failure quotes

A good education is not so much one which prepares a man to succeed in the world, as one which enables him to sustain a failure.

- Bernard Iddings Bell
  In Life,16 Oct.

Writers are always envious, mean-minded, filled with rage and envyat other's good fortune. There is nothing like the failure of a close friend to cheer us up.

- Peter Carey
  In the Observer,18  Aug.

Women can't forgive failure.

- Anton Chekhov
  The Seagull, act 2.

I can stand anything but failure.

- Betty pseudonym of  Elizabeth Cohen Comden
  Line delivered by Oscar Levant in The Band Wagon.

Slowly the poison the whole blood stream fills. It is not the effort or the failure tires. The waste remains, the waste remains and kills.

- Sir William Empson
  'Missing Dates'.

All of us failed to match our dreams of perfection. So I rate us on the basis of our splendid failure to do the impossible.

-William Harrison Faulkner
  On his generation of writers. Interview in Paris Review, Spring.

You need have no fear of any failure.

- Percy Harrison Fawcett
  Last words written to his wife. Collected in Brian Fawcett (ed) Exploration Fawcett (1953).

Kangaroo, Kangaroo! Thou Spirit of Australia, That redeems from utter failure, From perfect desolation, And warrants the creation Of this fifth part of the Earth.

- Barron Field
  First Fruits of  Australian Poetry,'The Kangaroo'.

God grant me a failure like that! See Mer imee 5 67:13.

- Charles Fran c° ois Gounod
Of  Wagner's opera Tannha«  user, after the disastrous premi e' re of its revised version at the Ope  ra,13 Mar, when it was withdrawn after only three performances. Quoted in  Joanna Richardson La Vie Parisienne (1971).

Success and failure are both difficult to endure. Along with success come drugs, divorce, fornication, bullying, travel, meditation, medication, depression, neurosis and suicide.With failure comes failure.

-Joseph Heller
  Interview in Playboy,  Jun.

To Walden the saxophone was, at once, his key to the world in which he found himself, and the way by which that world was rendered impotent to brand him either a failure or madman or Negro or saint.

-John Clellon Holmes
  The Horn,'Chorus:  Walden'.

The outstanding faults of the economic society in which we live are its failure to provide for full employment and its arbitraryand inequitable distribution of wealth and incomes.

-John Maynard, 1st Baron Keynes (of Tilton)
  The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money.

The saddest life is that of a political aspirant under democracy. His failure is ignominious and his success is disgraceful.

- H(enry) L(ouis) Mencken
  In the Baltimore Evening Sun, 9 Dec.

All political lives, unless they are cut off in mid-stream at a happy juncture, end in failure, because that is the nature of politics and of human affairs.

- (John) Enoch Powell
  Joseph Chamberlain.

What Chekhov saw in our failure to communicate was something positive and precious: the private silence in which we live, and which enables us to endure our own solitude.

- Sir V(ictor) S(awdon) Pritchett
  The Myth Makers,'Chekhov'.

The triumph of failure.

- Desmond Ryan
  Of the Irish uprising of1916.The Rising, closing words.

Sentimentality is a failure of feeling.

-Wallace Stevens
  Opus Posthumous, Aphorisms,'Adagia'.

The saddest object in civilization, and to my mind the greatest confession of its failure, is the man who can work, who wants work, and who is not allowed to work.

- Robert Louis Stevenson
Quoted by Lloyd Osbourne in'The Death of Stevenson', preface toTusitala edition of Weir of Hermiston (published1924).

So long as the law considers all these human beings, with beating heartsand living affections,onlyassomany things belonging tothemasterso long asthefailure, or misfortune, or imprudence, or death of the kindest owner, may cause them any day to exchange a life of kind protection and indulgence for one of hopeless miseryand toilso long is it impossible to make anything beautiful or desirable in the best-regulated administration of slavery.

- Harriet (Elizabeth) ne  e Beecher Stowe
  UncleTom's Cabin, ch.1.

The mystery of life is not solved by success, which is an end in itself, but in failure, in perpetual struggle, in becoming.

- Patrick Victor Martindale White
  Voss, ch.10.