Quotes about fail
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“Nothing is lost that we do not first see as lost. Visions born of fear give birth to our failing.
Visions born of hope give birth to our success.
What is possible lives within us, and it only remains for us to discover it.”

Terry Brooks (1944) American writer

Fear, Hope, Birth, Success

“Each time I fail to think about death, I have the impression of cheating, of deceiving someone in me.”

Emil M. Cioran book The Trouble With Being Born

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)
Source: The Trouble with Being Born

Death, Thinking, Time, Cheating

“The test of any good fiction is that you should care something for the characters; the good to succeed, the bad to fail. The trouble with most fiction is that you want them all to land in hell together, as quickly as possible.”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

Hell

“When all else fails, there's always delusion.”

Conan O'Brien (1963) American television show host and comedian

Funny

“You know, that might be the answer — to act boastfully about something we ought to be ashamed of. That's a trick that never seems to fail.”

Joseph Heller book Catch-22

Source: Catch-22 (1961)

“A man who fails well is greater than one who succeeds badly.”

Thomas Merton book No Man Is an Island

Source: No Man Is an Island

“A man can fail many times, but he isn't a failure until he begins to blame somebody else.”

John Burroughs (1837–1921) American naturalist and essayist

Variant: You can get discouraged many times, but you are not a failure until you begin to blame somebody else and stop trying.

Failure, Time

“Either dragons should exist completely or fail to exist at all, he felt. A dragon only half-existing was worse than the extremes.”

Terry Pratchett (1948–2015) English author

Source: The Color of Magic

“The desire for high status is never stronger than in situations where "ordinary" life fails to answer a median need for dignity and comfort.”

Alain de Botton book Status Anxiety

Source: Status Anxiety

Life

“You may be disappointed if you fail, but you are doomed if you don't try.”

Beverly Sills (1929–2007) opera soprano

As quoted in Incredible Quotations : 230 Thought-Provoking Quotes with Prompts to Spark Students' Writing, Thinking, and Discussion (1997) by Jacqueline Sweeney

Disappointment, Deep, Inspirational, Life

“Shoot for the moon, even if you fail, you'll land among the stars”

Cecelia Ahern (1981) Irish novelist

Source: P.S. I Love You

Star

“A mistake is only an error, it becomes a mistake when you fail to correct it”

John Lennon (1940–1980) English singer and songwriter

Source: The Writings of John Lennon

Error

“I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.”

Stephen Hawking (1942–2018) British theoretical physicist, cosmologist, and author

People

“Macbeth:
If we should fail?

Lady Macbeth:
We fail?
But screw your courage to the sticking place,
And we'll not fail.”

William Shakespeare Macbeth

Source: Macbeth

Courage

“I feel shame, not for the wrong things I have done, but for the right things that I have failed to do.”

Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) French painter and sculptor

Feeling

“if you set your goals ridiculously high and its a failure, you will fail above everyone elses success”

James Cameron (1954) Canadian film director

Failure, Success

“Everything is a contest. All dealings among men are a contest in which some will succeed and others fail. And some are failing quite spectacularly.”

Brandon Sanderson book The Way of Kings

Source: The Way of Kings

Men

“When all else fails, give up and go to the library.”

Stephen King book 11/22/63

Source: 11/22/63

“Many a man fails to become a thinker only because his memory is too good.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Human, All Too Human

Mancher wird nur deshalb kein Denker, weil sein Gedächtnis zu gut ist.
II.122
Human, All Too Human (1878)

Memory

“Greatly he failed, but he had greatly dared.”

Ovid (-43–17 BC) Roman poet

“Love alone is not enough. Without imagination, love stales into sentiment, duty, boredom. Relationships fail not because we have stopped loving but because we first stopped imagining.”

James Hillman (1926–2011) American psychologist

Love, Imagination

“Oft expectation fails, and most oft there where most it promises; and oft it hits where hope is coldest, and despair most fits.”

William Shakespeare (1564–1616) English playwright and poet

Hope, Despair

“Even if it meant that she had failed, she was glad. And if what she'd wanted had been impossible from the start, still there was a certain lonely comfort in the fact that she'd known it was impossible and had gone ahead and done it anyway.”

Donna Tartt book The Little Friend

Source: The Little Friend

“Don't fear failure. — Not failure, but low aim, is the crime. In great attempts it is glorious even to fail.”

