This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Your imagination has much to do with your life. It pictures beauty, success, desired results. One the other hand, it brings into focus ugliness, distress, and failure. It is for you to decide how you want your imagination to serve you." - Philip Conley, fully Philip Mallory "Phil" Conley
"Be sure to find a place for intellectual and cultural interests outside your daily occupation. It is necessary that you do so if this business of living is not to turn to dust and ashes in your mouth. Moreover, do not overlook the claims of religion as the explanation of an otherwise unintelligible world. It is not the fast tempo of modern life that kills but the boredom, a lack of strong interest and failure to grow that destroy. It is the feeling that nothing is worth while that makes men ill and unhappy." - Harold Willis Dodds
"Persistent people begin their success where others end in failure." - Frederic Eggleston, fully Sir Frederic William Eggleston
"I’m proof against the word “failure.” I’ve seen behind it. The only failure a man ought to fear is failure in cleaving to the purpose he sees to be best." - George Eliot, pen name of Mary Ann or Marian Evans
"I'm proof against that word failure. I've seen behind it. The only failure a man ought to fear is failure of cleaving to the purpose he sees to be best." - George Eliot, pen name of Mary Ann or Marian Evans
"There is only one real failure in life that is possible, and that is, not to be true to the best one knows." - Austin Madsen Farrer
"No man is a failure who is enjoying life." - William Feather
"Nobody succeeds in a big way except by risking failure." - William Feather
"There isn't much thrill in success unless one has first been close to failure." - William Feather
"Failure is only opportunity to more intelligently begin again." - Henry Ford
"One who fears failure limits his activities. Failure is only the opportunity more intelligently to begin again." - Henry Ford
"The children who go to bed hungry in a Harlem slum or a West Virginia mining town are not being deprived because no food can be found to give them; they are going to bed hungry because, despite all our miracles of invention and production, we have not yet found a way to make necessities of life available to all of our citizens - including those whose failure is not lack of personal industry or initiative, but only an unwise choice of parents." - James William Fulbright
"Three out of five of the Four Hundred [eminent individuals of the twentieth century] had serious school problems. In order of importance, their dissatisfactions were: with the curriculum; with dull irrational or cruel teachers; with others students who bullied, ignored, or bored them; and with school failure." - Mildred & Victor Goertzel
"Abortion almost always symbolizes failure - the failure of a contraceptive, of a relationship, of a family, of a dream, even of a social system. Government need not add an extra lash to the whip." - Soma Golden, fully Soma Golden Behr
"Send your audience away with a desire for, and an impulse toward spiritual improvement, or your preaching will be a failure." - Meyrick Goulburn, fully Edward Meyrick Goulburn
"We do not know, in most cases, how far social failure and success are due to heredity, and how far to environment. But environment is the easier of the two to improve." - J. B. S. Haldane, fully John Burdon Sanderson Haldane
"Perfectionism is a dangerous state of mind in an imperfect world. The best way is to forget doubts and set about the task at hand... If you are doing your best, you will not have time to worry about failure." - Robert Hillyer, fully Robert Silliman Hillyer
"Not failure, but low aim, is a crime." - Ernest Shurtleff Holmes
"The guns and the bombs, the rockets and the warships, are all symbols of human failure. They are necessary symbols. They protect what we cherish. But they are witness to human folly." - Lyndon Johnson, fully Lyndon Baines Johnson, aka LBJ
"We need to teach the highly educated person that it is not a disgrace to fail and that he must analyze every failure to find its cause. He must learn how to fail intelligently, for failing is one of the greatest arts in the world." - Charles F. Kettering, fully Charles Franklin Kettering
"We have forty million reasons for failure, but not a single excuse." - Rudyard Kipling
"There is no such thing as an inevitable war. If war comes it will be from failure of human wisdom." - Andrew Bonar Law
"I found that a hospital is probably the most difficult environment in which to afford a really good death. Hospitals are meant to preserve life; death is an enemy there. Death is not treated with much respect, with much compassion. There’s a lot of fear surrounding death. Death is a failure in a hospital." -
"No worldly success can compensate for failure in the home." - David O. McKay
"How far high failure overleaps the bounds of low success." - Jean Mary Morman
"The desire to take medicine is perhaps the greatest failure which distinguishes man from animals." - William Osler, fully Sir William Osler
"The process of writing a book is infinitely more important than the book that is completed as a result of the writing, let alone the success or failure the book may have after it is written... the book is merely a symbol of the writing. In writing the book, I am living. I am growing. I am tapping myself. I am changing. The process is the product." -
