Our business in life is not to succeed, but to continue to fail in good spirits.
Robert Louis StevensonRead
To avoid an occasion for our virtues is a worse degree of failure than to push forward pluckily and make a fall.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Avoiding challenges can lead to greater failure than attempting and stumbling.
This quote emphasizes that it is worse to shy away from challenges and opportunities to showcase our virtues than to face them bravely, even if it ends in failure. Taking action, even with the risk of falling, is more commendable than living in fear of potential obstacles.
Themes
CourageFailureVirtueChallengesAction
In practice
Example use cases
In a motivational speech to encourage employees to take risks at work.
More from Robert Louis Stevenson
All quotes →Like a bird singing in the rain, let grateful memories survive in time of sorrow.
Robert Louis StevensonRead
That man is a success who has lived well, laughed often and loved much.
Robert Louis StevensonRead
His past was fairly blameless; few men could read the rolls of their life with less apprehension; yet he was humbled to the dust by the many ill things he had done, and raised up again into sober and fearful gratitude by the many he had come so near to doing, yet avoided.
Robert Louis StevensonRead
The habit of being happy enables one to be freed, or largely freed, from the domination of outward conditions.
Robert Louis StevensonRead
It is the history of our kindnesses that alone make this world tolerable. If it were not for that, for the effect of kind words, kind looks, kind letters . . . I should be inclined to think our life a practical jest in the worst possible spirit.
Robert Louis StevensonRead
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