Bruce Lee (1940–1973) Hong Kong-American actor, martial artist, philosopher and filmmaker

Source: Striking Thoughts (2000), p. 121
Source: Striking Thoughts: Bruce Lee's Wisdom for Daily Living

Fear, Failure

“The erosion of our confidence in the future is threating to destroy the Social and the Political fabric of America. The confidence that we have always had as a people, is not simply some romantic dream, or a proverb in a dusty book, that we read, just on the Fourth of July. It is the idea of which founded our nation and has guided us in our development as a people. Confidence in the future has supported everything else. We've always believed in a thing called, progress. We've always had a faith, that the days of our children, would be better than our own. Our people are losing that faith. Fopr the first time in the history of our country, a majority of our people believe, that the next five years, will be worse than the past five years. We were taught that our armies were always invincible and our causes were always just, only to suffer the agony of Vietnam. We respected the presidency as a place of honor, unitl the shock of Watergate. We've got to stop crying and start sweating. Stop talking and start walking. Working together, with our common faith, we cannot fail.”

Jimmy Carter (1924) American politician, 39th president of the United States (in office from 1977 to 1981)

Children, People, Books, Faith

“When all else failed, she tried being reasonable.”

Terry Pratchett book Johnny and the Bomb

Source: Johnny and the Bomb

“Okay, you were probably taught there are five senses," he said. "We see, hear, touch, smell and taste. But how do we know those are the only five? What are the senses that we don't have? What are we failing to perceive?”

Louis Sachar (1954) American writer of children's books

Source: The Cardturner: A Novel about a King, a Queen, and a Joker

Sense

“But what if I fail of my purpose here? It is but to keep the nerves at strain, to dry one's eyes and laugh at a fall, and baffled, get up and begin again.”

Robert Browning (1812–1889) English poet and playwright of the Victorian Era

“Our whole life is startlingly moral. There is never an instant's truce between virtue and vice. Goodness is the only investment that never fails.”

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) 1817-1862 American poet, essayist, naturalist, and abolitionist

Life

“people who have failed in their lives, they are suffering their failure. People who have succeeded in their life, they are suffering their success.”

Sadhguru (1957) Yogi, mystic, visionary and humanitarian

Source: Inner Management: In the Presence of the Master

Life, People, Failure, Suffering

“To say she was my girlfriend was absurd: no one the wrong side of thirty has a girlfriend… I suppose I ought to have realize it’s ominous that forty thousand years of human language had failed to produce a word for our relationship.”

Robert Harris (1957) novelist

“There were people whom you positively ached to please. If you failed with such people they would put you into a category in their minds where they could kee you and have contempt for you forever.”

Alice Munro (1931) Canadian novelist

People

“The labours of men of genius, however erroneously directed, scarcely ever fail in ultimately turning to the solid advantage of mankind.”

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797–1851) English novelist, short story writer, dramatist, essayist, biographer, and travel writer

Men

“Most people who fail in their dream fail not from lack of ability but from lack of commitment.”

Zig Ziglar (1926–2012) American motivational speaker

Source: See You at the Top

People, Dreams

“Most people fail in life not because they aim too high and miss, but because they aim too low and hit.”

Les Brown (1945) American politician

Life, People

“A bend in the road is not the end of the road…Unless you fail to make the turn.”

Helen Keller (1880–1968) American author and political activist

Moving On

“To recognize that the greatest error is not to have tried and failed, but that in trying, we did not give it our best effort”

Gene Kranz (1933) NASA Flight Director and manager

Error, Effort

“An age is called Dark not because the light fails to shine, but because people refuse to see it.”

James A. Michener book Space

Space (1982)

People, Age, Light

“Prayer is the force as real as terrestrial gravity. As a physician, I have seen men, after all other therapy had failed, lifted out of disease and melancholy by the serene effort of prayer. Only in prayer do we achieve that complete and harmonious assembly of body, mind and spirit which gives the frail human reed its unshakable strength.”

Alexis Carrel (1873–1944) French surgeon and biologist

Men, Disease, Effort

“Contrary to what phenomenology—which is always phenomenology of perception—has tried to make us believe, contrary to what our desire cannot fail to be tempted into believing, the thing itself always escapes.”

Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) French philosopher (1930-2004)

“You never fail until you stop trying.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

Relationship, Good Night

“I had already found that it was not good to be alone, and so made companionship with what there was around me, sometimes with the universe and sometimes with my own insignificant self; but my books were always my friends, let fail all else.”

Joshua Slocum (1844–1909) American navigator and maritime writer

Source: Sailing Alone around the World

Books, Universe

“What does one prefer? An art that struggles to change the social contract, but fails? Or one that seeks to please and amuse, and succeeds?”

Robert Hughes (1938–2012) Australian critic, historian, writer

Source: The Shock of the New

Art, Change

“The education and empowerment of women throughout the world cannot fail to result in a more caring, tolerant, just and peaceful life for all.”

Aung San Suu Kyi (1945) State Counsellor of Myanmar and Leader of the National League for Democracy

Opening Keynote Address at NGO Forum on Women, Beijing China (1995)
Context: For millennia women have dedicated themselves almost exclusively to the task of nurturing, protecting and caring for the young and the old, striving for the conditions of peace that favour life as a whole. To this can be added the fact that, to the best of my knowledge, no war was ever started by women. But it is women and children who have always suffered most in situations of conflict. Now that we are gaining control of the primary historical role imposed on us of sustaining life in the context of the home and family, it is time to apply in the arena of the world the wisdom and experience thus gained in activities of peace over so many thousands of years. The education and empowerment of women throughout the world cannot fail to result in a more caring, tolerant, just and peaceful life for all.

Life, Women, World, Education

“If we pass on an unsustainable environment to our children we have failed them.”

Lewis Pugh (1969) Environmental campaigner, maritime lawyer and endurance swimmer

Address to the House of Lords (19 November 2010)
Speaking & Features

Children

“The Thing of the idols, the green, sticky spawn of the stars, had awaked to claim his own. The stars were right again, and what an age-old cult had failed to do by design, a band of innocent sailors had done by accident. After vigintillions of years great Cthulhu was loose again, and ravening for delight.”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

Fiction, The Call of Cthulhu (1926)

Age, Star

“We all lose sometimes. We fail to get what we want. Friends and loved ones leave. We make a decision we regret. We try our hardest and come up short. It's not the losing that defines us. It's how we lose. It's what we do afterward.”

Scott Jurek (1973) American ultramarthon runner

Epilogue, p. 221
Eat and Run (2012)

Love, Decision

“Treating women as second-class citizens is a bad tradition. It holds you back. There’s no excuse for sexual assault or domestic violence. There’s no reason that young girls should suffer genital mutilation. There’s no place in civilized society for the early or forced marriage of children. These traditions may date back centuries; they have no place in the 21st century. These are issues of right and wrong -- in any culture. But they’re also issues of success and failure. Any nation that fails to educate its girls or employ its women and allowing them to maximize their potential is doomed to fall behind in a global economy.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2015, Remarks to the Kenyan People (July 2015)

Women, Marriage, Children, Education

“Things have never been so swell
and I have never felt this well! I have never failed to feel… Pain!”

Kurt Cobain (1967–1994) American musician and artist

You Know You're Right.
Song lyrics, Posthumously released (post-1994)

Pain, Feeling

“Hitler took the guns, Stalin took the guns, Mao took the guns, Fidel Castro took the guns, Hugo Chávez took the guns. And I am here to tell you, 1776 will commence again if you try to take our firearms! It doesn't matter how many lemmings you get out there on the street begging for them to have their guns taken; we will not relinquish them, do you understand? That's why you're going to fail, and the establishment knows, no matter how much propaganda, the Republic will rise again when you attempt to take our guns!”

Alex Jones (1974) American radio host, author, conspiracy theorist and filmmaker

Alex Jones on Piers Morgan Tonight http://edition.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1301/12/pmt.01.html debating gun control, CNN, 7 January 2013 ( video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_XZvMwcluEg). <br class="br">2013

Understanding

“ISIL speaks for no religion. Their victims are overwhelmingly Muslim, and no faith teaches people to massacre innocents. No just God would stand for what they did yesterday, and for what they do every single day. ISIL has no ideology of any value to human beings. Their ideology is bankrupt. They may claim out of expediency that they are at war with the United States or the West, but the fact is they terrorize their neighbors and offer them nothing but an endless slavery to their empty vision, and the collapse of any definition of civilized behavior. And people like this ultimately fail. They fail, because the future is won by those who build and not destroy.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

Statement by the President (20 August 2014) http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2014/08/20/statement-president <br class="br">2014

God, War, People, Faith

“The scene I had just witnessed brought back a lot of memories — not of things I have done but of things I have failed to do, wasted hours and frustrated moments and opportunities forever lost because time had eaten so much of my life and I would never get it back.”

