concept

failure Quotes

100+ of the best book quotes about failure
01
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“I promised him!” he screamed, realizing even as he did so that his voice was laced with something wrong. Almost insanity. “I promised I’d save him, take him home! I promised him!”
James Dashner
author
The Maze Runner
book
Thomas
Chuck
characters
pain
failure
promises
concepts
02
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“Your challenge as a #GIRLBOSS is to dive headfirst into things without being too attached to the results. When your goal is to gain experience, perspective, and knowledge, failure is no longer a possibility. Failure is your invention. I believe that there is a silver lining in everything, and once you begin to see it, you’ll need sunglasses to combat the glare. It is she who listens to the rest of the world who fails, and it is she who has enough confidence to define success and failure for herself who succeeds.”
03
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“When you approach everything as if it’s a big, fun experiment, then it’s not that big of a deal if things don’t work out. If the plan changes, that can be even better. There are secret opportunities hidden inside every failure...”
04
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“A journey will have pain and failure. It is not only the steps forward that we must accept. It is the stumbles. The trials. The knowledge that we will fail. That we will hurt those around us. But if we stop, if we accept the person we are when we fail, the journey ends. That failure becomes our destination.”
05
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“Failure is a state of mind. It’s like one of those sand traps an ant lion digs. You keep sliding back. Takes one hell of a jump to get out of it.”
06
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“There are several ways to achieve a goal. Failure is preferable to winning through unjust means.”
07
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“If you want to lift a hundred pounds, you don’t expect to succeed the first time. You start with a lighter weight and work up little by little. You actually fail to lift a hundred pounds, every day, until the day you succeed. But it is in the days when you are exerting yourself that the growth is occurring.”
08
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“The moment you start thinking someone else’s gain is your loss, you limit yourself by thinking in terms of competition and shortages.”
09
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“Develop success from failures. Discouragement and failure are two of the surest stepping stones to success.”
10
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“Do kids benefit when they see their moms and dads losing or quitting?”
11
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“Average is a failing plan! Average doesn’t work in any area of life. Anything that you give only average amounts of attention to will start to subside and will eventually cease to exist.”
12
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“Lots of people think that they’re a failure if their first or eighth cure for depression or anxiety doesn’t work the way they wanted. But an illness is an illness. It’s not your fault if the medication or therapy you’re given to treat your mental illness doesn’t work perfectly, or it worked for a while but then stopped working. You aren’t a math problem. You’re a person.”
13
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“Winters prayed the whole way over, prayed to live through it, prayed that he wouldn’t fail.”
14
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“I would rather fail pushing forward than in retreat.”
15
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“Give yourself no choice but to succeed. Let the consequences of failure become so dire and so unthinkable that you’ll have no choice but to do whatever it takes to succeed.”
16
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“In any case you mustn’t confuse a single failure with a final defeat.”
17
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When you fail, you disgrace yourself and others. When you succeed, be proud and others will be proud for you.
18
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“Failure is not an option if success is just a matter of trying harder.”
19
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“Success is counted sweetest By those who ne’er succeed.”
20
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“Finite to fail, but infinite to venture.”
21
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“Failure is a feeling long before it’s an actual result. It’s vulnerability that breeds with self-doubt and then is escalated, often deliberately, by fear.”
22
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“This place I am hoping to get to is so marvelous that if I described it to you now you would go crazy with excitement. And then, if we failed to get there (which is very possible), you would die of disappointment. I don’t want to raise your hopes too much, my darlings.”
23
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“When we face pain in relationships our first response is often to sever bonds rather than to maintain commitment.”
24
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“The ancient code of the Knights Radiant says “journey before destination.” Some may call it a simple platitude, but it is far more. A journey will have pain and failure. It is not only the steps forward that we must accept. It is the stumbles. The trials. The knowledge that we will fail. That we will hurt those around us.”
25
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“This was evil’s hour: we could not run from it. Perhaps only when human effort had done its best and failed, would God’s power alone be free to work.”
26
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“I began feeling the way I imagine an actor or athlete must feel when, after years of commitment to a particular dream...he realizes that he’s gone just about as far as talent or fortune will take him. The dream will not happen, and he now faces the choice of accepting this fact like a grownup and moving on to more sensible pursuits, or refusing the truth and ending up bitter, quarrelsome, and slightly pathetic. ”
27
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“Failure is a greater teacher than success”
28
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“Don’t waste your time hating a failure. Failure is a greater teacher than success. Listen, learn, go on.”
