Failing Quotes - Page 14

• I think it's really important to be kind, especially to people whose lives are grim - I try hard to cheer people up in as many ways as I can - if all else fails - I tell 'em a joke!

  Jo Brand

  Cheer, Thinking, People

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• A wholesome sense of humor will be a safety valve that will enable you to apply the lighter touch to heavy problems and to learn some lessons in problem solving that "sweat and tears" often fail to dissolve.

  Hugh B. Brown

  Humor, Sweat, Safety

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• For most cosmologists, a supernatural God is an unnecessary hypothesis. For most Americans, He is an unassailable fact. The American belief machine apparently has a fail-safe component. Nothing shuts it down.

  Gary Sloan

  Religion, Atheism, Machines

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• Whatever their failings as a class may be, and however likely to lose their immortal souls, lawyers do not generally lose papers.

  Arthur Cheney Train

  Law, Class, Soul

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• Your persistent longing is your persistent voice. But when love grows cold, the heart grows silent. Burning love is the outcry of the heart! If you are filled with longing all the time, you will keep crying out, and if your love perseveres, your cry will be heard without fail.

  Saint Augustine

  Heart, Love Is, Voice

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• The reality that is present to us and in us: call it being...Silence. And the simple fact that by being attentive, by learning to listen (or recovering the natural capacity to listen) we can find ourself engulfed in such happiness that it cannot be explained: the happiness of being at one with everything in that hidden ground of Love for which there can be no explanations.... May we all grow in grace and peace, and not neglect the silence that is printed in the center of our being. It will not fail us.

  Thomas Merton

  Simple, Reality, Silence

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• If politics and business fail us, of course the military will be called in. In the developing world, the massive and repeated ecological disasters are quite commonly met by the military.

  Bruce Sterling

  Military, World, Politics

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• But in its final creation it was not the part of the Father's power to fail as though exhausted. It was not the part of His wisdom to waver in a needful matter through poverty of counsel.

  Giovanni Pico della Mirandola

  Wisdom, Father, Finals

  Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1953). “Oratio de Hominis Dignitate: Oration on the Dignity of Man. English Translation by Elizabet Livermore Forbes”

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• Everyone should fail in a big way at least once before reaching forty.

  Al Neuharth

  Failure, Way, Reaching

  "USA Today founder Al Neuharth dies in Florida at 89". www.foxnews.com. April 19, 2013.

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• If you hype something and it succeeds, you're a genius - it wasn't a hype. If you hype it and it fails, then it was just a hype.

  Neil Bogart

  Business, Hype, Genius

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• The cause of our difficulties in southeast Asia is not a deficiency of power but an excess of the wrong kind of power which results in a feeling of impotence when it fails to achieve its desired ends.

  J. William Fulbright

  Feelings, Excess, Asia

  J. William Fulbright (2011). “The Arrogance of Power”, p.32, Random House

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• Unfortunately, they develop a fixed mindset that they're the most talented, and they think that continued success is a right. Problems arise because pure talent only works as long as the going is easy. Furthermore, they don't take risks because failure would harm their image of being the best, brightest, and most talented. When they do fail, they deny it or attribute it to anything but their shortcomings.

  Guy Kawasaki

  Success, Business, Thinking

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• No scientist is admired for failing in the attempt to solve problems that lie beyond his competence. ... Good scientists study the most important problems they think they can solve. It is, after all, their professional business to solve problems, not merely to grapple with them.

  Peter Medawar

  Lying, Science, Thinking

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• And whatever the form of your own resurrection, you will arise, driven not by the Great Search, but by your own Great Duty, your limitless Dharma, the manifestation of your own highest potentials, and the world will begin to change because of you. And you will never flinch, and you will never fail in that great Duty, and you will never turn away, because simple, ever-present awareness will be with you now and forever, even unto the end of the worlds, because now and forever and endlessly forever, there is only Spirit, only intrinsic awareness of just this, and nothing more.

