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About the only problem with success is that it does not teach you how to deal with failure.
It is a tragic hour, that hour when we are finally driven to reckon with ourselves, when every avenue of mental distraction has been cut off and our own life and all its ineffaceable failures closes about us like the walls of that old torture chamber of the Inquisition.
WILLA CATHER, "The Burglar's Christmas," Home Monthly, Dec. 1896
What people call success is only preparation for the next failure.
AUGUST STRINDBERG, A Dream Play
If something doesn't go your way, it's probably because you didn't work that hard at it.
CHRIS SIMMS, Lakeland Ledger, Nov. 24, 2005
Failure means that you would not, or could not, pay for success. Success is a matter of sale. It can (most often) be bought by a large outlay--of hard forethought--of pains--of steadiness--of the golden wisdom coined from experience. But the figure is too high for most of us. We are too poor, or too slothful, to bring the price.
CHARLES BUXTON, Notes of Thought
Through failure, we learn a lesson in humility which is probably needed, painful though it is.
BILL WILSON, As Bill Sees It
Failure is regarded in Hollywood as practically a contagious disease; people will literally cross the road to avoid someone who is tainted with it.
BARRY NORMAN, The Film Greats
Ninety-nine percent of failures come from people who have the habit of making excuses.
GEORGE WASHINGTON CARVER, as quoted in Roy B. Zuck's The Speaker's Quote Book
One of the most important tasks of a manager is to eliminate his people’s excuses for failure.
ROBERT TOWNSEND, Further Up the Organization
Making your mark on the world is hard. If it were easy, everybody would do it. But it's not. It takes patience, it takes commitment, and it comes with plenty of failure along the way. The real test is not whether you avoid this failure, because you won't. it's whether you let it harden or shame you into inaction, or whether you learn from it; whether you choose to persevere.
BARACK OBAMA, speech, Jul. 12, 2006
A common tendency is to set an almost unreachable standard for success while simultaneously creating a standard for failure that is easy to meet. As a result, you may routinely feel a lot less successful than is necessary.
TOMMY NEWBERRY, Success Is Not an Accident
My parents always allowed me to fail when I was growing up, and I think that gave me a lot of strength going forward in my life. I lost high-school and junior-high elections when I ran for class president. I learned early in life to get up and dust yourself off and keep going.
ANDREA WONG, Newsweek, Oct. 15, 2007
A minute's success pays the failure of years.
ROBERT BROWNING, prologue, Apollo and the Fates
Neither failure nor success has the power to change your inner state of Being.
ECKHART TOLLE, The Power of Now
You can't let your failures define you -- you have to let your failures teach you. You have to let them show you what to do differently the next time.
BARACK OBAMA, National Address to America's Schoolchildren, Sep. 8, 2009
I have a congenital aversion to failure.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN, letter to George E. Pickett, Feb. 22, 1841
The common idea that success spoils people by making them vain, egotistic, and self-complacent is erroneous; on the contrary, it makes them, for the most part, humble, tolerant, and kind. Failure makes people cruel and bitter.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM, The Summing Up
We sink to rise.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON, Letters and Social Aims
All great success is preceded by failure.
BRIAN TRACY, The 100 Absolutely Unbreakable Laws of Business Success
If a man has directed his course to great ends there is compensation even in ruin.
ARTHUR LYNCH, Moods of Life
Success is somebody else's failure.
URSULA K. LE GUIN, Dancing at the Edge of the World
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