29
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“Though fairy tales end after ten pages, our lives do not. We are multi-volume sets. In our lives, even though one episode amounts to a crash and burn, there is always another episode awaiting us and then another. There are always more opportunities to get it right, to fashion our lives in the ways we deserve to have them. Don’t waste your time hating a failure. Failure is a greater teacher than success.”
30
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“Genuine love is rarely an emotional space where needs are instantly gratified. To know love we have to invest time and commitment...‘dreaming that love will save us, solve all our problems or provide a steady state of bliss or security only keeps us stuck in wishful fantasy, undermining the real power of the love -- which is to transform us.’ ”
31
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“Here then at long last is my darkness. No cry of light, no glimmer, not even the faintest shard of hope to break free across the hold.”
32
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“Perhaps down in his heart Okonkwo was not a cruel man. But his whole life was dominated by fear, the fear of failure and of weakness.”
33
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″‘Everything I do is wrong. You think I don’t know that? I’ve screwed up my entire existence, and everyone who’s close to me gets screwed right along with me.‘”
34
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“Even as a little boy he had resented his father’s failure and weakness, and even now he still remembered how he had suffered when a playmate had told him that his father was agbala. That was how Okonkwo first came to know that agbala was not only another name for a woman, it could also mean a man who had taken to title.”
35
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“There is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve: the fear of failure.”
36
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“The majority of people who fail to accumulate money sufficient for their needs, are, generally, easily influenced by the ‘opinions’ of others.”
37
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“I spent a year following every useless clue. You know this. Don’t torture me with the memory of my failure. ”
38
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“One does not run to reach success, one does not move to spoil it.”
39
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“You tried to help the people of the market. You mostly failed. This is life. The longer you live, the more you fail. Failure is the mark of a life well lived.
40
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″ In turn, the only way to live without failure is to be of no use to anyone. Trust me, I’ve practiced”
41
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“But if we stop, if we accept the person we are when we fall, the journey ends. That failure becomes our destination.”
42
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“When I thought about why I was sometimes reluctant to push myself, I realized that it was because I was afraid of failure - but in order to have more success, I needed to be willing to accept more failure.”
43
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“But my hope was that when I failed, if I failed, I’d fail quickly, so I’d have enough time, enough years, to implement all the hard-won lessons. I wasn’t much for setting goals, but this goal kept flashing through my mind every day, until it became my internal chant: Fail fast.”
44
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“Fear of failure, I thought, will never be our downfall as a company.”
45
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“That all things are possible to him who believes, that they are less difficult to him who hopes, they are more easy to him who loves, and still more easy to him who perseveres in the practice of these three virtues.”
46
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“We prematurely write off people as failures. We are too much in awe of those who succeed and far too dismissive of those who fail.”
47
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“The only failure is quitting. Everything else is just gathering information.”
48
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“For Ulbrickson, there was one overriding, and dark, fact to be confronted: he had failed again to make good on his public promises. It was very much an open question whether he was going to get another chance.”
49
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“Oh dear, it was going to be a failure; a complete failure, Clarissa felt it in her bones as dear old Lord Lexham stood there apologizing for his wife who had caught cold at the Buckingham Palace garden party.”
50
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“When our most tireless efforts fail to stop the surging sweep of oppression, we need to know that in this universe is a God whose matchless strength is a fit contrast to the sordid weakness of man.”
51
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“We learn from failure, not from success!”
Van Helsing
character
success
failure
concepts
52
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“Madame Zeroni warned that if he failed to do this, he and his descendants would be doomed for all of eternity. At the time, Elya thought nothing of the curse. He was just a fifteen-year-old kid, and “eternity” didn’t seem much longer than a week from Tuesday. Besides, he liked Madame Zeroni and would be glad to carry her up the mountain.”
Holes
book
Elya
Madame Zeroni
characters
failure
eternity
curse
doom
concepts
53
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“The moment of crisis had come, and I must face it. My old fears, my diffidence, my shyness, my hopeless sense of inferiority, must be conquered now and thrust aside. If I failed now I should fail forever.”
54
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“That our project has crashed is not a reflection of our worth as human beings. It’s just a mistake. It’s a problem – and a problem can be solved.”
55
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“If clouds are blocking the sun, there will always be a silver lining that reminds me to keep on trying.”
56
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“Most people lose the ability to see silver linings even though they are always there above us almost every day.”