Hunter S. Thompson (1937–2005) American journalist and author

1990s, The Rum Diary (1998)

Life, Memory, Time

“For priority in location, we need to first attend to Zone 1 and Zone 2; these support the household and save the most expense. What is perhaps of greatest importance, and cannot be too highly stressed, is the need to develop very compact systems. … We can all make a very good four meters square garden, where we may fail to do so in 40 square meters.”

Bill Mollison (1928–2016) Australian permaculturist

Source: Permaculture: A Designers' Manual (1988), chapter 3.15

Support

“Audacity succeeds as often as it fails; in life it has an even chance.”

Napoleon I of France (1769–1821) French general, First Consul and later Emperor of the French

Napoleon : In His Own Words (1916)

Life, Chance

“I have never read Max Weber and do not know how he has arrived at the conclusion that “more tribals joined the Hindu mainstream as a result of the Muslim shock than the number of Hindus who were converted to Islam”. Perhaps he had in mind the people of Assam whom Bakhtyar Khalji and a few other Muslim invaders tried to subjugate, or the hill people all over our northern borders whom Muhammad Tughlaq tried to conquer but failed, or the Gonds who fought Akbar under Maharani Durgavati, or the Bhils who fought for freedom under Maharana Pratap, or the Mavlas who joined Shivaji at a later date. But the very fact that these so-called “tribals” fought spontaneously against the Muslim marauders rather than walk over to the winning side goes to prove that they shared a common culture with the rest of the natives.”

Sita Ram Goel book The Story of Islamic Imperialism in India

The Story of Islamic Imperialism in India (1994)

People, Freedom, Reading

“The effort to develop the economy and improve the people’s standard of living can be successful only when it is backed by powerful military capabilities, nuclear forces. In the spirit with which we conquered outer space and with the mettle with which we succeeded in the nuclear test of a high level, we must push ahead simultaneously with the campaign to defend the country and the construction of an economic giant, and thus achieve the happiness of the people and the prosperity of the powerful Paektusan nation without fail.”

Kim Jong-un (1984) 3rd Supreme Leader of North Korea

Report to the March 2013 Plenary Meeting of the Central Committee of the Workers' Party of Korea, announcing the byungjin (dual advancement) policy line

Happiness, People, Effort, Success

“You know who critics are?— the men who have failed in literature and art.”

Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881) British Conservative politician, writer, aristocrat and Prime Minister

Source: Books, Coningsby (1844), Lothair (1870), Ch. 35. Compare: "Reviewers are usually people who would have been poets, historians, biographers, if they could; they have tried their talents at one or the other, and have failed; therefore they turn critics", Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lectures on Shakespeare and Milton, p. 36. Delivered 1811–1812; "Reviewers, with some rare exceptions, are a most stupid and malignant race. As a bankrupt thief turns thief-taker in despair, so an unsuccessful author turns critic", Percy Bysshe Shelley, Fragments of Adonais.

Men, Art, Literature

“His Majesty [emperor Charles V], [in his court in Augsburg] sent for me. After the usual courtesies and examination of the pictures which I have brought, he asked for news of you.... I replied that at Venice, in Rome and in all Italy the public assumed that his Holiness [the new Pope], was well minded to make you.. [Cardinal] upon which Caesar [= Charles V] showed signs of pleasure in his face, saying he would greatly rejoice at such an event, which could not fail to please you, and so, dear brother [= close friend], I have done for you such service as I owe to a friend of your standing.... not a day passes but the Duke of Alva speaks to me of the 'divine Aretini', because he loves you so much..”

Titian (1488–1576) Italian painter

Quote in Titian's letter to his friend Pietro Aretino in Venice, sent from Augsburg, 11 Nov. 1550, the original is in Lettere a P. Aretino' u.s. i. p. 147; as cited in Titian: his life and times - With some account of his family... Vol. 2. J. A. Crowe & G.B. Cavalcaselle, Publisher London, John Murray, 1877, p. 198
1541-1576

Love, Pleasure

“The skepticism which fails to contribute to the ruin of our health is merely an intellectual exercise.”

