Quotes Tagged "failure"

For the rest of history, for most of us, our bright promise will always fall short of being actualised; it will never earn us bountiful sums of money or beget exemplary objects or organisations.... Most of us stand poised at the edge of brilliance, haunted by the knowledge of our proximity, yet still demonstrably on the wrong side of the line, our dealings with reality undermined by a range of minor yet critical psychological flaws (a little too much optimism, an unprocessed rebelliousness, a fatal impatience or sentimentality). We are like an exquisite high-speed aircraft which for lack of a tiny part is left stranded beside the runway, rendered slower than a tractor or a bicycle.

When we fail, our pride supports us, and when we succeed it betrays us.

Do not let your grand ambitions stand in the way of small but meaningful accomplishments.

As an Odd-Fish, it is not my job to be right,' said Sir Oort. 'It is my job to be wrong in new and exciting ways.

If your failure is not a lesson, it's indeed a failure.

And for all those years, we never talked about the disaster at the recital or my terrible accusations afterward at the piano bench. All that remained unchecked, like a betrayal that was now unbreakable. So I never found a way to ask her why she had hoped something so large that failure was inevitable. And even worse, I never asked her what frightened me the most: Why had she given up hope?

Success and failure come and go, but don't let them define you. It's who you are that matters.

And the thing is, we can’t fail. We’ve already hit the bottom and come out of it. From here on out, if we just love and listen, we can’t go wrong, babe.

So, I must be taken as I have been made. The success is not mine, the failure is not mine, but the two together make me.

A failure establishes only this, that our determination to succeed was not strong enough.

It's the place built out of Man's ceaseless failure to overcome himself. Out of Man's endless war against himself we build our successes as well as our failures. Making it the city of all cities most like Man himself— loneliest creation of all this very old poor earth.

The true measure of a man is not what he dreams, but what he aspires to be; a dream is nothing without action. Whether one fails or succeeds is irrelevant; all that matters is that there was motion in his life. That alone affects the world.

Success and failure are two edges of the same blade, two sides of the same coin. To fear one is to forever deny the possibility of the other.

The greatest reward for a man's failure is not necessarily the consequent success, but what he becomes by it.

Two types of choices seem to me to have been crucial in tipping the outcomes [of the various societies' histories] towards success or failure: long-term planning and willingness to reconsider core values. On reflection we can also recognize the crucial role of these same two choices for the outcomes of our individual lives.

Strength and success - they are above morality, above criticism. It seems, then, that it is not what you do, but how you do it and what you call it. Is there a check in men, deep in them, that stops or punishes? There doesn't seem to be. The only punishment is for failure. In effect no crime is committed unless a criminal is caught.

The futility of action does not absolve one from the failure to act. -

Never let success get to your head and never let failure get to your heart.

You know you made it, when your friends tell their friends that you are their friend.

You know you made it, when people you know, tell people they know, that you know them.