Failure To Understand Quotes & Sayings

People don't talk like this, theytalklikethis. Syllables, words, sentences run together like a watercolor left in the rain. To understand what anyone is saying to us we must separate these noises into words and the words into sentences so that we might in our turn issue a stream of mixed sounds in response. If what we say is suitably apt and amusing, the listener will show his delight by emitting a series of uncontrolled high-pitched noises, accompanied by sharp intakes of breath of the sort normally associated with a seizure or heart failure. And by these means we converse. Talking, when you think about it, is a very strange business indeed. — Bill Bryson

What I try to get physically healthy people to understand is that they're going to die someday. There is no way out. And dying isn't failure, but not living is, so make use of your time. Don't keeping waiting. — Bernie Siegel

Most employees want to be involved in a successful business and most employees are happy for people running successful businesses to be paid a reasonable wage and a market rate for it, provided they understand the reason. What they hate most of all is pay for failure. — Stuart Rose

Beware the average man the average woman
beware their love, their love is average
seeks average
but there is genius in their hatred
there is enough genius in their hatred to kill you
to kill anybody
not wanting solitude
not understanding solitude
they will attempt to destroy anything
that differs from their own
not being able to create art
they will not understand art
they will consider their failure as creators
only as a failure of the world — Charles Bukowski

A failure to understand something does not mean it is irrational. It may simply mean that it lies on the far side of our limited abilities to take things in and make complete sense of them. — Alister E. McGrath

Ultimately, all human activities have as their goal the realization of happiness. Why, then, have we ended up producing the opposite result? Could the underlying cause be our failure to correctly understand the true nature of happiness? — Daisaku Ikeda

The persistence or failure of human relationships cannot be predicted by any set of objective or universal criteria. We are all limited, highly imperfect beings, worthy in some dimensions, deficient in others, and if we would understand how any of our connections survive, we would do well to look first to what is good in each of us. — Sonia Sotomayor

If we cannot understand the depth of feeling in the Muslim world toward Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, and Islam as a political force, then we will be doomed to failure in every encounter we have with the world. — Hooman Majd

Ultimately success or failure in photographing people depends on the photographer's ability to understand his fellow man. — Edward Weston

You need to put the fear of risk aside. Startups need leaders who are willing to persevere through the hard times. Failure is an option, and a real risk. Failure and risk are something entrepreneurs should understand well, and learn to manage. Don't have a fear of talking about your failures. Don't hide your mistakes. — Ben Huh

doesn't teach. Winning rewards. You can only really learn from failure. And in the end, after you have taken a prolonged physical and psychological beating that would destroy a lesser man or woman, you will understand that success is not the absence of failure, but rather the presence of not quitting when you do fail. To win, you need to fail, and fail hard. — Aisha Tyler

Today's marginalization of Christianity is a direct result of our failure to understand our faith as a total worldview. — Charles Colson

If I'm conceited enough to believe I'm invincible, then maybe it will take me doing the very thing I swore I would never do to understand that I'm not as wonderful as I thought I was. — Craig D. Lounsbrough

But I was not good enough. You should understand this about me - I am not a hero; not one to tap unknown reserves of courage; not one to rise to circumstance. I am the understudy who chokes on his lines when he is forced onto the stage. I am never, ever good enough. — Dexter Palmer

But a wife ... "
" ... is an individual who can be interesting when one makes use of her, but one must know how to detach oneself firmly when serious reasons separate one from her."
"That is a harsh statement."
"Not at all ... it is philosophy ... it is the tone of the day, it is the language of reason, one must adopt it or be taken for a fool."
"This supposes some fault in your wife, explain it to me: some natural defect, or a failure to comply, or bad conduct."
"A little of everything ... a little of everything, sir, but let us change the subject, I beg you, and return to that dear Madam: damn me, I don't understand how you can have been in Orleans without amusing yourself with that creature ... but everyone has her. — Marquis De Sade

The tyranny of the quantifiable is partly the failure of language and discourse to describe more complex, subtle, and fluid phenomena, as well as the failure of those who shape opinions and make decisions to understand and value these slipperier things. It is difficult, sometimes even impossible, to value what cannot be named or described, and so the task of naming and describing is an essential one in any revolt against the status quo of capitalism and consumerism. — Rebecca Solnit

He couldn't understand how I could be so bright in my other classes and a total failure in his. I must not be trying hard enough, he told me. In truth, I didn't care, and I didn't want to care. Geometric shapes with their dangerously sharp angles seemed the mortal enemies of words, and formulas were written in a hostage-taking language that made me despair of ever freeing the words from their captors. The best I could do was to avoid the enemy and save myself. — Thom Satterlee

There remains a problem with race in America because of the church's failure to understand the issues from a biblical perspective."

