Failing Quotes

• 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.

  

  Herbert Spencer
  • Men
  • Science
  • Wisdom

• The difference between those who succeed and those who fail isn't what they have'it's what they choose to see and do with their resources and their expertise of life.

  

  Anthony Robbins
  • Differences
  • Succeed
  • Resources

• Where Example keeps pace with Authority, Power hardly fails to be obey'd.

  

  William Penn
  • Failure
  • Authority
  • Example

• I think at times I read too much of my own press. I wish I was better at taking in how great my life is, but that's surprisingly elusive. I tend to be very hard on myself and insecure about failing no matter what happens.

  

  Seth MacFarlane
  • Life
  • Wish
  • Insecure

• You must first be willing to fail — and you must have the courage to go for it anyway.

  

  Michael Bloomberg
  • Firsts
  • Failing
  • Willing

• Showing your movie to an audience... it's like your kid doing a piano recital. 'Just let it not fail. Please.

  

  Rian Johnson
  • Audience
  • Please
  • Recitals

• One of the great failings of our education system is that we tend to focus on those who are succeeding in exams, and there are plenty of them. But what we should also be looking at, and a lot more urgently, is those who fail.

  

  Michael Morpurgo
  • Focus
  • Succeed
  • Plenty

• We should not assume that Russia is doomed to live according to its worst traditions. In fact, in Russian history, failed efforts at external aggression, when they fail, usually bring on areas of internal reform.

  

  Daniel Fried
  • Effort
  • Worst
  • Tradition

• I don’t mind failing, but if I succeed it better be worth succeeding for.

  

  Vinod Khosla
  • Mind
  • Succeed
  • Failing

• Regimes may fall and fail, but I do not.

  

  Charles Maurice de Talleyrand
  • May
  • Fall
  • Failing

• your soul needs to be lonely so that its strangest elements can moil about, curl and growl and jump, fail and get triumphant, all inside you. Sociable people have the most trouble hearing their unconscious. They have trouble getting rid of clichés because clichés are sociable.

  

  Carol Bly
  • People
  • Soul
  • Trouble

• Being an outsider doesn't necessarily indicate any sort of social failing. We do not view a tuba player as musically challenged if he cannot play the violin.

  

  Alexandra Robbins
  • Failing
  • Outsider
  • Indicate

• We humans are hard to deal with. We are a loud, complex and demanding bunch. Often, we are best dealt with from a safe distance and for only brief periods of time. This could be why a lot of marriages fail.

  

  Henry Rollins Black Flag
  • Humans
  • Distance
  • Deals

• The only reason people do not know much is because they do not care to know. They are incurious. Incuriousity is the oddest and most foolish failing there is.

  

  Stephen Fry
  • People
  • Reason
  • Care

• In natural pregnancy, more than half of fertilized eggs fail to implant or are otherwise lost. Should we regard that as an instance of infant mortality? And if so, why are we not mounting ambitious public health campaigns to try to save and rescue all of the fertilized eggs that are lost in natural pregnancy? We would need a public health campaign of massive proportions if there really were over a fifty percent rate of infant mortality.

  

  Michael Sandel
  • Natural
  • Public
  • Ambitious

• I don't want to fail the audience. I don't want to let them down.

  

  Henry Rollins Black Flag
  • Want
  • Audience
  • Failing

• So long as antimilitarists propose no substitute for war's disciplinary function, no moral equivalent of war, analogous, as one might say, to the mechanical equivalent of heat, so long they fail to realize the full inwardness of the situation.

  

  William James
  • Long
  • War
  • Moral

• New York remains what it has always been : a city of ebb and flow, a city of constant shifts of population and economics, a city of virtually no rest. It is harsh, dirty, and dangerous, it is whimsical and fanciful, it is beautiful and soaring - it is not one or another of these things but all of them, all at once, and to fail to accept this paradox is to deny the reality of city existence.

  

  Paul Goldberger
  • Reality
  • Dirty
  • Accepting

• Your body can dictate your mind, so when I walk to a fight a lot of times I'm scared, I'm scared to death, I have a lot of doubts of myself, I'm afraid to fail, I'm afraid to be humiliated in front of everybody; but what happens, I act like it's impossible for me to fail and that my victory is a certainty. So as I'm walking to the Octagon and I act with confidence my body takes over my mind and I become confident for real. As I'm walking I see the change in my mind and when I reach the Octagon I'm a different person, I'm very confident.

  

  Georges St-Pierre
  • Different
  • Mind
  • Victory

• I need to stay in the present and use that new-age mantra: 'I'm okay right now.' But I worry about all the things I'm failing at every moment.

  

  Jonathan Ames
  • Present
  • Moment
  • Failing

• Bodies count, of course - they count more than we're willing to admit - but we don't fall in love with bodies, we fall in love with each other. We all know that, but the moment we go beyond a catalogue of surface qualities and appearances, words begin to fail us, to crumble apart in mystical confusions and cloudy, unsubstantial metaphors.

  

  Paul Auster
  • Fall
  • Moments
  • Quality

• It is extremely interesting to me that black males, and other black folk, are viewed as self-pitying, by either other blacks who have failed to accurately calculate their own diminished status as a result of racial animosity - both individual and systemic - or by whites who fail to comprehend how, after forcing black folk into subservience for hundreds of years, they now whine about small privileges that pale - so to speak - in comparison to the untold advantage of centuries of benefit.

  

  Michael Eric Dyson
  • Interesting
  • Speak
  • Individual

• To improve, we must watch ourselves fail, and learn from our mistakes.

  

  Joshua Foer
  • Mistake
  • Failing
  • Watches

• Creativity requires a lot of pass/fail/start again and it is often hard on the psyche.

  

  Henry Rollins Black Flag
  • Creativity
  • Hard
  • Failing

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