The success or failure of a life, as far as posterity goes, seems to lie in the more or less luck of seizing the right moment of escape.

How sick one gets of being "good," how much I should respect myself if I could burst out and make everyone wretched for twenty-four hours; embody selfishness.

One has a greater sense of degradation after an interview with a doctor than from any human experience.

I wonder whether if I had an education I should have been more or less a fool that I am.

The success or failure of a life, as far as posterity goes, seems to lie in the more or less luck of seizing the right moment of escape.

I make it a rule always to believe compliments implicitly for five minutes, and to simmer gently for twenty more.

I suppose one has a greater sense of intellectual degradation after an interview with a doctor than from any human experience.

The difficulty about all this dying, is that you can't tell a fellow anything about it, so where does the fun come in?

You must remember that a woman, by nature, needs much less to feed upon than a man, a few emotions and she is satisfied.

Though I have no productive worth, I have a certain value as an indestructible quantity.

Physical pain however great ends in itself and falls away like dry husks from the mind, whilst moral discords and nervous horrors sear the soul.

What a sense of superiority it gives one to escape reading some book which everyone else is reading.

How sick one gets of being 'good', how much I should respect myself if I could burst out and make everyone wretched for twenty-four hours; embody selfishness.

Achievement is not always success, while reputed failure often is. It is honest endeavor, persistent effort to do the best possible under any and all circumstances.

A failure establishes only this, that our determination to succeed was not strong enough.

I hate failure and that divorce was a Number One failure in my eyes. It was the worst period of my life. Neither Desi nor I have been the same since, physically or mentally.

Failure happens all the time. It happens every day in practice. What makes you better is how you react to it.

It's fine to celebrate success but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure.

The key to accepting responsibility for your life is to accept the fact that your choices, every one of them, are leading you inexorably to either success or failure, however you define those terms.

If those committed to the quest fail, they will be forgiven. When lost, they will find another way. The moral imperative of humanism is the endeavor alone, whether successful or not, provided the effort is honorable and failure memorable.

I believe my publisher has shown a great deal of faith in me over a lot of years but I'm not prepared to be so arrogant to say that the long-term literary value of my work would compensate them for a financial failure.

With failure, you just try again.

In God's world, for those who are in earnest, there is no failure. No work truly done, no word earnestly spoken, no sacrifice freely made, was ever made in vain.

The moral turpitude of the boys of today appears to center in their failure to concentrate on any particular objective long enough to obtain their maximum results.

Success and failure are greatly overrated. But failure gives you a whole lot more to talk about.

The failure of Socialism since 1945 is that whilst encouraging us all, the creators of wealth, to produce less through strikes, it has caused us all to demand a higher level of our own product.

The assertion of failure coming from such persons does not mean that Mr. Mill failed to promote the practical success of those objects the advocacy of which forms the chief feature of his political writings.

There are no secrets to success. It is the result of preparation, hard work, and learning from failure.

Failure is not our only punishment for laziness; there is also the success of others.

Don't come home a failure.

However things may seem, no evil thing is success and no good thing is failure.

Failure should be our teacher, not our undertaker. Failure is delay, not defeat. It is a temporary detour, not a dead end. Failure is something we can avoid only by saying nothing, doing nothing, and being nothing.

It is Basic Management 101 that if you reward failure you are going to get more failure, and if you want success you should reward success. But if you look at the way this administration has approached national security, they have kind of got that principle backwards.

A failure is a man who has blundered, but is not able to cash in the experience.

Spend enough time around success and failure, and you learn a reverence for possibility.

Success breeds success, and failure leads to a sort of fallow period.

Far better is it to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure... than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much, because they live in a gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.

You must accept that you might fail; then, if you do your best and still don't win, at least you can be satisfied that you've tried. If you don't accept failure as a possibility, you don't set high goals, you don't branch out, you don't try - you don't take the risk.

Success is simply a matter of luck. Ask any failure.

The failure of academic feminists to recognize difference as a crucial strength is a failure to reach beyond the first patriarchal lesson. In our world, divide and conquer must become define and empower.

I've criticized President Bush for his failure to use his veto pen. There's plenty of blame to go around. The question is how to solve problems. It's not bailouts. What made America great? Free markets, free enterprise, manufacturing, job creation. That's how we're gonna do it, not by enlarging government.

Success or failure depends more upon attitude than upon capacity successful men act as though they have accomplished or are enjoying something. Soon it becomes a reality. Act, look, feel successful, conduct yourself accordingly, and you will be amazed at the positive results.

Think twice before you speak, because your words and influence will plant the seed of either success or failure in the mind of another.

Feeling is the consciousness of the resulting conditions - of success, failure, equilibrium, compromise or balance, in this continuous rivalry of ideas.

I think somehow you need to get to a certain point in your life where the notion of failure is absurd.

By virtually any measure, the record of the Republican Majority is an appalling failure.

Questioning the nature and implications of liminal instances necessarily involves failure, if only in the specifically technical sense of entering spaces where prevailing criteria of success scarcely apply.

War, except in self-defense, is a failure of moral imagination.

Success or failure in business is caused more by the mental attitude even than by mental capacities.