"Rather than being called into a different community by Scripture, we see our broken communities as justified by Scripture."

"Rather than challenge the worldly status quo, religious groups perpetuate stereotypes, sectarianism, and schisms when accepting ethnic denominational identities- inverting Pentecost by reading in multiple languages unrecognized by listeners and offering separate worship services according to musical preference."

"Ultimately, our aim is to draw attention to the biblical narrative from which comes to the strength for the long road of reconciliation. — Joy Moore

The truth about most people: they will never accept you as you are. You'll need to change. And I'm begging you, change. But only for yourself, and even if that means by yourself. Never bend for them. Don't calm your heart, don't scale back these dreams. Stay strange, lost your mind, finger fuck the rules, burn bridges if you must, and follow your insanity. Feel everything, it's telling you something. People will love you in bits and pieces, and hate you just the same. You'll always be too much for some, and not enough for others. They will never believe in you, as much as you do. And understand that you will never be a success in the eyes of a failure. There's a magic in you that most others can't believe in, simply because they haven't made sense of themselves. But you're magic, still. You've been that way all along. And even if the world changed everything in you, that much would always be true. — J. Raymond

It's [Into the Badlands] something that's very, very different and I think that's why it divided critics initially because they didn't understand it or get it. They didn't understand or have a knowledge of what we were trying to do. Bringing in the Asian martial arts aesthetic to American television. For us, these are the people who will make the show a hit or a failure in future seasons. So it's for us to respect them and interact and see what they have to say. — Miles Millar

A few conclusions become clear when we understand this: that our most cruel failure in how we treat the sick and the aged is the failure to recognize that they have priorities beyond merely being safe and living longer; that the chance to shape one's story is essential to sustaining meaning in life; that we have the opportunity to refashion our institutions, our culture, and our conversations in ways that transform the possibilities for the last chapters of everyone's lives. — Atul Gawande

It's not my fault if I'm not any good at things like that." "I'll differ there," Coker told her. "It's not only your fault - it's a self-created fault. Moreover, it's an affectation to consider yourself too spiritual to understand anything mechanical. It is a petty and a very silly form of vanity. Everyone starts by knowing nothing about anything, but God gives him - and even her - brains to find out with. Failure to use them is not a virtue to be praised; — John Wyndham

Bad architecture is in the end as much a failure of psychology as of design. It is an example expressed through materials of the same tendencies which in other domains will lead us to marry the wrong people, choose inappropriate jobs and book unsuccessful holidays: the tendency not to understand who we are and what will satisfy us. — Alain De Botton

Tolkien helped Lewis to realise that the problem lay not in Lewis's rational failure to understand the theory, but in his imaginative failure to grasp its significance. The issue was not primarily about truth, but about meaning. When — Alister E. McGrath

Children, of course, don't understand at first that they are being cheated. They come to school with a degree of faith and optimism, and they often seem to thrive during the first few years. It is sometimes not until the third grade that their teachers start to see the warning signs of failure. By the fourth grade many children see it too. — Jonathan Kozol

Businesses should follow and learn from others successes and failures in order to better understand and predict their own. — Ben Mezrich

We cannot finally judge the correctness of what we do in evangelism by the immediate response that we see. It is important to understand this truth, because a failure to understand it can distract well-meaning churches into pragmatic, results-oriented endeavors and it can transform pastors into neurotic people-manipulators. — Mark Dever

