In Praise of Failure Quotes

“Doing nothing would allow us to take a decisive step back, stand still, and have a good look at ourselves. Thanks to our stillness and detachment, we would be able to see our condition in a more truthful light.”
― Costică Brădățan, In Praise of Failure: Four Lessons in Humility

“The self we eventually weave is not just the sum total of what we have done, but also of a long series of absences: all that we’ve longed for but never got, the love that was not reciprocated, the unkept promises, the missed opportunities, the unfulfilled desires, all that we have only imagined or fantasized about, or have not even dared to dream.”
― Costică Brădățan, In Praise of Failure: Four Lessons in Humility

“The self we eventually weave is not just the sum total of what we have done, but also of a long series of absences: all that we’ve longed for but never got, the
love that was not reciprocated, the unkept promises, the missed opportunities, the unfulfilled desires, all that we have only imagined or fantasized about, or have not even dared to dream.”
― Costică Brădățan, In Praise of Failure: Four Lessons in Humility

“Eventually, words are not that important. What matters is what they gesture toward: our fundamental need for a larger frame of reference.”
― Costică Brădățan, In Praise of Failure: Four Lessons in Humility

“We don’t have an exact name for this place—before and beyond existence—for which we look in vain while we are caught up in the maelstrom.”
― Costică Brădățan, In Praise of Failure: Four Lessons in Humility

“Oh, wretched, ephemeral race, children of chance and misery, why do you compel me to tell you what it would be most expedient for you not to hear? What is best of all is utterly beyond your reach: not to be born, not to be, to be nothing. But the second best for you is—to die soon.”
― Costică Brădățan, In Praise of Failure: Four Lessons in Humility

“Greeks used the word meletē to describe the process whereby—through constant effort and concentration—we become increasingly better at a given task, be it playing a musical instrument, practicing a sport, or even dying (meletē thanatou), according to Plato.”
― Costică Brădățan, In Praise of Failure: Four Lessons in Humility

“Before I was born. Death is just nonexistence. I know already what that is like: what will exist after me is the same as existed before me. If there is any torment in this thing, then there must have been torment also before we saw the light of day. Yet we did not feel any discomfort at that time.80”
― Costică Brădățan, In Praise of Failure: Four Lessons in Humility

“There’s no way to know the point where death lies waiting for you, so you must wait for death at every point,”
― Costică Brădățan, In Praise of Failure: Four Lessons in Humility

“Whether one dies sooner or later is not the issue; the issue is whether one dies well or badly. And dying well means that one escapes the risk of living badly.”
― Costică Brădățan, In Praise of Failure: Four Lessons in Humility

“To have mastery over our life is above all to be master over our death: “We are in no one’s power when death is in our power,” writes one of the premier therapist philosophers, the Stoic Seneca.62”
― Costică Brădățan, In Praise of Failure: Four Lessons in Humility

“The Stoics explicitly referred to philosophy as an “exercise” (askēsis) to be practiced daily and embodied in one’s life, and not a set of theoretical statements to adhere to on a strictly intellectual plane. For the Stoics, observes Hadot, “philosophy did not consist in teaching an abstract theory,” but rather in “the art of living.” Philosophy “causes us to be more fully, and makes us better.”
― Costică Brădățan, In Praise of Failure: Four Lessons in Humility

“to adhere to on a strictly intellectual plane. For the Stoics, observes Hadot, “philosophy did not consist in teaching an abstract theory,” but rather in “the art of living.” Philosophy “causes us to be more fully, and makes us better.”
― Costică Brădățan, In Praise of Failure: Four Lessons in Humility

“In the Phaedo, Plato has Socrates say that philosophy is nothing but “rehearsal” or “preparation for death” (meletē thanatou).”
― Costică Brădățan, In Praise of Failure: Four Lessons in Humility

“You choose freely, but your circumstances dictate the parameters of your freedom.”
― Costică Brădățan, In Praise of Failure: Four Lessons in Humility

“Thousands of people in Paris live it—struggling artists and students, prostitutes when their luck is out, out-of-work people of all kinds. It is the suburbs, as it were, of poverty.”52”
― Costică Brădățan, In Praise of Failure: Four Lessons in Humility