  Ken Wilber

  Simple, Forever, End Of The World

  Ken Wilber (2001). “The Eye of Spirit: An Integral Vision for a World Gone Slightly Mad”, p.307, Shambhala Publications

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• Whereas Iraq has consistently breached its cease-fire agreement between Iraq and the United States, entered into on March 3, 1991, by failing to dismantle its weapons of mass destruction program, and refusing to permit monitoring and verification by United Nations inspections; Whereas Iraq has developed weapons of mass destruction, including chemical and biological capabilities, and has made positive progress toward developing nuclear weapons capabilities

  Tom Harkin

  Agreement, Iraq, Fire

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• All attempts to destroy democracy by terrorism will fail. It must be business as usual.

  Margaret Thatcher

  Democracy, Usual, Terrorism

  Margaret Thatcher (1989). “The revival of Britain: speeches on home and European affairs, 1975-1988”

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• Be thankful, but be careful that you don't become so enamored of God's good gifts that you fail to worship the giver.

  Aiden Wilson Tozer

  God, Christian, Religious

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• I thank God for having given the Company subjects who belong more to Him than to themselves, and who serve the neighbor at the risk of their lives! They are like unrefined gold, which becomes visible in fire and which would otherwise remain hidden under ordinary actions and sometimes under faults and failings.

  Vincent de Paul

  Faith, Fire, Risk

  Saint Vincent de Paul, Pierre Coste (1985). “Correspondence, Conferences, Documents: Apr. 1650-July 1653”

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• Is it not better to fail after asking advice than to risk acting on our own?

  Vincent de Paul

  Wisdom, Advice, Risk

  Saint Vincent de Paul, Pierre Coste (1992). “Correspondence, conferences, documents”, New City Pr

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• ... he felt himself to be one of them, who can live neither in the world nor out of it. They are a kind of sick people, whose desire for God makes them unsatisfactory citizens of an ordinary life, but whose strength or temperament fails them to surrender the world completely; and present-day society, with its hurried pace and its mechanical and technical structure, offers no home to these unhappy souls.

  Iris Murdoch

  Home, Sick, People

  Iris Murdoch (2001). “The Bell”, p.74, Penguin

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• They were the triumphant and insolent possessors; they had a hall, and a fire, and food and clothing and money, and so they might preach to hungry men, and the hungry men must be humble and listen. They were trying to save their souls- and who but a fool could fail to see that all that was the matter with their souls was that they had not managed to get a decent existence for their bodies?

  Upton Sinclair

  Humble, Men, Fire

  Upton Sinclair (2016). “The Jungle”, p.260, First Avenue Editions

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• Too much apparatus, designed to guide us in experiments and to supplement the exactness of our senses, makes us neglect to use those senses...The more ingenious our apparatus, the coarser and more unskillful are our senses. We surround ourselves with tools and fail to use those which nature has provided every one of us.

  Jean-Jacques Rousseau

  Technology, Tools, Use

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• It has become too easy to see that the luckless men of the past lived by mistakes, even absurd beliefs, so we may well fail in a decent respect for them, and forget that historians of the future will point out that we too lived by myths.

  Herbert J. Muller

  Mistake, Past, Men

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• If history were a photograph of the past it would be flat and uninspiring. Happily, it is a painting; and, like all works of art, it fails of the highest truth unless imagination and ideas are mixed with the paints.

  Allan Nevins

  Art, Past, Ideas

  Allan Nevins (1975). “Allan Nevins on history”

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• In the laboratory, we call this the six-degrees-of-separation-from-cancer rule: you can ask any biological question, no matter how seemingly distant-what makes the heart fail, or why worms age, or even how birds learn songs-and you will end up, in fewer than six genetic steps, connecting with a proto-oncogene or tumor suppressor.

  Siddhartha Mukherjee

  Song, Cancer, Heart

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