This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"A success is one who decided to succeed - and worked. A failure is one who decided to succeed - and wished. A decided failure is one who failed to decide - and waited. " - Henry Ward Beecher
"Capitalism has always been a failure for the lower classes. It is now beginning to fail for the middle classes." - Howard Zinn
"Success teaches us nothing; only failure teaches." - Hyman George Rickover
"There is no failure in life. It all depends how you take things. If you are desiring too much -- you want to reach too high, and you cannot -- then there is frustration and failure. But if you are not desiring anything and you are perfectly happy wherever you are, life is moment-to-moment victory." - Osho, born Chandra Mohan Jain, also known as Acharya Rajneesh and Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh NULL
"Added man-made failure really hurts young children [under six]. No one has to contrive lessons for these youngsters so that they will learn how to lose—they are losers too much of the time. No one has to put them in their place—they know all too well in their hearts the little place they are in. No one has to cut them down to size—their size is painfully small. At this stage in their development we are wise to stay away from competition, from games and races and contests with winners and losers. It matters too much to each child to come in first—they cannot stand the risk of competition. " - James L. Hymes, Jr.
"We slowly learn that life consists of processes as well as results, and that failure may come quite as easily from ignoring the adequacy of one's method as from selfish or ignoble aims. We are thus brought to a conception of Democracy not merely as a sentiment which desires the well-being of all [people], nor yet as a creed which believes in the essential dignity and equality of all [people], but as that which affords a rule for living as well as a test of faith." - Jane Addams
"The hardest trial of the heart is, whether it can bear a rival's failure without triumph." - John Aiken or Aikin
"To begin to think with purpose is to enter the ranks of those strong ones who only recognize failure as one of the pathways to attainment." - James Allen
"Don't be discouraged by a failure. It can be a positive experience. Failure is, in a sense, the highway to success, inasmuch as every discovery of what is false leads us to seek earnestly after what is true, and every fresh experience points out some form of error which we shall afterwards carefully avoid." - John Keats
"It has always seemed strange to me... the things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling, are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest, are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second. " - John Steinbeck, fully John Ernst Steinbeck
"All war is a symptom of man's failure as a thinking animal." - John Steinbeck, fully John Ernst Steinbeck
"In uncertainty I am certain that underneath their topmost layers of frailty men want to be good and want to be loved. Indeed, most of their vices are attempted shortcuts to love. When a man comes to die, no matter what his talents and influence and genius, if he dies unloved his life must be a failure to him and his dying a cold horror. It seems to me that if you or I must choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure to the world." - John Steinbeck, fully John Ernst Steinbeck
"Failure is not fatal, but failure to change might be." - John Wooden, fully John Robert Wooden
"Success is never final, failure is never fatal. It's courage that counts. " - John Wooden, fully John Robert Wooden
"Let’s face it, we’re all imperfect and we’re going to fall short on occasion. But we must learn from failure and that will enable us to avoid repeating our mistakes. Through adversity, we learn, grow stronger, and become better people" - John Wooden, fully John Robert Wooden
"The man who is afraid to risk failure seldom has to face success." - John Wooden, fully John Robert Wooden
"Don’t permit fear of failure to prevent effort. We are all imperfect and will fail on occasions, but fear of failure is the greatest failure of all." - John Wooden, fully John Robert Wooden
"It's a failure of national vision when you regard children as weapons, and talents as materials you can mine, assay, and fabricate for profit and defense. " - John Hersey, fully John Richard Hersey
"Learning starts with failure; the first failure is the beginning of education. " - John Hersey, fully John Richard Hersey
"I acquired expensive habits and affected manners. I got a third-class degree and a first-class illusion: that I was a poet. But nothing could have been less poetic that my seeing-through-all boredom with life in general and with making a living in particular. I was too green to know that all cynicism masks a failure to cope-- an impotence, in short; and that to despise all effort is the greatest effort of all. But I did absorb a small dose of one permanently useful thing, Oxford's greatest gift to civilized life: Socratic honesty. It showed me, very intermittently, that it is not enough to revolt against one's past. One day I was outrageously bitter among some friends about the Army; back in my own rooms later it suddenly struck me that just because I said with impunity things that would have apoplexed my dead father, I was still no less under his influence. The truth was I was not a cynic by nature, only by revolt. I had got away from what I hated, but I hadn't found where I loved, and so I pretended that there was nowhere to love. Handsomely equipped to fail, I went out into the world." - John Fowles, fully John Robert Fowles