Emil M. Cioran (1911–1995) Romanian philosopher and essayist

All Gall Is Divided (1952)

Health, Exercises

“Wars can be prevented just as surely as they can be provoked, and we who fail to prevent them must share the guilt for the dead.”

Omar Bradley (1893–1981) United States Army field commander during World War II

As quoted in Peace Pilgrim: Her Life and Work in Her Own Words (1992) by Peace Pilgrim, p. 113.

War, Dead

“It is the artist's business to create sunshine when the sun fails.”

Romain Rolland (1866–1944) French author

Part I
Jean-Christophe (1904 - 1912), Jean-Christophe à Paris: The Market-Place (1908)

Business, Sun

“The war has ended - quite differently, indeed, from how we expected. Our politicians have failed us miserably.”

Wilhelm II, German Emperor (1859–1941) German Emperor and King of Prussia

Reaction to Hindenburg and Ludendorff's advice that an armistice must be requested (29 September 1918), quoted in Fritz Fischer, Germany's Aims in the First World War (New York: W. W. Norton & Co, 1967), p. 634
1910s

War

“Surely, no patriot can fail to see the fearful brutalization and debasement which the indulgence of such a spirit and such practices inevitably portend. Surely, all public men, all writers for the daily press, all clergymen, all teachers, all who in any way have a right to address the public, should, with every energy, unite to denounce such crimes and to support those engaged in putting them down.”

Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) American politician, 26th president of the United States

1900s, Letter to Winfield T. Durbin (1903)

Men, Fear, Way, Support

“I recognized my own creative voice filtered through those six strings, but it was also something else entirely. Notes and chords have become my second language and, more often than not, that vocabulary expresses what I feel when language fails me.”

Slash (musician) book Slash

Source: Slash (2007) by Anthony Bozza & Mason Segal,, p. 29

Feeling

“If the entire soul, then, follows without rebellion the part which loves wisdom, the result is that in general each part can carry out its own function—can be just, in other words—and in particular each is able to enjoy pleasures which are its own, the best, and, as far as possible, the truest. … When one of the other parts takes control, there are two results: it fails to discover its own proper pleasure, and it compels the other parts to pursue a pleasure which is not their own, and not true.”

Socrates (-470–-399 BC) classical Greek Athenian philosopher

Plato, Republic, T. Griffith, trans. (2000), 587a
Plato, Republic

Love, Wisdom, Pleasure, Soul

“A man may speak very well in the House of Commons, and fail very completely in the House of Lords. There are two distinct styles requisite: I intend, in the course of my career, if I have time, to give a specimen of both.”

Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881) British Conservative politician, writer, aristocrat and Prime Minister

Book V, Chapter 6.
Books, Coningsby (1844), The Young Duke (1831)

Time, Housing

“Colours no longer looked as brilliant to me as they use to do [Monet's sight was beginning to fail], I no longer painted shades of light so correctly. Reds looked muddy to me, pinks insipid, and the intermediate or lower notes in the colour scale escaped me. As for forms, I could see them as clear as ever, and render them as decisively. At first I tried pertinacity. How many times I have remained for hours near the little bridge, exactly were we are now, in the full glare of the sun, sitting on my camp-stool, under my sunshade, forcing myself to resume my interrupted task and to recapture the freshness my palette had lost! A waste of effort. What I painted was more and more mellow.... and (when) I compared it with what I used to do in the old days. I would fall into a frantic rage, and I slashed all my pictures with my penknife.”

Claude Monet (1840–1926) French impressionist painter

remark by Monet – between 1900 and 1920 – on his 'Water lilies' paintings; as quoted in Letters of the great artists – from Blake to Pollock, Richard Friedenthal, Thames and Hudson, London, 1963, pp. 131-132
1900 - 1920

Decision, Effort, Light, Rage

“My aim is to understand love. I know how alive I felt when I was in love, and I know that everything I have now, however interesting it might seem, doesn't really excited me.
But love is a terrible thing: I've seen my girlfriends suffer and I don't want the same thing to happen to me. … Although my aim is to understand love, and although I suffer to think of people to whom I gave my heart, I see that those who touched my heart failed to arouse my body, and that those who aroused my body failed to touch my heart.”

