Failing Quotes - Page 36

• Few things are impossible in themselves: application to make them succeed fails us more often than the means.

  Francois de La Rochefoucauld

  Mean, Succeed, Impossible

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• According to true military art, one should never push one's enemy to the point of despair, because such a state multiplies his strength and increases his courage which had already been crushed and failing, and because there is no better remedy for the health of beaten and overwhelmed men than the absence of all hope.

  Francois Rabelais

  Art, War, Military

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• For precisely when concepts fail one,
  Words are found at the right time.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Found, Right Time, One Word

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• I go out of my way, but rather by license than carelessness.... It is the inattentive reader
  who loses my subject, not I. Some word about it will always be found off in a corner, which will not fail to be sufficient, though it takes little room.

  Michel de Montaigne

  Reading, Littles, Inattention

  Michel de Montaigne (1958). “Complete Essays”

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• Either it is true that a medicine works or it isn't. It cannot be false in the ordinary sense but true in some alternative sense. If a therapy or treatment is anything more than a placebo, properly conducted double-blind trials, statistically analyzed, will eventually bring it through with flying colours. Many candidates for recognition as orthodox medicines fail the test and are summarily dropped. The alternative label should not (though, alas, it does) provide immunity from the same fate.

  Richard Dawkins

  Fate, Medicine, Flying

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• Lords of immortality will always fail in the material world.

  Deepak Chopra

  World, Immortality, Lord

  "Not My Job: Deepak Chopra Plays 'Yes, We Cannes'". "Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me!" with Peter Sagal, www.npr.org. June 1, 2013.

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• To live as God's child is to know that you are loved by your Maker not because you try to please him and succeed, or fail to please him and apologize, but because he wants to be your Father. Nothing more.

  Max Lucado

  Children, Father, Trying

  Max Lucado (2012). “Wild Grace: What Happens When Grace Happens”, p.141, Thomas Nelson Inc

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• Even a happy life has a sad day. We fail to provide a context which says it's okay to cry, it's okay to be sad. So I think making the space for suffering is so important and making space for this expression of feelings in community.

  Marianne Williamson

  Happy Life, Thinking, Space

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• Everybody knows how awful the world is and what a terrible situation it is and each person distorts it in a certain way that enables him to get through. Some people distort it with religious things. Some people distort it with sports, with money, with love, with art, and they all have their own nonsense about what makes it meaningful, and all but nothing makes it meaningful. These things definitely serve a certain function, but in the end they all fail to give life meaning and everyone goes to his grave in a meaningless way.

  Woody Allen

  Meaningful, Sports, Religious

  "Woody Allen's World: Whatever Works". Interview with Robert E. Lauder, www.commonwealmagazine.org. April 15, 2010.

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• In order to learn how to do something well, you have to fail sometimes. In order to fail, there has to be a measurement system. And that's the problem with most philanthropy - there's no measurement system. You give somebody some money to do something and most of the time you can really never measure whether you failed or succeeded in your judgment of that person or his ideas or their implementation.

  Steve Jobs

  Order, Ideas, Giving

  Interview with David Sheff, www.scribd.com. February 1, 1985.

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• I think that markets classically fail in cases where there are public goods that provide benefits that people cannot capture. The big debate is how big these public goods are, where they exist, things of that sort.

  Peter Thiel

  Thinking, People, Benefits

  Interview with Victoria Brown, bigthink.com. November 15, 2010.

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• Having studied biology really helped me a lot because I quickly understand how biological systems work, and how they fail, and the tragedy of when they fail, because we are dealing with life systems, and when we hear that a species has become extinct, or is threatened, you realize that this could mean that this species will disappear from the face of the earth forever! So that understanding really gives you energy to do something to save it.

  Wangari Maathai

  Mean, Giving, Forever

  Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

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• Nobody is born without fear. We are all born into this world screaming and crying, a bloody mess. We're afraid of failing. What differentiates people is that some of them tend to deal more with fearful situations and understand that it's hurting them in life. That by becoming fearful they're maiming themselves and they learn to move past these fears.

  Robert Greene

  Hurt, Moving, Past

  Source: bigthink.com

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• Directing is such alchemy, it's so easy to fail. And I've seen people who are great at their jobs because everybody has a go. Editors, DPs, actors, craft services guy, everybody wants to try it out but it is such a diffuse but necessary set of skills that you never know which one this person might lack.

  Joss Whedon

  Jobs, Editors, Skills

  Source: www.complex.com

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• Much verse fails of being poetry because it was not written exactly at the right crisis, though it may have been inconceivably near to it. It is only by a miracle that poetry is written at all. It is not recoverable thought, but a hue caught from a vaster receding thought.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Inspirational, Miracle, Poetry

  Henry David Thoreau (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Henry David Thoreau (Illustrated)”, p.246, Delphi Classics

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• You fail in your thoughts, or you prevail in your thoughts only.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Success, Thoughtful, Thinking

  Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson (1865). “Letters to Various Persons”, p.180

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• Men do not fail commonly for want of knowledge, but for want of prudence to give wisdom the preference.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Wisdom, Knowledge, Men

  Henry David Thoreau (2016). “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers”, p.90, Xist Publishing

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• Such is the never-failing beauty and accuracy of language, the most perfect art in the world; the chisel of a thousand years retouches it.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Art, Years, Perfect

  Henry David Thoreau (2016). “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers”, p.29, Xist Publishing

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• How to fail: Try too hard.

  Malcolm Forbes

  Failure, Trying, Hard

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• If you cannot fail, you cannot learn.

  Eric Ries

  Ifs

  Eric Ries (2011). “The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses”, p.50, Crown Business

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• I have desired to go
  Where springs not fail,
  To fields where flies no sharp and sided hail
  And a few lilies blow.

  Gerard Manley Hopkins

  Spring, Blow, Lilies

  'No worst, there is none' (written 1885)

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• I certainly know that if the war fails, the administration fails, and that I will be blamed for it, whether I deserve it or not. And I ought to be blamed, if I could do better. You think I could do better; therefore you blame me already. I think I could not do better; therefore I blame you for blaming me.

  Abraham Lincoln

  War, Thinking, Administration

  Abraham Lincoln (2012). “The Complete Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln (Biographically Annotated Edition)”, p.1084, Jazzybee Verlag

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• I do not believe that a moral philosophy can ever be founded on a scientific basis. … The valuation of life and all its nobler expressions can only come out of the soul’s yearning toward its own destiny. Every attempt to reduce ethics to scientific formulas must fail. Of that I am perfectly convinced.

  Albert Einstein

  Life, Philosophy, Believe

  Albert Einstein (2013). “Einstein on Politics: His Private Thoughts and Public Stands on Nationalism, Zionism, War, Peace, and the Bomb”, p.230, Princeton University Press

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• When their children fail to charm others, few parents can stay neutral.

  Mignon McLaughlin

  Children, Parent, Charm

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• We can glut ourselves with how-to-raise children information . . . strive to become more mature and aware but none of this will spare us from the . . . inevitability that some of the time we are going to fail our children. Because there is a big gap between knowing and doing. Because mature, aware people are imperfect too. Or because some current event in our life may so absorb or depress us that when our children need us we cannot come through.

  Judith Viorst

  Depressing, Children, Knowing

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