57
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“It hurts to look at the clouds, but it also helps, like most things that cause pain.”
58
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“When life reaches out with a moment like this, it’s a sin if you don’t reach back.”
59
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“Most people lose the ability to see silver linings even though they are always there above us almost every day.”
60
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“She looks sad. She looks angry. She looks different from everyone else I know—she cannot put on that happy face others wear when they know they are being watched. She doesn’t put on a face for me, which makes me trust her somehow.”
61
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“Success is a poor teacher. We learn the most about ourselves when we fail, so don’t be afraid of failing. Failing is part of the process of success. You cannot have success without failure.”
62
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“By what you allow to occupy your mind and mouth, you can either bless your life to great heights of success or send it orbiting into realms of failure, sadness, and discontentment.”
63
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Where others have failed, I will not fail.
64
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“‘It’s our nature. We destroy. It’s the constant of our kind. No matter the color of blood, man will always fall.‘”
65
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“There is in us a tendency to locate the shaping forces of our existence outside ourselves. Success and failure are unavoidably related in our minds with the state of things around us.”
66
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“Our greatest fear should not be of failure but of succeeding at things in life that don’t really matter.”
67
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“The thing I love about God is He intentionally guides people into failure.”
68
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“Failure is just part of the process, and it’s not just okay; it’s better than okay. God doesn’t want failure to shut us down. God didn’t make it a three-strikes-and-you’re-out sort of thing. It’s more about how God helps us dust ourselves off so we can swing for the fences again. And all of this without keeping a meticulous record of our screw-ups.”
69
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“We can’t be brave in the big world without at least one small safe space to work through our fears and falls.”
70
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“I had failed to understand the perverse comfort we sometimes get from choosing death in life, exempting ourselves from the challenge of using our gifts, of living our lives in authentic relationship with others.”
71
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“The punishment imposed on us for claiming true self can never be worse than the punishment we impose on ourselves by failing to make that claim.”
72
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“He felt as though he were failing in practically every area of his life. Lately, happiness seemed as distant and unattainable to him as space travel. He hadn’t always felt this way. There had been a long period of time during which he remembered being very happy. But things change. People change. Change was one of the inevitable laws of nature, exacting its toll on people’s lives. Mistakes are made, regrets form, and all that was left were repercussions that made something as simple as rising from the bed seem almost laborious. ”
73
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“One man cannot practise many arts with success.”
Plato
author
Socrates
character
failure
skills
practice
concepts
74
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“I learned a lesson I’d never forget. The lesson was that, when you have setbacks and failures, you can’t overreact to them.”
75
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“Identity politics is universally attractive because it enables failures and weaknesses to be spun as the products of oppression and historical injustice. Personal responsibility is removed from the equation.”
76
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“and the color in my eyes has gone back into the sea.”
77
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“We either make ourselves miserable, or we make ourselves strong. ...”
78
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“From the errors of other nations, let us learn wisdom...”
79
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“Faith does not eliminate questions. But faith knows where to take them.”
80
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“attend the boxing matches, go to the racetrack, live on luck and skill, get alone, get alone often, and if you can’t sleep alone be careful of the words you speak in your sleep; and ask for no mercy no miracles;..”
81
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“I never get too attached to one deal or one approach. For starters, I keep a lot of balls in the air, because most deals fall out, no matter how promising they seem at first.”
82
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“Failing well means ending something that is not working and choosing to do something else better.”
83
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“Everyone wants happiness. No one wants pain. But you can have a rainbow without a little rain.”
84
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“It’s natural for a person to deny he’s a failure as a human being.”
85
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“The human heart has a way of making itself large again even after it’s been broken into a million pieces.”
86
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“Yet it is in this whole process of meeting and solving problems that life has its meaning. Problems are the cutting edge that distinguishes between success and failure. Problems call forth our courage and our wisdom; indeed, they create our courage and our wisdom.”
87
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“It is eerily terrifying that there is no sound when a heart breaks. Car accidents end with a bang, falling ends with a thud, even writing makes the scratching sound of pencil against paper. But the sound of a heart breaking is completely silent.”
88
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“Failures plagued me. Things I had omitted or ignored, neglected. What I should have given and hadn’t. I felt the biting pang of every unfulfillment.”
89
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“There’s no way to know what makes one thing happen and not another. What leads to what. What destroys what. What causes what to flourish or die or take another course.”
