Quotes on Failing

When a child makes a mistake or fails to accomplish a certain goal, we must avoid any word or action which indicates that we consider him a failure. 'Too bad that didn't work.' 'I'm sorry it didn't work out for you.' We need to separate the deed from the doer.

When you are famous it is hard to work on small problems. This is what did [Claude Elwood] Shannon in. After information theory, what do you do for an encore? The great scientists often make this error. They fail to continue to plant the little acorns from which the mighty oak trees grow. They try to get the big thing right off. And that isn't the way things go. So that is another reason why you find that when you get early recognition it seems to sterilize you.

Morning comes every day; the sunrise does not fail, nor the sunset. _x000D_ Give it time. That is all that may be required. Just give it time. Do not try to push the river. The cycles of life present themselves, play themselves out, and make smooth every passage and terrain. _x000D_ Try not to get caught up in your story of the moment. Look, rather, to the Long Story. Therein will be found your peace. The cycles will redeem this moment, if you let them, and even this shall pass.

One thing about open source is that even the failures contribute to the next thing that comes up. Unlike a company that could spend a million dollars in two years and fail and there's nothing really to show for it, if you spend a million dollars on open source, you probably have something amazing that other people can build on.

The Army might screw you and your girlfriend might dump you and the enemy might kill you, but the shared commitment to safeguard one another’s lives is unnegotiable and only deepens with time. The willingness to die for another person is a form of love that even religions fail to inspire, and the experience of it changes a person profoundly.

When machines fail, when technology fails, when the conventional religion fails, people have got to have something. Even a zombin lurching through the night can seem pretty cheerful compared to the existential comedy/horror of the ozone layer dissolving under the combined assult of a million flurocarbon spray cans of deoderant." - The Mist

The easiest thing to do, whenever you fail, is to put yourself down by blaming your lack of ability for your misfortunes.

So I became a publisher by mistake - well, not quite by mistake, because I wanted to be an editor but I had to make sure the magazine would survive. The point is this: Most businesses fail, so if you're going to succeed, it has to be about more than making money.

Don't settle for average. Bring your best to the moment. Then, whether it fails or succeeds, at least you know you gave all you had. We need to live the best that's in us.

If the Bible is not the Word of God and inspired, the whole of Christendom for 1800 years has been under an immense delusion; half the human race has been cheated and deceived, and churches are monuments of folly. If the Bible is the Word of God and inspired, all who refuse to believe it are in fearful danger; they are living on the brink of eternal misery. No man, in his sober senses, can fail to see that the whole subject demands most serious attention.

There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance-that principle is contempt prior to investigation.

PITY, n. A failing sense of exemption, inspired by contrast.

Great marketing only makes a bad product fail faster.

Political activism is not failing because people are too busy watching cat videos online, but because of a fundamental collapse of citizen leverage on institutions of power like governments and corporations.

I didn't fail 1000 times. The light bulb was an invention with 1000 steps.

A wrong is unredressed when retribution overtakes its redresser. It is equally unredressed when the avenger fails to make himself felt as such to him who has done the wrong.

If you're not failing 90% of the time, then you're probably not working on sufficiently challenging problems.

Develop success from failures. Discouragement and failure are two of the surest stepping stones to success.

Any commander who fails to exceed his authority is not of much use to his subordinates.

There is hardly any activity, any enterprise, which is started out with such tremendous hopes and expectations, and yet which fails so regularly, as love.

I would prefer even to fail with honor than win by cheating.