On Failure Quotes

“We might imagine that the way to create a kinder world would be to lecture people on manners and ethics – but what we really need is a world in which everyone is shown sufficient kindness so that stamping on others no longer holds such allure. The true measure of a civilisation is the degree to which people can be good and generous even when no one is watching. This is possible only when they do not feel emotionally exhausted and belittled, because they have been cared for in the past – and so have reserves of tenderness to lend to others in the future.”
― The School of Life, The School of Life: On Failure: How to succeed at defeat

“It’s an ineradicable part of being human that we simply cannot know what elements of suffering we will need to pass through before we are at last delivered to our final resting place.”
― The School of Life, The School of Life: On Failure: How to succeed at defeat

“We should dare to retire voluntarily from an active or elite life – in order to enjoy the true wealth afforded by a serene mind.”
― The School of Life, The School of Life: On Failure: How to succeed at defeat

“We need nature not just for physical health, but, just as importantly, for relief from the tensions of our psyches. No day should be counted as wise if it does not include at least a few moments given over to clouds, trees or streams: robust emissaries of perspective, patience and introspection.”
― The School of Life, The School of Life: On Failure: How to succeed at defeat

“If we are to remain even somewhat balanced, limiting our contact with, and knowledge of, the actions and beliefs of most members of the human race will be a daily priority.”
― The School of Life, The School of Life: On Failure: How to succeed at defeat

“In the broadest sense, we are afraid of failure because we were not properly loved. We were not held, reassured, calmed down, delighted in and accepted unconditionally. We believe that the world is filled with risks, not because we face unprecedented obstacles, but because we have unusually difficult histories. The catastrophe we apprehend has in fact already happened, but until now we have found it too hard to think about it. We were too busy working, trying to impress or fending off imagined enemies.”
― The School of Life, The School of Life: On Failure: How to succeed at defeat

“The more we start to understand the origins of our fearful worldview, the more we may decide that we have the right to do something which we have perhaps indulged in very little over the years: feel sorry for ourselves”
― The School of Life, The School of Life: On Failure: How to succeed at defeat

“We are apt to return to precisely the degree of intelligence that we possessed when certain difficulties arose in childhood and seared themselves across our neuronal pathways. Trauma keeps us as cognitively limited as we were when a given disaster struck us.”
― The School of Life, The School of Life: On Failure: How to succeed at defeat

“No one ever really desires fame; they want – first and foremost – to feel loved. Fame for a time appears as though it may deliver on the original aspiration, but in reality, all it provides is paranoia and a continuous terror of downfall. The famous will truly have succeeded when they are able to walk away from being ‘known’ and towards the safety of being loved and seen by just one or two sets of eyes.”
― The School of Life, The School of Life: On Failure: How to succeed at defeat

“It is extremely rare to want to be very famous without an accompanying fear of invisibility and neglect. Fame is a salve invented by the traumatised to compensate for an early experience of unbearable let-down. No one who hadn’t suffered from a sense of worthlessness – one that has not been understood or worked through – would actively wish to be known by so many complete strangers.”
― The School of Life, The School of Life: On Failure: How to succeed at defeat

“Instead of blindly pursuing wealth, we should strive to remember, and to overcome, the original trauma that we suffered at the hands of others. We must keep in mind that we work harder than most because we were let down more than most – in a way that we have avoided focusing on all our adult lives.”
― The School of Life, The School of Life: On Failure: How to succeed at defeat

“We don’t so much have fears to face – we have a deficit of self-love to make up. If we can find a way to feel more loveable, we might discover that the world also feels less fearsome.”
― The School of Life, The School of Life: On Failure: How to succeed at defeat

“Somewhere inside our worried mind is a sense of being an unworthy person. Our fears are plugged into boundless subterranean stores of self-hatred.”
― The School of Life, The School of Life: On Failure: How to succeed at defeat

“In the process we will learn that we don’t live in an exceptionally dangerous world; we simply happen to have endured an exceptionally unsoothing past.”
― The School of Life, The School of Life: On Failure: How to succeed at defeat

“A calamity that is endlessly anticipated is in its way every bit as awful as a calamity that actually unfolds – with the added problem that fears tend to go on far longer than ‘real’ incidents.”
― The School of Life, The School of Life: On Failure: How to succeed at defeat

“The fear of failure is every bit as serious and painful as failure itself.”
― The School of Life, The School of Life: On Failure: How to succeed at defeat

“We will have had to fail – and then we will have learnt – in other areas, remarkably, in ways we had never expected and that still feel alien and impossible now – how to win.”
― The School of Life, The School of Life: On Failure: How to succeed at defeat

