"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."

Failure, Observation, Life, Acceptance

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"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."

Exlpore more Failure quotes

"Life is full of screwups," he said, chucking another paper at the split-level before taking the corner. "You're supposed to fail sometimes. It's a required part of the human existence."

Sarah Dessen, American Author

Failure, Life, Growth, Mistake

"The failure of the United Nations - My failure is maybe, in retrospective, that I was not enough aggressive with the members of the Security Council."

Boutros Boutros Ghali, Egyptian Public Servant

Failure, Nations, Security, United

"This dullness of vision regarding the importance of the general welfare to the individual is the measure of the failure of our schools and churches to teach the spiritual significance of genuine democracy."

Henry A. Wallace, American Vice President

Failure, Vision, Churches, Democracy

"We need to teach the highly educated man 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 Kettering, American Inventor

Failure, Cause, Disgrace, Man

"Failure is only the opportunity more intelligently to begin again."

Henry Ford, American Businessman

Failure, Opportunity, Learning, Success

"Failure in the theater is more dramatic and uglier than any other form of writing. It costs so much, you feel so guilty."

Lillian Hellman, American Dramatist

Failure, Theater, Writing

"The Soviet Union did not achieve victory over the West, so was my information inadequate to help them to victory, or did it play no particular role in their failure to achieve victory?"

Aldrich Ames, American Criminal

Failure, Victory, Help, Information

"Crime and bad lives are the measure of a State's failure, all crime in the end is the crime of the community."

H. G. Wells, English Author

Failure, Community, Crime, End

"In a sense it might even be said that our failure is to form habits: for, after all, habit is relative to a stereotyped world, and meantime it is only the roughness of the eye that makes two persons, things, situations, seem alike."

Walter Pater, English Critic

Failure, Habit, Eye, Sense

"Rather than viewing a brief relapse back to inactivity as a failure, treat it as a challenge and try to get back on track as soon as possible."

Jimmy Connors, American Athlete

Failure, Challenge

Explore more quotes by Julian Barnes

"But I don't remember. I won't remember. Memory is an act of will, and so is forgetting."

Mind

"The land of embarrassment and breakfast."

Society

"The better you know someone, the less well you often see them (and the less well they can therefore be transferred into fiction). They may be so close as to be out of focus, and there is no operating novelist to dispel the blur."

Perception

"WHORES.Necessary in the nineteenth century for the contraction of syphilis, without which no one could claim genius."

History

"The dangerous charm of GPC was that everything in the world could be called up; if you didn't look out, a couple of sessions might turn you from a serious enquirer into a mere gape-mouthed browser."

Knowledge

"I would have to go back into my past and deal with Adrian. My philosopher friend, who gazed on life and decided that any responsible, thinking individual should have the right to reject this gift that had never been asked for - and whose noble gesture re-emphasised with each passing decade the compromise and littleness that most lives consist of. 'Most lives': my life."

Life

"Most people, in my opinion, steal much of what they are. If they didn't what poor items they would be."

Behavior

"I thought of the things that had happened to me over the years, and of how little I had made happen."

Reflection

"I didn't doubt for a moment that she had read them all, or that they were the right books to own. Further, they seemed to be an organic combination of her mind and personality, whereas mine struck me as functionally separate, straining to describe a character I hoped to grow into."

Growth

"When we're young, everyone over the age of thirty looks middle-aged, everyone over fifty antique. And time, as it goes by, confirms that we weren't that wrong. Those little age differentials, so crucial and so gross when we are young erode. We end up all belonging to the same category, that of the non-young. I've never much minded this myself."

Life