Here's a memonic device that I feel teaches how we can properly cope with failure. Forget about your failures; don't dwell on past mistakes Anticipate failure; realize that we all make mistakes. Intensity in everything you do; never be a failure for lack of effort. Learn from your mistakes; don't repeat previous errors. Understand why you failed; diagnose your mistakes so as to not repeat them. Respond, don't react to errors; responding corrects mistakes while reacting magnifies them. Elevate your self-concept. It's OK to fail, everyone does; now how are you going to deal with the failure — Steve Largent

If I'm not playing well, I do get down on myself because I am a perfectionist. [So I need] someone who believes in me more than I believe in me, someone willing to work as hard as I work. I don't understand what no means or what failure means; I only understand what yes means and try again means. — Serena Williams

A failure to learn about Satan's plan for man here on earth would be fatal to the full exercise of free agency. The reason for this lies in the fact that ... free agency is the opportunity to choose between good and evil. To intelligently make such a choice one must understand the alternatives-both of them. To the extent one is ignorant of these alternatives, to that same extent he has not made a complete choice. Until a person understands Satan's plan, he can never be certain he does not believe in it and is not helping to carry it out. — H. Verlan Andersen

You can't expect everyone to laugh or applaud you for doing edgy things. Sometimes you'll miss. But I think comedians are artists and there's a value in failure. It kind of works both ways between comedians and audiences. The audience has to understand that comedians are going to sometimes tell a joke that doesn't work out with dark subjects, and the comedian has to understand that sometimes they 'll fail and it's not the audience's fault for not getting it or loving it. — Anthony Jeselnik

The images of the unconscious place a great responsibility upon a man. Failure to understand them, or a shirking of ethical responsibility, deprives him of his wholeness and imposes a painful fragmentariness on his life. — Carl Jung

Yes, being gay is just one of a thousand traits that make up my character, no more remarkable than my love of M&M's or my ability to mess up a room in fifteen seconds flat or my failure to understand the appeal of Luke and Owen Wilson.
But I believe that the desire to love and be loved is the strongest force on earth. And in that way, being gay affects every interaction in which straight people take part. Every human motive is in the end a yearning for companionship, and every act of every person on this planet is an effort not to be alone. — Joel Derfner

She didn't like it," he said immediately.
"Of course she did."
"She didn't like it," he insisted. "She didn't have a good time."
He was silent and I guessed at his unutterable depression.
"I feel far away from her," he said. "It's hard to make her understand."
"You mean about the dance?"
"The dance?" He dismissed all the dances he had given with a snap of his fingers. "Old sport, the dance is unimportant. — F Scott Fitzgerald

All the accomplished gardeners I know are surprisingly comfortable with failure. They may not be happy about it, but instead of reacting with anger or frustration, they seem freshly intrigued by the peony that, after years of being taken for granted, suddenly fails to bloom. They understand that, in the garden at least, failure speaks louder than success. By that I don't mean that the gardener encounters more failure than success (though in some years he will), only that his failures have more to say to him - about his soil, the weather, the predilections of local pests, the character of his land. The gardener learns nothing when his carrots thrive, unless that success is won against a background of prior disappointment. Outright success is dumb, disaster frequently eloquent. At least to the gardener who knows how to listen. — Michael Pollan

Faced with a new mutation in an organism, or a fundamental change in its living conditions, the biologist is frequently in no position whatever to predict its future prospects. He has to wait and see. For instance, the hairy mammoth seems to have been an admirable animal, intelligent and well-accoutered. Now that it is extinct, we try to understand why it failed. I doubt that any biologist thinks he could have predicted that failure. Fitness and survival are by nature estimates of past performance. — George Wald

The most important thing a writer can do after completing a sentence is to stay in the room. The great temptation is to leave the room to celebrate the completion of the sentence or to go out in the den where the television lies like a dormant monster and rest up for a few days for the next sentence or to go wander the seductive possibilities of the kitchen. But. It's simple. The writer is the person who stays in the room. The writer wants to read what she is in the process of creating with such passion and devotion that she will not leave the room. The writer understand that to stand up from the desk is to fail, and to leave the room is so radical and thorough a failure as to not be reversible. Who is not in the room writing? Everybody. Is it difficult to stay in the room, especially when you are not sure of what you're doing, where you're going? Yes. It's impossible. Who can do it? The writer. — Ron Carlson