Paulo Coelho book Eleven Minutes

Maria's diary entry at the age of 17, p. 16.
Eleven Minutes (2003)

Love, People, Understanding, Thinking

“We must learn to give ourselves permission to blunder, to fail, and to make fools of ourselves every day for the rest of our lives. We do so in any case.”

Sheldon Kopp (1929–1999) American psychotherapist

Source: Even a stone can be a teacher (1985), p. 85

Fools, Learning

“In order to correctly define art, it is necessary, first of all, to cease to consider it as a means to pleasure and consider it as one of the conditions of human life. …Reflecting on it in this way, we cannot fail to observe that art is one of the means of affective communication between people.”

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) Russian writer

What is Art? (1897)

Life, People, Pleasure, Art

“The war was a “tragic error,” but not “fundamentally wrong or immoral” (as the overwhelming majority of the American people continue to believe), and surely not criminal aggression - the judgment that would be reached at once on similar evidence if the responsible agent were not the USA, or an ally or client. Our point is not that the retrospectives fail to draw what seem to us, as to much of the population, the obvious conclusions; the more significant and instructive point is that principled objection to the war as “fundamentally wrong and immoral,” or as an outright criminal aggression - a war crime - is inexpressible. It is not part of the spectrum of discussion. The background for such a principled critique cannot be developed in the media, and the conclusions cannot be drawn. It is not present even to be refuted. Rather, the idea is unthinkable. All of this reveals with great clarity how foreign to the mobilized media is a conception of the media as a free system of information and discussion, independent of state authority and elite interests.”

Noam Chomsky book Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media

Herman and Chomsky (1988), Manufacturing Consent, p. 252.
Quotes 1960s-1980s, 1980s

War, People, Error, Idea

“Until the bourgeoisie is completely vanquished, until its wealth has been confiscated, the proletariat must without fail possess a military force, it must without fail have its "proletarian guard," with the aid of which it will repel the counter-revolutionary attacks of the dying bourgeoisie, exactly as the Paris proletariat did during the Commune.”

Joseph Stalin (1879–1953) General secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union

Anarchism or Socialism (1906)

Communication, Wealth

“The central feature of the stigmatized individual's situation in life can now be stated. It is a question of what is often, if vaguely, called 'acceptance. Those who have dealings with him fail to accord him the respect and regard which the un-contaminated aspects of his social identity have led them to anticipate extending, and have led him to anticipate receiving; he echoes this denial by ending that some of his own attributes warrant it.”

Erving Goffman book Stigma

Source: 1950s-1960s, Stigma, 1963, p. 18

Life, Question

“He who knows the All but fails to know himself lacks everything.”

Thomas the Apostle Apostle of Jesus Christ

67
Gospel of Thomas (c. 50? — c. 140?)

“I don't see how you can be saying this. Look. You want to take…you want your god to take responsibility for the huge number of collapsing stars and imploding galaxies and destroyed universes and failed solar systems that have left us in this tiny corner on the one planet in this petty solar system that can support life some of the time on some of its surface. And you want a creator who filled this earth with species, since life began 99% of which are now extinct already…and this is some design, isn't it?”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

2000s, 2007
Source: Hannity's America, May 13, 2007 interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWoHh4_rVdg http://transcripts.wikia.com/wiki/Sean_Hannity_Christopher_Hitchens_Hannity%27s_America_May13%2C_2007?venotify=created

Life, God, Star, Support

“Tis true, my form is something odd
but blaming me, is blaming God,
Could I create myself anew
I would not fail in pleasing you.”

Joseph Merrick (1862–1890) English man with severe deformities

This is a rhyme used in Merrick's sideshow pamphlet, and which he is said to have often repeated, and used to sign his letters, followed by a quotation from "False Greatness" by Isaac Watts, first published in Horae Lyricae (1706) Bk. II:
If I could reach from pole to pole
or grasp the ocean with a span,
I would be measured by the soul
The mind's the standard of the Man.

God

“Private property capitalism and egalitarian multiculturalism are as unlikely a combination as socialism and cultural conservatism. And in trying to combine what cannot be combined, much of the modern libertarian movement actually contributed to the further erosion of private property rights (just as much of contemporary conservatism contributed to the erosion of families and traditional morals). What the countercultural libertarians failed to recognize, and what true libertarians cannot emphasize enough, is that the restoration of private property rights and laissez-faire economics implies a sharp and drastic increase in social “discrimination” and will swiftly eliminate most if not all of the multicultural-egalitarian life style experiments so close to the heart of left libertarians. In other words, libertarians must be radical and uncompromising conservatives.”

