinger that isn't about the man himself. He is such an outsize figure that he eclipses his own context, leading his many biographers, critics, and admirers to focus nearly exclusively on the quirks of his personality or his moral failings.
~ Greg Grandin
Self-destruction is such an interesting thing for a dramatist, and what's particular to Nixon is how human the failings were that led to his downfall.
~ Peter Morgan
Our virtues and our failings are inseparable, like force and matter. When they separate, man is no more.
~ Nikola Tesla
I never heard that it had been anybody's business to find out what his natural bent was, or where his failings lay, or to adapt any kind of knowledge to him. He had been adapted to the verses and had learnt the art of making them to such perfection. I did doubt whether Richard would not have profited by some one studying him a little, instead of his studying them quite so much.
~ Charles Dickens
At twenty you have many desires which hide the truth, but beyond forty there are only real and fragile truths-your abilities and your failings.
~ Grard Depardieu
The American Way is an amalgam of our compassion, our strengths, our failings and our attempts to build a better world, a more perfect union.
~ J. Michael Straczynski
Critics of American colleges typically attribute the failings of undergraduate education to a tendency on the part of professors to neglect their teaching to concentrate on research. In fact, the evidence does not support this thesis, except perhaps in major research universities.
~ Derek Bok
On the other hand, she was disproportionately indulgent towards the failings of men, and was often heard to say that these were natural.
~ George Eliot
His wife also did not request any restrictions or control, nor did she ask to see in advance what I would publish. In fact she strongly encouraged me to be honest about his failings as well as his strengths. She is one of the smartest
~ Walter Isaacson
A sense of our inadequacies and failings, a recognition that we could be better people than we usually are, is one of the forces for moral growth and improvement in our society. An appropriate sense of guilt makes people try to be better. But an excessive sense of guilt, a tendency to blame ourselves for things which are clearly not our fault, robs us of our self-esteem and perhaps of our capacity to grow and to act.
~ Harold S. Kushner
Ah, beware of snobbery; it is the unwelcome recognition of one's own past failings.
~ Cary Grant
It is not necessary to let anyone know about one's private faults or past failings, except if someone is qualified to give help in cases where outside intervention is needed.
~ Paramahansa Yogananda
It is an occult law moreover, that no man can rise superior to his individual failings without lifting, be it ever so little, the whole body of which he is an integral part. In the same way no one can sin, nor suffer the effects of sin, alone. In reality, there is no such thing as 'separateness' and the nearest approach to that selfish state which the laws of life permit is in the intent or motive.
~ HELENA PETROVNA BLAVATSKY
What I can claim is that no other work of mine depicts virtue with greater prominence: here the slightest misdemeanour is severely punished; the mere thought of wrongdoing is viewed with as much horror as the enactment of it; lapses that derive from love are treated as absolute failings; the passions are represented only to demonstrate the destructive anarchy to which they give rise; and vice is everywhere portrayed in colours which cause its ugliness to be known for what it is and abhorred.
~ Jean Racine
We all have our strengths and our failings.
~ Hannah Simone
It was one thing to be depressed in your twenties or thirties, when the aspect of youth gave it an undeniable poignancy, a certain tattered charm; it was another thing entirely to be depressed in middle age, when you were supposed to have come to terms with life's failings, as well as your own.
~ Daphne Merkin
I have no end of failings as a mother, but I have always followed the rules.
~ Lionel Shriver
Sibilia could not get past two things: (1) that the USFL's dysfunction was the greatest culprit in the league's failings, and (2) Trump was awful. "He was extremely arrogant and I thought that he was obviously trying to play the game. He wanted an NFL franchise . . . the USFL was a cheap way in.
~ Jeff Pearlman
Sir Hamish Graham has many of the qualities & most of the failings that result from being born to a middle-class Scottish family. He was well educated, hard working & honest, while at the same time being narrow-minded, uncompromising & proud.
~ Jeffrey Archer
Stupidity and human incompetence are the great evils, not ambition and glory.
~ Robert Greene
True gentleness is founded on a sense of what we owe to him who made us and to the common nature which we all share. It arises from reflection on our own failings and wants, and from just views of the condition and duty of man. It is native feeling heightened and improved by principle.
~ Hugh Blair