90
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“If we allow more people to solve problems without permission, and if we tolerate (and don’t vilify) their mistakes, then we enable a much larger set of problems to be addressed. When a random problem pops up in this scenario, it causes no panic, because the threat of failure has been defanged.”
91
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“Is the question being asked: Whose fault is it? If so your culture is one that vilifies failure. Failure is difficult enough without being compounded by the search for a scapegoat.”
92
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“When it comes to creative endeavors, the concept of zero failures is worse than useless. It’s counterproductive.”
93
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“Maybe it was good that the world forgot every lesson, every good and bad memory, every triumph and failure, all of it dying with each generation. Perhaps this cultural amnesia spared them all. Perhaps if they remembered everything, hope would die instead.”
94
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“I should’ve told you the truth from the beginning.” His voice trembled. “I thought if you knew what a failure I was, you wouldn’t want me along.”
95
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“I must be taken as I have been made. The success is not mine, the failure is not mine, but the two together make me.”
96
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“Slow down your yes. Only commit to things you know you can accomplish because they’re incredibly important to you. Otherwise you set yourself up for continued failure.”
97
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“The God who made the moon and the stars and the mountains and the oceans, The Creator who did all of those things, believed that you and your baby were meant to be a pair. That doesn’t mean you’re going to be a perfect fit. That doesn’t mean you won’t make mistakes. It does mean that you need not fear failure because you can’t fail at a job you were created to do.”
98
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“It’s impossible to go through life unscathed. Nor should you want to. By the hurts we accumulate, we measure both our follies and our accomplishments.”
99
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″‘Find THAT!’ sneered the bird. ‘But I think you will fail.’ And he left with a flip of his black-bottomed tail.”
100
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“What is belief - what is faith - if you don’t continue it after failure?”
101
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“Any fact facing us is not as important as our attitude toward it, for that determines our success or failure. The way you think about a fact may defeat you before you ever do anything about it. You are overcome by the fact because you think you are.”
102
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“Jesus tends to his people individually. He personally sees to our needs. We all receive Jesus’ touch. We experience his care.”
103
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“Like any good school, learning from failure isn’t free. The tuition is paid in discomfort or loss and having to start over.”
104
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“Failure shows us the way—by showing us what isn’t the way.”
105
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“Failure really can be an asset if what you’re trying to do is improve, learn, or do something new.”
106
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“Let our hearts admit, “I am poor and weak. Satan is too subtle, too cunning, too powerful; he watches constantly for advantages over my soul. The world presses in upon me with all sorts of pressures, pleas, and pretences.”
107
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“My own corruption is violent, tumultuous, enticing, and entangling. As it conceives sin, it wars within me and against me.”
108
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“Aren’t we all waiting to be read by someone, praying that they’ll tell us that we make sense?”
109
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“You can be shaped, or you can be broken. There is not much in between. Try to learn. Be coachable. Try to learn from everybody, especially those who fail. This is hard.”
110
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“Occasions and opportunities for temptation are innumerable. No wonder I do not know how deeply involved I have been with sin.”
111
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“The difference between a garden and a graveyard is only what you choose to put in the ground” ...
112
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“You want to know how I got these scars. I swallowed my pride and then it crawled its way out of my mouth.”
113
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Mind is the Maker, for no reason at all, for all this creation, created to fall.”
114
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“Prioritize your problems and take care of them one at a time, the highest priority first. Don’t try to do everything at once or you won’t be successful.” I explained how a leader who tries to take on too many problems simultaneously will likely fail at them all.”
115
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“THE ONLY REAL FAILURE IS TO FAIL OTHERS.”
116
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“I watched him even then as he fell, his face undefeated, his eyes still proud.”
117
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“The only things I regret, and the only things I’ll ever regret are things I didn’t do. In the end, that’s what we mourn. The paths we didn’t take. The people we didn’t touch.”
118
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“I have noticed that, with few exceptions, men bungle their affairs. Everywhere I see incompetence rampant, incompetence triumphant...I have accepted the universality of incompetence.”
119
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“Actually, I am a failed anorexic. I have anorexic thinking, but I can’t seem to muster the behavior”
120
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“The mark of fear is not easily removed.”
121
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“You can’t blame gravity for falling in love.”
122
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“Those who love to be feared fear to be loved, and they themselves are more afraid than anyone, for whereas other men fear only them, they fear everyone.