Hans-Hermann Hoppe book Democracy: The God That Failed

Source: Democracy: The God That Failed (2001), P.207-08

Life, Family, Heart

“I have need of a friend.

There is one and only one
who will give the air
from his failing lungs
for my body's mend.

And that one is my love.”

Maya Angelou book I Shall Not Be Moved

"Many and More"
I Shall Not Be Moved (1990)

Love

“It feels like a moment I've lived a thousand times before, as if everything is familiar, right up to the moment of my death, that it will happen again an infinite number of times, that we will meet, marry, have our children, succeed in the ways we have, fail in the ways we have, all exactly the same, always unable to change a thing. I am again at the bottom of an unstoppable wheel, and when I feel my eyes close for death, as they have and will a thousand times, I awake.”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Everything Is Illuminated

Everything Is Illuminated (2002)

Death, Children, Way, Feeling

“Better have failed in the high aim, as I,
Than vulgarly in the low aim succeed,—
As, God be thanked! I do not.”

Robert Browning (1812–1889) English poet and playwright of the Victorian Era

The Inn Album, iv.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

God

“Love is better than hate, because it brings harmony instead of conflict into the desires of the persons concerned. Two people between whom there is love succeed or fail together, but when two people hate each other the success of either is the failure of the other.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

1920s, What I Believe (1925)

Love, Hate, People, Failure

“Markets are institutions that exist to facilitate exchange, that is, they exist in order to reduce the cost of carrying out exchange transactions. In an economic theory which assumes that transaction costs are nonexistent. markets have no function to perform, and it seems perfectly reasonable to develop the theory of exchange by an elaborate analysis of individuals exchanging nuts for apples on the edge of the forest or some similar fanciful example. This analysis certainly shows why there is a gain from trade, but it fails to deal with the factors which determine how much trade there is or what goods are traded.”

Ronald H. Coase (1910–2013) British economist and author

1960s-1980s, "The Firm, the Market, and the Law" (1988)

“The longer I live, the more urgent it seems to me to endure and transcribe the whole dictation of existence up to its end, for it might just be the case that only the very last sentence contains that small and possibly inconspicuous word through which everything we had struggled to learn and everything we had failed to understand will be transformed suddenly into magnificent sense.”

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) Austrian poet and writer

Je weiter ich lebe, desto nötiger scheint es mir, auszuhalten, das ganze Diktat des Daseins bis zum Schluss nachzuschreiben; denn es möchte sein, dass erst der letzte Satz jenes kleine, vielleicht unscheinbare Wort enthält, durch welches alles mühsam Erlernte und Unbegriffene sich gegen einen herrlichen Sinn hinüberkehrt.
Letter to Ilse Erdmann, 21 December 1913, in Letters on Life, U. Baer, trans. (2007)
Rilke's Letters

Understanding, Sense, Learning

“Yet, here we are, long and difficult years into that conflict,” … “we still have not created the state we promised them. On the contrary, our costly and valiant efforts have produced an outcome our government did not predict or intend—a failed state spinning out of control into anarchy and civil war.”

Anthony Zinni (1943) American Marine Corps general

Pages 227-228 of The Battle for Peace: A Frontline Vision of America's Power and Purpose, ISBN 978-1403971746 (released in March 2006)
The Battle for Peace

War, Effort

“To such a one my answer is that I have arrived at a nourishing kernel in that I have learnt that a man is not in any difficulty in making a reply according to his faith which he ought to make to those who try to defame our Holy Scripture. When they are able, from reliable evidence, to prove some fact of physical science, we shall show that it is not contrary to our Scripture. But when they produce from any of their books a theory contrary to Scripture, and therefore contrary to the Catholic faith, either we shall have some ability to demonstrate that it is absolutely false, or at least we ourselves will hold it so without any shadow of a doubt. And we will so cling to our Mediator, “in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge,” that we will not be led astray by the glib talk of false philosophy or frightened by the superstition of false religion. When we read the inspired books in the light of this wide variety of true doctrines which are drawn from a few words and founded on the firm basis of Catholic belief, let us choose that one which appears as certainly the meaning intended by the author. But if this is not clear, then at least we should choose an interpretation in keeping with the context of Scripture and in harmony with our faith. But if the meaning cannot be studied and judged by the context of Scripture, at least we should choose only that which our faith demands. For it is one thing to fail to recognize the primary meaning of the writer, and another to depart from the norms of religious belief. If both these difficulties are avoided, the reader gets full profit from his reading."”