“We cannot, it seems, be winners at everything. Those who appear to be carrying off all the prizes and who are lauded as the superhuman athletes of life cannot, on closer examination, really be triumphing across the board. They are bound to be making a deep mess of some of the less familiar or prestigious races they are entered in for; in certain corners of the stadium, they’ll be falling over, tripping up, complaining loudly about track conditions and, perhaps, sourly denigrating the whole event as useless and not worth participating in.”
― The School of Life, The School of Life: On Failure: How to succeed at defeat

“The truly kind ones among us always readily forgive because they know how much in them needs to be forgiven.”
― The School of Life, The School of Life: On Failure: How to succeed at defeat

“Generally, it never occurs to the most difficult or dangerous people on the planet that they might be lacking. Their sickness is to locate evil always firmly outside of themselves: it’s invariably the ‘others’ who are to blame, the others who are cruel, sinful, lacking in judgement and mistaken. Their job is to take these impure people down and correct their evils in the fire of their own righteousness.”
― The School of Life, The School of Life: On Failure: How to succeed at defeat

“The price of being genuinely good is the constant idea that one might be a monster – combined with a fundamental hesitation about labelling anyone else monstrous. A guilty conscience is the bedrock of virtue – and all this comes easily to the failed.”
― The School of Life, The School of Life: On Failure: How to succeed at defeat

“One thing that failure strips us of is a feeling that we might be ‘good’ people. This might indicate that we must therefore be ‘bad’, but the reality is more complicated. Ironically, people who are genuinely good – people who know about kindness, patience, forgiveness, compromise, apology and gentleness – always suspect that they aren’t very good. It seems one cannot both be a good person and at the same time feel blameless or pure inside”
― The School of Life, The School of Life: On Failure: How to succeed at defeat

“At one time, we might have had plans for happiness on an epic scale: we might have wanted to be happy ‘forever’. Now we are satisfied if no further disaster strikes us before nightfall. We might once have sought out ever-increasing fame and power. Now we have been inducted into how quickly things can fall apart and won’t take a quiet day for granted ever again. As newly failed beings, we may turn into people with an acute eye for small pleasures: a lemon on a windowsill, some clouds silhouetted by the evening sun, a fig, a piece of chocolate, a hot bath, a chat with a funny friend.”
― The School of Life, The School of Life: On Failure: How to succeed at defeat

“Once we have failed, we can feel pain from the inside. Suffering of all kinds becomes our area of expertise; all distress becomes relatable (how unkind are people who have been happy all their lives). We can picture just what it might be like to have a painful hip as a 90-year-old or to have been told off for eating too many sweets as a 4-year-old – even to be a sparrow that has lost its way home or a squirrel longing for nuts in midwinter. When we read the paper, every unfortunate ‘cheater’ or ‘reject’ is someone whose story we can understand and empathise with. We have become kind not out of some superhuman goodness: we just want, for our own sake, to spare everyone we encounter a modicum of the pain we have had to suffer. Our kindness is solidly grounded in self-interest: it hurts us to see someone else in pain.”
― The School of Life, The School of Life: On Failure: How to succeed at defeat

“Our kindness is solidly grounded in self-interest: it hurts us to see someone else in pain.”
― The School of Life, The School of Life: On Failure: How to succeed at defeat

“The most common reason why people are unkind is that they cannot imagine how they might end up suffering from certain ills: they can’t picture themselves becoming homeless, losing their temper, saying something idiotic online or getting into trouble over sex. Because of this, they naturally aren’t in a position to extend sympathy to those who have failed in these areas; those people must simply be idiots or reprobates – human in a technical sense, but not creatures with any humanity worth honouring. The moralists who think this way aren’t so much unkind as unimaginative.”
― The School of Life, The School of Life: On Failure: How to succeed at defeat

“We may have failed in the world of men; we still have so many interesting afternoons to spend in the company of animals.”
― The School of Life, The School of Life: On Failure: How to succeed at defeat

“This makes animals ideal companions. They show no proclivity to judge and they don’t moralise. They generally don’t talk. They offer us their presence, but they don’t intrude with their thoughts. They won’t suggest that they could have done any better in our shoes and they won’t be sentimental or passive-aggressive in their words of comfort. They will simply sit beside us for a while, breathing heavily, occasionally burping or farting. And then they will bid us goodbye – perhaps returning to say a downbeat hello the next day.”
― The School of Life, The School of Life: On Failure: How to succeed at defeat

“We can read history as a promise – an advance notice – that we will one day also, thankfully, be forgotten.”
― The School of Life, The School of Life: On Failure: How to succeed at defeat

“Every night, so long as the sky is clear, we have one of the finest philosophical lessons ever generated written above us in a faint script of light.”
― The School of Life, The School of Life: On Failure: How to succeed at defeat