"I was too green to know that all cynicism masks a failure to cope — an impotence, in short and to despise all effort is the greatest effort of all." - John Fowles, fully John Robert Fowles
"The only guarantee for failure is to stop trying." - John C. Maxwell
""Failing forward" is the ability to get back up after you've been knocked down, learn from your mistake, and move forward in a better direction. Don't buy into the notion that mistakes can somehow be avoided. They can't be. Failure is not a one-time event; it's how you deal with life along the way. Until you breathe your last breath, you're still in the process, and there is still time to turn things around for the better. You are the only person who can label what you do a failure. Failure is subjective. Don't allow the fire of adversity to make you a skeptic. Allow it to purify you. Generally speaking, there are two kinds of learning: experience, which is gained from your own mistakes, and wisdom, which is learned from the mistakes of others. Seek advice, but make sure it's from someone who has successfully handled mistakes or adversities." - John C. Maxwell
"It doesn't matter how hard or long you work if you're not accomplishing what needs to be done. Plan and execute your first failure so that you no longer have to fear it. If the size of a task causes you to procrastinate or completely shy away, break it into smaller, more manageable tasks. Often people fail to start or complete a task because they don't see any connection between what they're doing and what they really want to accomplish in life." - John C. Maxwell
"Exaltation is gone from the synagogue, from the church, and also from many a classroom and university. The cardinal sin is boredom, and the major failure the denial to our young of moments of exaltation." - Abraham Joshua Heschel
"The fear of living arises most commonly... in the failure to live in complete involvement with what transcends our being." - Abraham Joshua Heschel
"To celebrate is to contemplate the singularity of the moment and to enhance the singularity of the self. What was shall not be again... Every moment is a new arrival, a new bestowal. How to welcome the moment? How to respond to the marvel? The cardinal sin is in our failure not to sense the grandeur of the moment, the marvel and mystery of being, the possibility of quiet exaltation. The man of our time is losing the power of celebration. Instead of celebrating, he seeks to be amused or entertained. Celebration is an active state, an act of expressing reverence or appreciation. To be entertained is a passive state - it is to receive pleasure afforded by an amusing act or a spectacle... Celebration is a confrontation, giving attention to the transcendent meaning of one’s actions. Celebration is an act of expressing respect or reverence for that which one needs or honors... inward appreciation, lending spiritual form to everyday acts." - Abraham Joshua Heschel
"With the American failure came world failure." - John Kenneth Galbraith, aka "Ken"
"I think that one may contribute (ever so slightly) to the beauty of things by making one's own life and environment beautiful, as far as one's power reaches.This includes moral beauty, one of the qualities of humanity, though it seems not to appear elsewhere in the universe. But I would have each person realize that his contribution is not important, its success not really a matter for exultation nor its failure for mourning; the beauty of things is sufficient without him." - Robinson Jeffers, fully John Robinson Jeffers
"I think, here is your emblem to hang in the future sky; not the cross, not the hive, but this; bright power, dark peace;Fierce consciousness joined with final disinterestedness; Life with calm death; the falcon’s realist eyes and act married to the massive mysticism of stone, which failure cannot cast down nor success make proud." - Robinson Jeffers, fully John Robinson Jeffers
"We pay a heavy price for our fear of failure. It is a powerful obstacle to growth. It assures the progressive narrowing of the personality and prevents exploration and experimentation. There is no learning without some difficulty and fumbling. If you want to keep on learning, you must keep on risking failure all your life." - John W. Gardner, fully John William Gardner
"Not many people are willing to give failure a second opportunity. They fail once and it's all over. The bitter pill of failure is often more than most people can handle. If you're willing to accept failure and learn from it, if you're willing to consider failure as a blessing in disguise and bounce back, you've got the potential of harnessing one of the most powerful success forces." - Joseph Sugarman
