Failing Quotes - Page 23

• Old maids claw as cats do. They not only inflict wounds but experience pleasure in doing so. Nor will they fail to remind their victims of the blood drawn.

  Honore de Balzac

  Cat, Blood, Maids

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• The best painters, as they progress in reputation and towards perfection, are found to dispense more and more with the technique of the art, for simpler methods. Simplicity never fails to charm.

  Honore de Balzac

  Art, Perfection, Simplicity

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• How sternly we reproach virtue for its failings, how indulgent we are to the better qualities of vice!

  Honore de Balzac

  Quality, Vices, Virtue

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• Thou who wouldst see the lovely and the wild
  Mingled in harmony on Nature's face,
  Ascend our rocky mountains. Let thy foot
  Fail not with weariness, for on their tops
  The beauty and the majesty of earth,
  Spread wide beneath, shall make thee to forget
  The steep and toilsome way.

  William C. Bryant

  Feet, Lovely, Mountain

  William Cullen Bryant, “Monument Mountain”

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• Or, bide thou where the poppy blows
  With windflowers fail and fair.

  William C. Bryant

  Blow, Poppies, Fairs

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• When our desires are fulfilled, we never fail to realize the wealth of imagination and the paucity of reality.

  Ninon de L'Enclos

  Reality, Imagination, Desire

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• Either one fails in one's art or in one's life.

  Anais Nin

  Art

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• America may not be the best nation on earth, but it has conceived loftier ideals and dreamed higher dreams than any other nation. America is a heterogeneous nation of many different people of different races, religions, and creeds. Should this experiment go forth and prosper, we will have offered humans a new way to look at life; should it fail, we will simply go the way of all failed civilizations.

  Nikki Giovanni

  Dream, Race, Civilization

  Nikki Giovanni (1994). “Racism 101”, William Morrow & Co

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• We must settle this question now -- whether in a free government the minority have the right to break it up whenever they choose. If we fail, it will go far to prove the incapability of the people to govern themselves.

  Abraham Lincoln

  Government, People, Minorities

  Abraham Lincoln, Mario Matthew Cuomo, G. S. Boritt (2004). “Lincoln on Democracy”, p.185, Fordham Univ Press

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• The intellect has only one failing, which, to be sure, is a very considerable one. It has no conscience.

  James Russell Lowell

  Intellect, Conscience

  James Russell Lowell (1845). “Conversations on Some of the Old Poets”, p.140

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• To fail at all is to fail utterly.

  James Russell Lowell

  Failure

  James Russell Lowell (1870). “Among my Books, etc”, p.45

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• The memory is perpetually looking back when we have nothing present to entertain us. It is like those repositories in animals that are filled with food, on which they may ruminate when their present pastures fail.

  Joseph Addison

  Memories, Animal, May

  Joseph Addison, Sir Richard Steele (1860). “The Spectator: A New Edition”, p.563

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• If the second marriage really succeeds, the first one didn't really fail.

  Mignon McLaughlin

  Succeed, Firsts, Second Marriage

  "The Complete Neurotic's Notebook". Book by Mignon McLaughlin, 1981.

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• Tragedy isn't getting something, or failing to get it; it's losing something you already have.

  Mignon McLaughlin

  Tragedy, Losing

  Mignon McLaughlin (2014). “Aperçus: The Aphorisms of Mignon McLaughlin”, p.55, BookBaby

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• Women on the way up generally fail to win popularity contests. The only compensation is that once you're there you will become very well liked.

  Lois Wyse

  Winning, Way, Popularity

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• Memoir ... satisfies our need for gossip and intimacy, for testimony and confessional, and in this world of spin, offers a truthful account of what it means to succeed or fail, to love and lose, to break your heart and mend it again.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Heart, Mean, Gossip

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• The sunshine fails, the shadows grow more dreary,
  And I am near to fall, infirm and weary.

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

  Fall, Sunshine, Shadow

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (2008). “Michael Angelo and Translations”, p.353, Wildside Press LLC

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• Gaiety is to good-humor as animal perfumes to vegetable fragrance. The one overpowers weak spirits, the other recreates and revives them. Gaiety seldom fails to give some pain; good-humor boasts no faculties which every one does not believe in his own power, and pleases principally by not offending.

  Samuel Johnson

  Pain, Believe, Animal

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• I can't tell you how to succeed, but I can tell you how to fail: Try to please everybody.

  Eleanor Roosevelt

  Trying, Succeed, Success And Failure

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• How were friendship possible? In mutual devotedness to the good and true; otherwise impossible, except as armed neutrality or hollow commercial league. A man, be the heavens ever praised, is sufficient for himself; yet were ten men, united in love, capable of being and of doing what ten thousand singly would fail in. Infinite is the help man can yield to man.

  Thomas Carlyle

  Friendship, Men, Yield

  Thomas Carlyle, Rodger L. Tarr, Mark Engel (2000). “Sartor Resartus: The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdröckh in Three Books”, p.216, Univ of California Press

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• Part of our good consists in the endeavor to do sorrows away, and in the power to sustain them when the endeavor fails,--to bear them nobly, and thus help others to bear them as well.

  Leigh Hunt

  Helping Others, Sorrow, Bears

  Leigh Hunt (1853). “The Religion of the Heart: A Manual of Faith and Duty”, p.27

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• How spiritually blind are men that they fail to see that we are bound together. We rise or fall together; we are dwarfed or godlike, free or chained, together.

  Helen Keller

  Fall, Men, Together

  Helen Keller (1967). “Helen Keller, her Socialist years: writings and speeches”

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• Curiosity is idle only to those who fail to realize that it may be a very rare and indispensable thing.

  James Harvey Robinson

  Curiosity, May, Realizing

  James Harvey Robinson (1939). “The Mind in the Making”

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• The disappointed man turns his thoughts toward a state of existence where his wiser desires may be fixed with the certainty of faith; the successful man feels that the objects which he has ardently pursued fail to satisfy the cravings of an immortal spirit; the wicked man turneth away from his wickedness, that he may save his soul alive.

  Robert Southey

  Successful, Men, Soul

  Robert Southey (1832). “On Sir Francis Burdett's motion for parliamentary reform.-On the conduct of the war.-On the cry of the Whigs for peace, 1810.-Army and navy reforms, 1810.-On the economical reformers, 1811.-On the state of the poor.-The principle of Mr. Malthus's essay on population.-The manufacturing system, 1812.-On the state of the poor.-On the accounts of England by foreign travellers and the state of public opinion, 1816.-On the state of public opinion and the political reformers, 1816.-v.2 A letter to Will”, p.235

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• Ay! idleness! the rich folks never fail
  To find some reason why the poor deserve
  Their miseries.

  Robert Southey

  Poverty, Reason Why, Misery

  Robert Southey (1854). “Ballads, metrical tales and other poems”, p.141

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