"Evolutionism, purporting to explain all and everything solely and exclusively by natural selection for adaption and survival, is the most extreme product of the materialistic utilitarianism of the nineteenth-century. The inability of twentieth-century thought to rid itself of this imposture is a failure which may well cause the collapse of the Western civilization." -
"We learn wisdom from failure much more than from success; we often discover what will do, by finding out what will not do; and probably he who never made a mistake never made a discovery." - Samuel Smiles
"I cannot give you the formula for success, but I can give you the formula for failure - which is : Try to please everybody." - Herbert Bayard Swope
"Are you willing to think? Consider carefully, for the answer to that question will largely determine your success or failure in life. If you develop your judgment, use it. Exercise your power of judgment as often as you can, for the first rule of good judgment is practice. The functions of your mind, no less than the muscles of your body, receive their strength through repeated use." - John M. Wilson, fully John Moulder Wilson
"Defeat is not the worst of failures. Not to have tried is the true failure." - George Edward Woodberry
"Our advance and salvation, our retreat and destruction, are linked with the prosperity or failure of school and synagogue." - Leopold Zunz
"The time we spend on earth is but one tick of the eternal clock in an unending eternity. We are here in mortality for a brief moment and then on to the next stage of our development. It does not matter how many trials we have in life, just how we handle them. It does not matter how long we live, just how we live. How can we appreciate eternal good health if we have never experienced sickness, pain, or disease? How can we appreciate eternal joy if we have never experienced disappointment, hardship, or failure? How can we appreciate living forever if we have never known death?" - Phil Batchelor
"There are multitudes of men and women who… attempt to get rid of the sense of moral failure by identifying themselves with groups which condone or approve the indulgences which they are either unable or unwilling to give up." - Anton Theophilus Boisen
"The pangs of pain, of failure, in this mortal lot, are the birth-throes of transition to better things." - John Elof Boodin
"Nothing fails like success because we don't learn from it. We learn only from failure." - Kenneth Boulding, fully Kenneth Ewart Boulding
"It’s easier to succeed because failure exacts a high price in terms of time when you have to do a job over. It’s easier to succeed because success eliminates the agony and frustration of defeat. It’s easier to succeed because money spent to fail must be spent again to succeed. It’s easier to succeed because a person’s credibility decreases with each failure, making it harder to succeed the second time. And it’s easier to succeed because joy and expressions of affirmation come from succeeding, whereas feelings of discouragement and discontent accompany failure." - S. Truett Cathy
"The Christian ideal of marriage is that of indissoluble unity… It is difficult to see on what ground failure in marriage should be treated as if it was the one failure for which the penitent cannot be forgiven." - Sydney Cave
"Show me a thoroughly satisfied man and I will show you a failure." - Thomas Edison, fully Thomas Alva Edison
"The way to succeed is double your failure rate." - Henry Ford
"One who fears limits his activities. Failure is only the opportunity to intelligently begin again." - Henry Ford
"Like produces like. Good produces good. If our all day thinking is positive, constructive, kindly, we produce health, success, and freedom. If our hour-to-hour thinking is negative, pessimistic, mean, we produce sickness, failure, and unhappiness. If our life is governed by Faith we become younger, more prosperous, and more joyous, as the years pass. If our life is governed by fear, the fleeting years bring age, decrepitude, and frustration." - Emmet Fox
"The food of events is thought. Your habitual thoughts nourish your conditions and cause them to increase and multiply. Fear thoughts, gloomy and critical thoughts, selfish thoughts, are the food of unhappiness, sickness, and failure. When you supply this food in abundance these things come into your life – because they seek their food. Thoughts of God, thoughts of kindness, of optimism, and good will, are the food of health, joy, and success; and if you furnish a bountiful supply of this food you will attract these things instead." - Emmet Fox
"The root of the guilt problem lies in human nature itself, in our failure as human being to live in accordance with our potentialities and our vision of the good." - J. Glenn Gray
"When it is said and done, life’s journey isn’t about humanity in general, or even the person next door. It’s about you and me. Our individual lives are the focus, a picture framed by our birth and death. Our personal goals and principles are under scrutiny; our personal success or failure is in the balance." - Os Guiness