"Poverty is not wholly a personal failure. It also represents the failure of an economic system. And the remedy is not wholly one of charity, but of political and economic action. Poverty is a reflection also no those who are not poor." - Brooks Atkinson, fully Justin Brooks Atkinson
"Leadership is solving problems. The day soldiers stop bringing you their problems is the day you have stopped leading them. They have either lost confidence that you can help or concluded you do not care. Either case is a failure of leadership." - Karl Popper, fully Sir Karl Raimund Popper
"There is no failure except in no longer trying. There is no defeat except from within, no really insurmountable barrier save our own inherent weakness of purpose." - Kin Hubbard, pen name for Frank McKinney Hubbard
"Today, no walls can separate humanitarian or human rights crises in one part of the world from national security crises in another. What begins with the failure to uphold the dignity of one life all too often ends with a calamity for entire nations." - Kofi Annan, fully Kofi Atta Annan
"It doesn’t matter what the particular problem is for a person’s faith. Having an omniscient God concept solves it. It could be the intractable and unanswerable problem of ubiquitous suffering; or how a man could be 100% God and 100% man without anything leftover, or left out; or how the death of a man on a cross saves us from sins; or why God’s failure to better communicate led to massive bloodshed between Christians themselves. It just doesn’t matter. God is omniscient. He knows why. He knows best. Therefore punting to God’s omniscience makes faith pretty much unfalsifiable, which allows believers to disregard what reason tells them by ignoring the probabilities." - Kurt Baier
"The most unfortunate thing that happens to a person who fears failure is that he limits himself by becoming afraid to try anything new. " - Leo Busacaglia
"We seem to gain wisdom more readily through our failures than through our successes. We always think of failure as the antithesis of success, but it isn't. Success often lies just the other side of failure." - Leo Busacaglia
"To dwell on the past simply causes failure in the present. While you are sitting down and bemoaning the past and regretting all the things you have not done, you are crippling yourself and preventing yourself from working in the present." - Martyn Lloyd-Jones, fully David Martyn Lloyd Jones
"Self-confidence is not hope; it is the self-judgment of your own internal forces in their relation to the world without, which results from the failure of many; hopes and the non-realization of many fears. " - Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, fully Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Lytton
"The vices and the virtues are written in a language the world cannot construe; it reads them in a vile translation, and the translators are Failure and Success. " - Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, fully Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Lytton
"There is no such things as darkness, only a failure to see." - Malcolm Muggeridge
"Our failure to segregate morons who are increasing and multiplying ... demonstrates our foolhardy and extravagant sentimentalism ... [Philanthropists] encourage the healthier and more normal sections of the world to shoulder the burden of unthinking and indiscriminate fecundity of others; which brings with it, as I think the reader must agree, a dead weight of human waste. Instead of decreasing and aiming to eliminate the stocks that are most detrimental to the future of the race and the world, it tends to render them to a menacing degree dominant ... We are paying for, and even submitting to, the dictates of an ever-increasing, unceasingly spawning class of human beings who never should have been born at all." - Margaret Sanger, fully Margaret Higgins Sanger Slee
"This link between deprivation and educational failure or special needs struck me then as of the greatest possible importance. And in this respect things have not changed. We were not allowed to mention the link because the myth still persisted that social services and the teaching profession were two completely different sources of provision, dealing in completely separate things, or meeting totally different needs." - Mary Warnock, fully Helen Mary Warnock, Baroness Warnock
"Science reveals the possibility of achieving all good, and sets mortals at work to discover what God has already done; but distrust of one's ability to gain the goodness desired and to bring out better and higher results, often hampers the trial of one's wings and ensures failure at the outset." - Mary Baker Eddy
"I realize that not everything can be measured—mystery, beauty, the sweep of a rainbow, the breadth of human potential. Though failure is a reality and sometimes a consequence of measurement, continual success probably means our bar is too low or our tape too short." - Max DePree, alternatively De Pree or Depree
"Often the difference between a successful man and a failure is not one's better abilities or ideas, but the courage that one has to bet on his ideas, to take a calculated risk, and to act." - Maxwell Maltz