But if neither sadness or rage could unite us, I didn't know what could - the more I wanted to identify with her, the more I identified with myself; and the more I tried to understand her, the less, necessarily, I succeeded: the failure of an intelligent mind to grasp feeblemindedness was dark and deep, no less than the failure of a feeble mind to grasp intelligence, because intelligence got its shape by not understanding the thing it could never be. — Jean-Christophe Valtat

Humans and their governments have effectively neutered the population to the point that they're just skinbags, mouth-breathers and pseudo-intellectuals repeating political, religious or academic rhetoric that they don't even understand! — Brad McKinniss

didn't get it back then. I thought . . . I thought choosing him meant you didn't love me. I thought because we didn't work out, it meant we were a failure or a mistake. But I understand it now. Because I love her. I love her so much I can't see straight. But it doesn't change how I felt about you or how thankful I am to have loved you once. It's just . . ." "I'm the past. And she's the present." "Yeah," he says, relieved that I've put it into words for him, that he doesn't have to try to find them himself. "That's exactly it." I — Taylor Jenkins Reid

It is important you understand how fear affects you and how it drives human behavior so you can start to see situations and people accurately and respond more appropriately. When someone is behaving badly, attacking you, or being defensive, critical, or judgmental, it is not really about you. Fear is the real reason people behave badly. Their fears make them selfish, defensive, mean, and grouchy. Every time someone is behaving badly, step back and ask yourself, "What is this person afraid of? What fear inside me is driving my reaction to their attack? What am I afraid of?"
When you can accurately see the fear behind their behavior, and yours, you will see the situation for what it really is. — Kimberly Giles

As the years go by, he returns to this invisible world rather than to earth for peace and solace. There also he finds a profound enchantment, although he can seldom describe it. He can discuss it with others of his kind, and because they too know and feel its power they understand. But his attempts to communicate his feelings to his wife or other earthly confidants invariable end in failure. — Ernest K. Gann

Listen, you have to understand something. In all of the history of professional sports, the Cubs are the ultimate symbol of complete failure. The championship of baseball is something called the World Series, and it's been so long since the Cubs have won it that no one who is alive could remember the last time they won it. It's so long that no one alive knew anyone who was alive when they won it. We're talking centuries of abject failure here. — John Scalzi

The first reason for psychology's failure to understand what people are and how they act, is that clinicians and psychiatrists, who are generally the theoreticians on these matters, have essentially made up myths without any evidence to support them; the second reason for psychology's failure is that personality theory has looked for inner traits when it should have been looking for social context. — Naomi Weisstein

I don't understand a way to work other than bold-facedly running towards failure. — Cate Blanchett

Indeed, your failure to understand that there are things much worse than death has always been your greatest weakness. — J.K. Rowling

He began by talking about the Christ child as the representative of all children and what it was to be childlike. He was arguing in favour of the need for times of weakness and vulnerability in our lives. An always invincible, strong, resistant humanity would have no room for growth or learning. It would have nothing to do. There would be no test because there could be no failure. Humanity needed its failings in order to understand itself. This was more than a matter of learning from mistakes. It was about acknowledging weakness, denying pride, and beginning any task from a position of openness, aware of the possibility that we often fall short. We must learn from the appearance of the Christ child in the world, as ready for companionship as tribulation, a blank canvas on whose surface life was painted and where depths contained mysteries yet to be understood. 'The — James Runcie

Know before whom thou stands. Understand your friends for who they are, not who you wish them to be. Accept them for their flaws as well as their attributes. Turn to them for their strengths, what good stuff they can bring to your life, and forget about the rest. To ask for more only sets you up for failure. — Fran Drescher

THE LOCARD EXCHANGE PRINCIPLE Wherever he steps, whatever he touches, whatever he leaves, even unconsciously, will serve as a silent witness against him. Not only his fingerprints or his footprints, but his hair, the fibers from his clothes, the glass he breaks, the tool mark he leaves, the paint he scratches, the blood or semen he deposits or collects. All of these and more, bear mute witness against him. This is evidence that does not forget. It is not confused by the excitement of the moment. It is not absent because human witnesses are. It is factual evidence. Physical evidence cannot be wrong, it cannot perjure itself, it cannot be wholly absent. Only human failure to find it, study and understand it, can diminish its value. - Edmund Locard — D.P. Lyle