“You write not to go mad, not to kill yourself or others.”
― Costică Brădățan, In Praise of Failure: Four Lessons in Humility

“Republic of virtue,” “classless society,” “ideal state,” “perfect community”—they are all admirable, as lofty as they are well-meaning, but we should never lose sight of what they are: political fictions. Not some mended version of the real world, but a wild act of imagination—a world unto itself, almost completely cut off from political reality.”
― Costică Brădățan, In Praise of Failure: Four Lessons in Humility

“Gandhi was inspired by a fifteenth-century Gujarati poet and mystic, Narsinh Mehta, who taught that “he who understands the pain of others is one of God’s own.”
― Costică Brădățan, In Praise of Failure: Four Lessons in Humility

“Hence the Revolution’s first commandment: “You shall reinvent everything.”
― Costică Brădățan, In Praise of Failure: Four Lessons in Humility

“Less suffering, humble though it may sound, is in fact a rather difficult goal. If we managed just that, we would accomplish a great deal.”
― Costică Brădățan, In Praise of Failure: Four Lessons in Humility

“Derek Bok, a former president of Harvard University, observes casually that, at American universities, the arts and sciences faculties “display scant interest in preparing undergraduates to be democratic citizens, a task once regarded as the principal purpose of a liberal education.”39”
― Costică Brădățan, In Praise of Failure: Four Lessons in Humility

“The system produces enough decently trained professionals (doctors, engineers, teachers), but it doesn’t affect the inner lives of these people in such a way as to cause a major change in society. The profound humility that genuine democracy presupposes—the notion that you are no better than the next person and that, for all your education, you may be wrong and the other right; the acute awareness of your libido dominandi and the internalized need to keep it in check—is not something to be expected upon graduation from the modern university.”
― Costică Brădățan, In Praise of Failure: Four Lessons in Humility

“Paideia (defined as a rigorous and comprehensive training in the liberal arts) is one of the finest things one can experience in life, and does involve a radical transformation when done properly. “The whole secret of the teacher’s force,” wrote Emerson, “lies in the conviction that men are convertible. And they are. They want awakening.”
― Costică Brădățan, In Praise of Failure: Four Lessons in Humility

“There is no such thing as an innocent narrator.”
― Costică Brădățan, In Praise of Failure: Four Lessons in Humility

“Such is the power of faith—even when it is misplaced. People “who do not have a good religion,” observed Milton Mayer, “will have a bad one.” They just cannot do without it. “They will have a religion; they will have something to believe in.”
― Costică Brădățan, In Praise of Failure: Four Lessons in Humility

“Since what distinguishes all mature religions is their inexhaustible capacity to bring meaning into people’s lives, it has always been tempting for the political to steal as much as it can from the religious: rituals, gestures, symbols, images, and language. By taking on some of religion’s hermeneutic functions, political power hopes to consolidate its own prestige, authority, and control.”
― Costică Brădățan, In Praise of Failure: Four Lessons in Humility

“A half century earlier, Fyodor Dostoevsky had hinted at a possible answer in The Brothers Karamazov. His Grand Inquisitor observes, long before Viktor Frankl famously made the same point, that more than anything else—more even than food or shelter—humans need meaning. We are nothing without it. We will patiently endure the worst tortures, the deepest humiliations, so long as we know why we are going through all that. The “mystery of man’s being is not only in living, but in what one lives for,” says the Grand Inquisitor. “Without a firm idea of what he lives for, man will not consent to live and will sooner destroy himself than remain on earth, even if there is bread all around him.”3”
― Costică Brădățan, In Praise of Failure: Four Lessons in Humility

“to save your life you have to be ready, at any given moment, to part with it. Face the abyss, look it in the eyes, and behave as if this were the most natural thing in the world. It’s precisely at such moments, in that state of readiness, and thanks to the radical humility it brings forth, that you live to the highest degree.”
― Costică Brădățan, In Praise of Failure: Four Lessons in Humility

“I can easily imagine that God loves that perspective of creation which can only be seen from the point where I am.”
― Costică Brădățan, In Praise of Failure: Four Lessons in Humility