

“I can accept failure, everyone fails at something. But I can't accept not trying.”
Variant: I can appect failure, but I cannot accept not trying.
Seed of Light (1959)
“I can accept failure, everyone fails at something. But I can't accept not trying.”
Variant: I can appect failure, but I cannot accept not trying.
"The Power of a State Developed by Mental Culture", an address to the Mercantile Library Association (18 November 1844), published in The Works of Rufus Choate : Memoir, Lectures and Addresses (1862), edited by Samuel Gilman Brown.
“Failure is acceptable. but not trying is a whole different ball park.”
Source: For the Love of the Game: My Story
“You have to be able to accept failure to get better.”
Speaking to parliament on 11 May 1964 as Minister for Coloured Affairs, as cited in The Guardian, 7 February 2006
“We are by nature observers, and thereby learners. That is our permanent state.”
As quoted in "Václav Havel: Heir to a Spiritual Legacy" by Richard L. Stanger in Christian Century (11 April 1990) http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=767
Context: It's not hard to stand behind one's successes. But to accept responsibility for one's failures... that is devishly hard! But only thence does the road lead... to a radically new insight into the mysterious gravity of my existence as an uncertain enterprise and to its transcendental meaning.
“A permanent state of transition is man's most noble condition.”
"Heroic Reason", as translated by H. R. Hays, in Selected Writings of Juan Ramon Jimenez (1957) edited by Eugenio Florit, p. 231.
Context: A permanent state of transition is man's most noble condition. When we say an artist is in a state of transition, many believe that we are belittling. In my opinion when people speak of an art of transition this indicates a better art and the best that art can give. Transition is a complete present which unites the past and the future in a momentary progressive ecstasy, a progressive eternity, a true eternity of eternities, eternal moments. Progressive ecstasy is above all dynamic; movement is what sustains life and true death is nothing but lack of movement, be the corpse upright or supine. Without movement life is annihilated, within and without, for lack of dynamic cohesion. But the dynamism should be principally of the spirit, of the idea, it should be a moral dynamic ecstasy, dynamic in relation to progress, ecstatic in relation to permanence.
“Failure to properly conceptualize the nature of knowledge assets condemns firms.”
Source: Knowledge Assets, 1998, p. 2