By understanding and increasing just this one capacity of the human brain, an enormous amount of social change can be fostered. Failure to understand and cultivate empathy, however, could lead to a society in which no one would want to live - a cold, violent, chaotic, and terrifying war of all against all. This destructive type of culture has appeared repeatedly in various times and places in human history and still reigns in some parts of the world. And it's a culture that we could be inadvertently developing throughout America if we do not address current trends in child rearing, education, economic inequality, and our core values. — Bruce D. Perry

The emphasis on technology over an understanding of the realities of war and conflict reflect[s] the ahistoricism not only of too much of the U.S. military officer corps, but of the American educational system as well. Our mistakes in Iraq and Afghanistan were the result of a pervasive failure to understand the historical framework within which insurgencies take place, to appreciate the cultural and political factors of other nations and people, and to encourage the learning of foreign languages. In other words, in Afghanistan and Iraq we managed to repeat many of the mistakes we made in Vietnam, because America's political and military leaders managed to forget nearly every lesson of that conflict. — Peter R. Mansoor

I understand the harsh feelings and sentiments from my opponents and their supporters because I myself have been defeated twice in my political life in the past and I understand very well it is hard to accept your own failure. — Chen Shui-bian

For my first show at 'SNL', I wrote a Bill Clinton sketch, and during our read-through, it wasn't getting any laughs. This weight of embarrassment came over me, and I felt like I was sweating from my spine out. But I realized, 'Okay, that happened, and I did not die.' You've got to experience failure to understand that you can survive it. — Tina Fey

How does one undermine the framework of racial reasoning? By dismantling each pillar slowly and systematically. The fundamental aim of this undermining and dismantling is to replace racial reasoning with moral reasoning, to understand the black freedom struggle not as an affair of skin pigmentation and racial phenotype but rather as a matter of ethical principles and wise politics, and to combat the black nationalist attempt to subordinate the issues and interests of black women by linking mature black self-love and self-respect to egalitarian relations within and outside black communities. The failure of nerve of black leadership is its refusal to undermine and dismantle the framework of racial reasoning. — Cornel West

It takes the entire Bible to help us understand all the reasons that Jesus' death on the cross was not just a failure and a tragedy but was consummate wisdom. It takes a major part of Genesis to help us understand God's purposes in Joseph's tribulations. Sometimes we may wish that God would send us our book - a full explanation! But even though we cannot know all the particular reasons for our crosses, we can look at the cross and know God is working things out. — Timothy J. Keller

Of all the stories our mother told us when we were girls, the story about Lenz and the snowflakes and the sky was our favorite. We were children ourselves; we empathized with a little boy's failure to understand an adult's message. We got why his misapprehension was cute and silly, but we also got why it was wonderful, why this was a glorious way to see the world; not reduced to one of its component colors, but broad and encompassing and mystical, and the whole thing revolving around little old you. — Judith Claire Mitchell

I had no illusions that now, in some final and dramatic flash of revelation, we would understand one another. We were done. It was a fact of my life
intractable and sad
that our relationship had been a failure. Still, with her prognosis came one last chance to be her daughter. [p. 163] — Dani Shapiro

It was always her failure for not being able to talk to us, never ours for not being able to understand her. — Karen Joy Fowler

The Lord knows all - His timing and reasoning is perfect. If we really trust Him, then we no longer see our failures as a bad thing. We will see them as an answer to our prayers even if we don't understand how in the moment. — Lindsey Rietzsch

Failure fear people who pursue success, cause their bravery to become successful is far more than failure to understand. — Festus Adeoye