Aurelius Augustinus (354–430) early Christian theologian and philosopher

I, xxi, 41. Modern translation by J.H. Taylor
De Genesi ad Litteram

Wisdom, Books, Faith, Religion

“On the receipt of this letter, Hijaj obtained the consent of Wuleed, the son of Abdool Mullik, to invade India, for the purpose of propagating the faith and at the same time deputed a chief of the name of Budmeen, with three hundred cavalry, to join Haroon in Mikran, who was directed to reinforce the party with one thousand good soldiers more to attack Deebul. Budmeen failed in his expedition, and lost his life in the first action. Hijaj, not deterred by this defeat, resolved to follow up the enterprise by another. In consequence, in the year AH 93 (AD 711) he deputed his cousin and son-in-law, Imad-ood-Deen Mahomed Kasim, the son of Akil Shukhfy, then only seventeen years of age, with six thousand soldiers, chiefly Assyrians, with the necessary implements for taking forts, to attack Deebul'… 'On reaching this place, he made preparations to besiege it, but the approach was covered by a fortified temple, surrounded by strong wall, built of hewn stone and mortar, one hundred and twenty feet in height. After some time a bramin, belonging to the temple, being taken, and brought before Kasim, stated, that four thousand Rajpoots defended the place, in which were from two to three thousand bramins, with shorn heads, and that all his efforts would be vain; for the standard of the temple was sacred; and while it remained entire no profane foot dared to step beyond the threshold of the holy edifice. Mahomed Kasim having caused the catapults to be directed against the magic flag-staff, succeeded, on the third discharge, in striking the standard, and broke it down… Mahomed Kasim levelled the temple and its walls with the ground and circumcised the brahmins. The infidels highly resented this treatment, by invectives against him and the true faith. On which Mahomed Kasim caused every brahmin, from the age of seventeen and upwards, to be put to death; the young women and children of both sexes were retained in bondage and the old women being released, were permitted to go whithersoever they chose… On reaching Mooltan, Mahomed Kasim also subdued that province; and himself occupying the city, he erected mosques on the site of the Hindoo temples.”

Muhammad bin Qasim (695–715) Umayyad general

Tarikh-i-Firishta, translated into English by John Briggs under the title History of the Rise of the Mahomedan Power in India, 4 Volumes, New Delhi Reprint, 1981. p. 234-238

Life, Death, Women, Children

“The Real is therefore simultaneously both the hard impenetrable kernel resisting symbolization and a pure chimerical entity which has in itself no ontological consistency. To use Kripkean terminology, the Real is the rock upon which every attempt at symbolization stumbles, the hard core which remains the same in all possible worlds (symbolic universes); but at the same time its status is thoroughly precarious; it is something that persists only as failed, missed, in a shadow, and dissolves itself as soon as we try to grasp it in its positive nature… like a traumatic event constructed backwards.”

Slavoj Žižek book The Sublime Object of Ideology

190
The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989)

World, Nature, Universe, Time

“The essence of striving to the far-off worlds is contained in the assimilation of a consciousness of our life in them. The possibility of life on them becomes for our consciousness, as it were, a channel of approach. Indeed, this consciousness must be dug through as a channel. People are able to swim, yet a considerable portion of them do not swim. Such an obvious fact as the far-off worlds completely fails to attract humanity. It is time to cast this seed into the human brain.”

Nicholas Roerich (1874–1947) Russian painter, writer, archaeologist, theosophist, enlightener, philosopher

§ 44
New Era Community (1926)

Life, People, World, Time

“A leader is best when people barely know that he exists, not so good when people obey and acclaim him, worst when they despise him. Fail to honor people, They fail to honor you. But of a good leader, who talks little, when his work is done, his aims fulfilled, they will all say, "We did this ourselves."”

Laozi book Tao Te Ching

A longer paraphrase of this quotation, with modern embellishments, is often attributed to Laozi: see "Misattributed" below.
Source: Tao Te Ching, Ch. 17

People