“Chamberlain's sins were not his intentions, but rather his ignorance and arrogance in failing to appraise the situation properly. And in that failure he was not alone.”

“He was impregnably armored by his good intentions and his ignorance.”

“His air of failure had nothing desperate about it; rather, it seemed to stem from an unresented realisation that he was not cut out for success, and his duty was therefore to ensure only that he failed in the correct and acceptable fashion.”

“Man's sin is in his failure to live what he is. Being the master of the earth, man forgets that he is the servant of God.”

“The sinners … had been taught to think of sin as the failure of observe laws of which they were usually quite ignorant. Sin was therefore not always a fully deliberate act.”

“He (the Professor) was a failure but did his best to hid it. One of his failings was that he could barely write, except in a twelfth century hand, in Latin, with abbreviations.”

“If a man wants to succeed in his work, that is, to achieve the anticipated results, he must bring his ideas into correspondence with the laws of the objective external world; if they do not correspond, he will fail in his practice. After he fails, he draws his lessons, corrects his ideas to make them correspond to the laws of the external world, and can thus turn failure into success; this is what is meant by “failure is the mother of success” and “a fall into the pit, a gain in your wit.”

“Will moved on grimly, screwing up his eyes against the glare, ignoring the worsening pain from his hand, and finally reaching a state in which movement alone was good and stillness bad, so that he suffered more from resting than from toiling on. And since the failure of the witches' spell to stop his bleeding, he thought they were regarding him with fear, too, as if he was marked by some curse greater than their own powers.”

“Doomed to total failure in a deaf world of ignorance and indifference, he inexorably kept on cutting out his diamonds, his dazzling diamonds, of whose mines he had a perfect knowledge.”

“His wings were failing, but he refused to fall without a struggle.”