Boys who grow up seeing themselves everywhere as powerful and central just by virtue of being boys, often white, are critically impaired in many ways. It's a rude shock to many when things don't turn out the way they were told they should. It seems reasonable to suggest media misrepresentations like these contribute, in boys, to a heightened inability to empathize with others, a greater propensity to peg ambition to intrinsic qualities instead of effort and a failure to understand why rules apply or why accountability is a thing. It should mean something to parents that the teenagers with the highest likelihood of sexually assaulting a peer and feel no responsibility for their actions are young white boys from higher-income families. The real boy crisis we should be talking about is entitlement and outdated notions of masculinity, both of which are persistently responsible for leaving boys confused and unprepared for contemporary adulthood. — Soraya Chemaly

It is only possible to succeed at second-rate pursuits - like becoming a millionaire or a prime minister, winning a war, seducing beautiful women, flying through the stratosphere, or landing on the moon. First-rate pursuits - involving, as they must, trying to understand what life is about and trying to convey that understanding - inevitably result in a sense of failure. A Napoleon, a Churchill, or a Roosevelt can feel himself to be successful, but never a Socrates, a Pascal, or a Blake. Understanding is forever unattainable. — Malcolm Muggeridge

One of the great errors organizations make is shutting down what is a natural, life-enhancing process-chaos. We are terrified of chaos. As a manager, it signals failure. But if you move out of control and into an appreciation of natural order, you understand that the only way a system changes is when it is far from equilibrium, when it moves from the 'quiet' we treasure and is confronted with the choice to die or reorganize. And you can't reorganize to a higher level unless you risk the perils of the path through chaos. — Margaret J. Wheatley

I begin to understand that failure is its own reward. It is in the effort to close the distance between the work imagined and the work achieved wherein it is to be found that the ceaseless labor is the freedom of play, that what's at stake isn't a reflection in the mirror of fame but the escape from the prison of the self. — Lewis H. Lapham

A counselor, David Seamands, summed up his career this way: Many years ago I was driven to the conclusion that the two major causes of most emotional problems among evangelical Christians are these: the failure to understand, receive, and live out God's unconditional grace and forgiveness; and the failure to give out that unconditional love, forgiveness, and grace to other people. ... We read, we hear, we believe a good theology of grace. But that's not the way we live. The good news of the Gospel of grace has not penetrated the level of our emotions. — Philip Yancey

Errors of human judgment can infect even the smartest people, thanks to overconfidence, lack of attention to details, and excessive trust in the judgments of others, stemming from a failure to understand that others are not making independent judgments, but are themselves following still others - the blind leading the blind. - ROBERT J. SHILLER, PROFESSOR OF ECONOMICS, YALE UNIVERSITY — Pamela Yellen

The solution is to change from the negative to the positive and one way to do that is to remember that failure is an event - it is not a person. Another way is to understand that your child might make a mistake, but the child is not a mistake — Zig Ziglar

When clouds will become heavier than the land in us led our entire life by the steps of our Destiny, we will understand that not their moments' rain has darkened the sun of our life, but the failure to be ourselves. — Sorin Cerin

No true work since the world began was ever wasted; no true life since the world began has ever failed. Oh, understand those two perverted word, failure and success and measure them by the eternal, not the earthly, standard. When after thirty obscure, toilsome, unrecorded years in the shop of the village carpenter, one came forth to be pre-eminently the man of sorrows, to wander from city to city in homeless labors, and to expire in lonely agony upon the shameful cross
was that a failure. — Frederic Farrar

Many businessmen fail to understand Python principles
the ultimate absurdity was an offer from America to buy the 'format' of the Python shows, that is, Monty Python without the Pythons
corporate methods do not have the conceptual framework to deal with an anarchist collective, run by intelligent and arrogant comedians who have proved that their method works. — Robert Hewison

If you employed a strategy that is not conducive to the results you are looking for, then you will not achieve the desired result. You have to understand that it's not you that failed; it's just that you employed the wrong strategy. — Julian Pencilliah

The failure of modern evangelicalism is the failure to understand the holiness of God. — R.C. Sproul

Failure is always present as an actor. I make my living by taking chances. If I'm not risking something, then I'm not doing my job, so I'm constantly failing. In fact, I'm trying to fail bigger. I try to focus on the positive, the moment, and try to realize where I'm at in an attempt to understand the failure. — Damon Runyon