123
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“I’m not afraid to try again, I’m just afraid of getting hurt for the same reason.”
124
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“I failed my daughter, and my family and my myself. At least that’s what I believed at the time-that’s what I felt in my heart, in my bones, and in every atom of my body.”
125
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“She is so lost in her sadness that she has no idea how visible it is.”
126
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“When first love ends, most people eventually know there will be more to come. They are not through with love. Love is not through with them. It will never be the same as the first, but it will be better in different ways.”
127
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“Your suit is your responsibility. It failed. That means you failed.”
128
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“If you’re not failing, you’re probably not really moving forward.”
129
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“But I’ve come to realize that failure is a process. If you flunk a test, it doesn’t mean you failed a one-time event. The F shows that you neglected the process leading up to the test.”
130
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“Failure is an inside job. So is success. If you want to achieve, you have to win the war in your thinking first.”
131
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“Failure isn’t so bad if it doesn’t attack the heart. Success is all right if it doesn’t go to the head.”
132
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“A penal system must be conceived as a mechanism ... to administer illegalities differentially, not to eliminate them.”
133
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“As prayer warriors, we must remember that no matter how hopeless a situation may appear to us, God gives us power in prayer to do something about it.”
134
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″-my people are on another. There is room in this world for both ways. But your failure to grasp this simple fact has killed many of us and it will kill many more of you. For we have been on our path longer.”
135
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“I experienced failure and learned to buck up so I could rally those who’d put their trust in me. I suffered rejections and insults often enough to stop fearing them. In other words, I grew up—and got my sense of humor back.”
136
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“In those days we had everything. Everything a man could want. Even things to complain about. Before the mountain failed.”
137
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“Marcus’s hope of seeing the lost legion re-established is dashed, but he is able to bring back the gilded bronze eagle so that it can no longer serve as a symbol of Roman defeat – and thus will no longer be a danger to the frontier’s security.”
138
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“They had blown on the signpost and set it spinning so that when it stopped it pointed in wrong directions. They had sent their servants to trick him into a false sense of safety. The trick had failed.”
139
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“Welcome to the beautiful Sinclair family. No one is a criminal. No one is an addict. No one is a failure.”
140
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“The bet does more than expose Persephone’s failure as a goddess, however.”
141
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“it’s not failure that matters, but how you recover from it.”
142
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“We fail the minute we let someone else define success for us.”
143
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“If there is one lesson I’ve learned from failure and success, it’s this. I am not the outcome. I am never the result. I am only the effort.”
144
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“Success and failure come and go, but don’t let them define you. It’s who you are that matters.”
145
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“I only hope she knows what she’s doing. Climbing so high, so quickly: it only makes for further to fall.”
146
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“We can do our family members down as much as we like. But the second an outsider insults them our blood seethes. At the end of the day I don’t like him- but I love him. And I see my own failures in him.”
147
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“It wasn’t only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy, it was confusion and misunderstanding; above all, it was the failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you.”
148
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“Pair-a-Dice was wild jubilation. It wed black despair with fear and the foul taste of failure.”
149
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“failure always is a blessing when it forces one to acquire knowledge or to build habits that lead to the achievement of one’s major purpose in life.”
150
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“Billy knew he had been infallible before that, and now he was capable of failure. ”
151
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“The best thing we can do with the failures of the past is to let them be history.”
152
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“We can fail, but we can’t suck.”
153
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“The capacity to surmount failure without being discouraged is the chief asset of every person who attains outstanding success in any calling.”
154
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“The person who moves with definiteness recognizes the difference between temporary defeat and failure. When plans fail he substitutes others but he does not change his purpose. He perseveres.”
155
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“Failure is man-made circumstance. It is never real until accepted by man as permanent.”
156
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“Discarding your equipment means admitting failure and shedding part of your identity. You have to rethink your goal in your job- and your role in life.”
157
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“My past is everything I failed to be.”
158
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“You haven’t failed until you stop trying.”
159
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“Trust is equal parts character and competence... You can look at any leadership failure, and it’s always a failure of one or the other.”
160
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“Our successes and failures in life can be traced to how well or how badly we deal with the inevitable conflicts that confront us in society.”
161
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“For Google to have real impact, or even to reach liftoff, they would have to learn to make tough choices and keep their team on track. Given their healthy appetite for risk, they’d need to pull the plug on losers—to fail fast. Not least, they would need timely, relevant data. To track their progress. To measure what mattered.”

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