"A shy failure is nobler than an immodest success."
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Failure quotes
Failure
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Failure quotes (page 11 of 47)
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"I did then what I knew how to do. Now that I know better, I do better."
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"There was never any fear for me, no fear of failure. If I miss a shot, so what?"
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"I think you can have 10,000 explanations for failure, but no good explanation for success."
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"If I had permitted my failures, or what seemed to me at the time a lack of success, to discourage me I cannot see any way in which I would ever have made progress."
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"Things that are done, it is needless to speak about...things that are past, it is needless to blame."
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"Failure is a prerequisite for great success. If you want to succeed faster, double your rate of failure."
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"Show me a satisfied man, and I'll show you a failure."
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"It is not always by plugging away at a difficulty and sticking to it that one overcomes it; often it is by working on the one next to it. Some things and some people have to be approached obliquely, at an angle."
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"It is a tragic hour, that hour when we are finally driven to reckon with ourselves, when every avenue of mental distraction has been cut off and our own life and all its ineffaceable failures closes about us like the walls of that old torture chamber of the Inquisition."
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"Compared with what we ought to be, we are only half awake. Our fires are damped, our drafts are checked. We are making use of only a small part of our possible mental and physical resources."
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"So what if you fail? At least you'll know what not to do when you try again."
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"I have always been pushed by the negative. The apparent failure of a play sends me back to my typewriter that very night, before the reviews are out. I am more compelled to get back to work than if I had a success."
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"Individual misfortunes give rise to the general good; so that the more individual misfortunes exist, the more all is fine."
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"The boy who is going to make a great man must not make up his mind merely to overcome a thousand obstacles, but to win in spite of a thousand repulses and defeats."
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"Show me a completely contented person and I'll show you a failure."
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"So you think that you're a failure, do you? Well, you probably are. What's wrong with that? In the first place, if you've any sense at all you must have learned by now that we pay just as dearly for our triumphs as we do for our defeats. Go ahead and fail. But fail with wit, fail with grace, fail with style. 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."
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"America is the most grandiose experiment the world has seen, but, I am afraid, it is not going to be a success."
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"Have you found your life distasteful? My life did, and does, smack sweet. Was your youth of pleasure wasteful? Mine I saved and hold complete. Do your joys with age diminish? When mine fail me, I'll complain. Must in death your daylight finish? My sun sets to rise again."
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"We may stop ourselves when going up, never when coming down."
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