Sometimes you have to fail in order to succeed. Whether we want it or not, there is an order in the universe. It's hard to understand and many, many times it's hard to swallow, but it's there and our choices are our own. Failure is part of life and no one can succeed every time they try something. — Sherrilyn Kenyon

Let us say plainly: the unredeemed state of the world consists precisely in the failure to understand the meaning of creation, in the failure to recognize truth; as a result, the rule of pragmatism is imposed, by which the strong arm of the powerful becomes the god of this world. — Pope Benedict XVI

You can understand Tunisia revolution as a failure to censor the internet. And Libya had that failure too. It's very difficult for governments that are autocratic and don't have broad popular support to be in power when a lot of people have these devices. That was what Arab Spring was about, that people could express this and lead to revolution. — Eric Schmidt

Make a distinction between positive contingencies, and negative. Learn to distinguish between those human undertakings in which a lack of predictability has been extremely beneficial, and those where failure to understand the future has caused harm. — Nicholas Nassim Taleb

Indeed, an astoundingly small proportion of arguments 'for free speech' and 'against censorship' or 'banning' are, in fact, about free speech, censorship or banning. It is depressing to have to point out, yet again, that there is a distinction between having the legal right to say something & having the moral right not to be held accountable for what you say. Being asked to apologise for saying something unconscionable is not the same as being stripped of the legal right to say it. It's really not very f-cking complicated. Cry "free speech" in such contexts, you are demanding the right to speak any bilge you wish without apology or fear of comeback. You are demanding not legal rights but an end to debate about and criticism of what you say. When did bigotry get so needy? This assertive & idiotic failure to understand that juridical permissibility backed up by the state is not the horizon of politics or morality is absurdly resilient. — China Mieville

Defeat is real. It is also temporary. We have to understand both. Faced for what it is, absorbed and met without self-deception, defeat can offer wisdom and motivation. Begin even though you know that you will suffer failure and defeat along the way. — Eric Greitens

Every book I've written has been a different attempt to understand something, and the success or failure of the previous one is irrelevant. I write the book I want. — Yann Martel

Many Christians ... find themselves defeated by the most psychological weapon that Satan uses against them. This weapon has the effectiveness of a deadly missile. Its name? Low self-esteem. Satan's greatest psychological weapon is a gut level feeling of inferiority, inadequacy, and low self-worth This feeling shackles many Christians, in spite of wonderful spiritual experiences and knowledge of God's Word. Although they understand their position as sons and daughters of God, they are tied up in knots, bound by a terrible feeling inferiority, and chained to a deep sense of worthlessness. — David A. Seamands

It is all too often the case with certain types of scholars of Malay-Indonesian Islam, when dealing with Islamic texts such as the one in question in which they are confronted with a word they do not quite understand, that instead of admitting their failure to explain the word in the text as due to their own lack of understanding, they would proceed to conjure up some excuse for branding the word as an enigma, and then, because it is an enigma to them, they would proceed further to reject it with such pronouncements as: "it seems obvious that this puzzling word is due to a scribal error", so that they might suggest their own futile substitute. — Syed Muhammad Naquib Al-Attas

It's their failure, my little Anna, not yours. Men who try to understand the world without the help of children are like men who try to bake bread without the help of yeast. — Gavriel Savit

Successful people don't fear failure, but understand that it's necessary to learn and grow from. — Robert Kiyosaki

The utter failure came at the Crucifixion in the tragic words, 'My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?' If you want to understand the full tragedy of those words you must realize what they meant: Christ saw that his whole life, devoted to the truth according to his best conviction, had been a terrible illusion. He had lived it to the full absolutely sincerely, he had made his honest experiment, but it was nevertheless a compensation. On the cross his mission deserted him. But because he had lived so fully and devotedly he won through to the Resurrection body. — Carl Jung

The reason people fail to reach their goals is because they give up too early. They don't understand that most successes are built upon foundations of multiple attempts. — Richelle E. Goodrich

As long as the G.O.P., led by its increasingly visible women, continues to insist that the problem is not their policies but women's failure to understand their own lives and interests, the gender gap won't go away. — Dee Dee Myers

She had come to understand that American parenting was a juggling of anxieties, and that it came with having too much food: a sated belly gave Americans time to worry that their child might have a rare disease that they had just read about, made them think that they had the right to protect their child from disappointment and want and failure. A sated belly gave Americans the luxury of praising themselves for being good parents, as if caring for one's child were the exception rather than the rule. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

And those characters [in a fairy tale] dwell in a moral world, whose laws are as clear as the law of gravity. That too is a great advantage of the folk tale. It is not a failure of imagination to see the sky blue. It is a failure rather to be weary of its being blue- and not to notice how blue it is. And appreciation of the subtler colors of the sky will come later. In the folk tale, good is good and evil is evil, and the former will triumph and later will fail. This is not the result of the imaginative quest. It is rather its principle and foundation. It is what will enable the child later on to understand Macbeth, or Don Quixote, or David Copperfield. — Anthony Esolen

I can't say I'm not grateful to have journalists writing about me as a genius. But I know it's not true. I'm not confused. I understand that success comes through a lot of failure and a lot of very embarrassing failure. People want to create the next Facebook, but they are too afraid to create the next Facemash. — Eric Ries

Business executives do not understand true IT needs and are inspired by external vendors and other sources. The business dictates a solution, IT accepts it, and then IT resources are consumed by the complexity of a non-optimal solution. There is pressure to deliver and consequently a high failure rate, rework rate, and, hence, low confidence in IT. This leads to further breakdown in IT business relationships and fuels more misaligned initiatives from an IT perspective. — Ashu Bhatia

I was a loser, most concerned with making a living. It took me 30 years to understand ... I had to reinvent a system, find a way out, and set some rules that could work for me and a few others. I guess in the end that's what we all are trying to do. — Maurizio Cattelan

In a government institution, there is only one area in which problems are taken seriously, and that is the political. Many of the strange things done in American educationism suddenly become perfectly understandable when we see them not as educational methods but as political maneuvers. We must understand illiteracy, therefore, the root of ignorance and thoughtlessness, as not some inadvertent failure to accomplish what was intended but simply a political arrangement of great value to somebody. — Richard Mitchell

He suspected that somewhere, somehow, this new technology was stupid or lazy. Some young engineer had taken a shortcut and failed to anticipate the consequences that he was suffering now. But because he didn't understand the technology, he had no way to know the nature of the failure or to take steps to correct it.
And so the goddamned lights made a victim of him, and there wasn't a goddamned thing he could do except go out and spend. — Jonathan Franzen

When he was young, he had thought love had something to do with understanding, but with age he knew that no human being understood another. Love was the wish to understand, and presently with constant failure the wish died, and love died too perhaps or changed into this painful affection, loyalty, pity ... — Graham Greene

You cannot begin to understand the failure of marriage - or the living of these ideas commitment or covenant - without considering and factoring in the devaluing of fatherhood. The two are inextricably linked and dependent. — H. Kirk Rainer

Adolescents may be, almost simultaneously, overconfident and riddled with fear. They are afraid of their overpowering feelings, oflosing control, of helplessness, of failure. Sometimes they act bold, to counteract their imperious yearnings to remain children. They are impulsive, impetuous, moody, disagreeable, overdemanding, underappreciative. If you don't understand them, remember, they don't understand themselves most of the time. — Stella Chess

Nixon's grand mistake was his failure to understand that Americans are forgiving, and if he had admitted error early and apologized to the country, he would have escaped. — Bob Woodward

God often uses failure to make us useful. When Jesus called the disciples, He did not go out and find the most qualified and successful people. He found the most willing, and He found them in the workplace. He found a fisherman, a tax collector, and a farmer. The Hebrews knew that failure was a part of maturing in God. The Greeks used failure as a reason for disqualification. Sadly, in the Church, we often treat one another in this way. This is not God's way. We need to understand that failing does not make us failures. It makes us experienced. It makes us more prepared to be useful in God's Kingdom -- if we have learned from it. And that is the most important ingredient for what God wants in His children. — Os Hillman

Growth is a greater mystery than death. All of us can understand failure, we all contain failure and death within us, but not even the successful man can begin to describe the impalpable elations and apprehensions of growth. — Norman Mailer