Feeling Like A Failure Quotes & Sayings

There are many roles that people play and many images that they project. There is, for example, the "nice" man who is always smiling and agreeable. "Such a nice man," people say. "He never gets angry." The facade always covers its opposite expression. Inside, such a person is full of rage that he dares not acknowledge or show. Some men put up a tough exterior to hide a very sensitive, childlike quality. Even failure can be a role. Many masochistic characters engage in the game of failure to cover an inner feeling of superiority. An outward show of superiority could bring down on them the jealous wrath of the father and the threat of castration. As long as they act like failures they can retain some sexuality, since they are not a threat to her father. — Alexander Lowen

I always want objects in my home that have a connection to me or something I've loved. It's still stuff, but it's stuff that has meaning. — Nate Berkus

How is feeling like a failure supposed to help me? The way I see it, they should invent some pill that just makes you forget whatever you want, some pill that makes you numb and functional. — Amy Reed

You find out a lot about yourself through athletics. If you're cut out to be a winner or a failure or a quitter, athletics will bring it out of you. You're always stripping yourself down to the bones of your personality. And sometimes you just get a glimpse of the kind of talent you've been given. Sometimes I run and I don't even feel the effort of running. I don't even feel the ground. I'm just drifting. Incredible feeling. All the agony and frustration, they're all justified by one moment like that. — Steve Ovett

Trying to control the emotional self willfully by manipulative attempts is like trying to choose a number on a thrown die or to push back the water of the Kamo River upstream. Certainly, they end up aggravating their agony and feeling unbearable pain because of their failure in manipulating the emotions. — Shoma Morita

Often what keeps us stuck and continually doing penance is the very feeling that we must pay for lack of action. We become caught in a circle of blame, condemn ourselves, feel hopeless, and feed the fire - or slow burn - by reciting like a mantra our history of inertia and self-judged wrong choices. Well, let's break that dead-end cycle of waste and regret. — Noelle Sterne

A best friend is someone with whom you can sit on the porch, without a word, and then walk away with the feeling that it was the best conversation that ever had in your life. I would like to see next to me was the man in whose presence my heart beat would be evenly and uniformly, the man next to whom I would be calm, because I was not afraid to be the next day to lose him. And the time would have flowed more slowly, and we could just keep quiet, knowing that to talk with us there is still a whole life. Only one thing makes a dream impossible - it is the fear of failure. — Paulo Coelho

All this blackness was within him, but that was where it really mattered. It was night without moon or stars, it was a doorless pit in the earth's bowels, it was forever. He felt black ice growing, blooming in his veins. One last sharp feeling was left to him
the bitter taste of failure. Then that went too. All was nothing.
Cold and everlasting night, and an everlasting laughter that was older and colder than the stars he would never see again. His heart squirmed wildly in his chest, seeking an escape that was denied it. Laughter like a glacier came again, rolling and crushing all else before it.
A bird sang. — Susan Dexter

When you're looked over, passed by, and straight up refused, that isn't failure. When it feels like you can't do anything right, that isn't failure.

When it all feels hopeless and you don't even know why you bother, it still isn't failure. When you change directions to do something else, that's not failure.

Failure is neither delays nor going slow. Failure isn't starting late or starting wrong. Failure isn't feeling worry or regret or confusion.

Failure doesn't look like struggle, it looks like nothing at all.

Failure is when we stop. When we put our goals and dreams up on the shelf to collect dust. Failure is accepting failure.

But until the day we die, failure doesn't have to be permanent. We can always dust off those dreams and start again.

All we have to do is keep going — Noah Bradley

From the first I hated, and whenever possible evaded, orderly instruction in regard to the world around me...Not that I lacked the child's faculty of wonder. In a sense, I had it to excess. For what astonished, and still astonishes, me more than anything else was the existence, anywhere, of anything at all. But since things there were, I preferred to become one with them, in the child's way of direct apprehension which no subsequent 'knowledge' can either rival or destroy, rather than to stand back and be told, in relation to any of the objects of my self-losing adoration, this and that. — Dorothy M. Richardson

At the same time, if we were feeling a knot of guilt about our decision re: dying, it might have been because we regretted our failure to achieve a certain kind of wisdom born from certain kinds of life experiences...Our skittishness when it came to any crisis, the preference we had for deflecting important conversations with jokes, rather than facing them head-on. It was fine, we agreed, not to want to grow old. Fine, too, to take steps to ensure we didn't grow old. But we'd also avoided growing up. We'd lived our lives like perpetual children, hiding in corners, never knowing what to say, never knowing what to do. If our plan to die was problematic, it was problematic in that it eliminated the possibility of our ever becoming serious, capable women. — Judith Claire Mitchell

He's kissing me, quick desperate kisses, like I'm something he needs to live; and I'm kissing him back, crazy with the ache I feel for him, trying to kiss him better, trying to fix him. I'm touching his face, feeling the roughness of his beard, the wet of his tears, feeling the tremors passing through his body, hearing his ragged breathing. And each kiss is a failure. A failed attempt to escape from all that's happening. And I only know this when he slows, drawing it out, letting me taste regret, letting things linger. He pulls away, and I'm saying "Don't, don't, don't", trying to bring him back, kissing his face. But I've lost him. — Kirsty Eagar

And I went to New York and died; for 10 years I walked those pavements. I can't think of New York without feeling uncomfortable and feeling like a failure. — Harvey Korman

What do you mean by that?"

Her frustration got the best of her. "You're so used to feeling superior that you've forgotten there are people who might know something you don't."

One of his big, competent hands landed on the blade of his hip. "What's your deal anyway? Do you feel like such a failure that you need to attack anybody who's successful?"

"No. Maybe. I don't know. Fuck you. — Susan Elizabeth Phillips

And I know, knew for sure, with an absolute certainty, that this is rock bottom, this what the worst possible thing feels like. It is not some grand, wretched emotional breakdown. It is, in fact, so very mundane: ... Rock Bottom is an inability to cope with the commonplace that is so extreme it makes even the grandest and loveliest things unbearable ... Rock bottom is feeling that the only thing that matters in all of life is the one bad moment ... Rock bottom is everything out of focus. It's a failure of vision, a failure to see the world how it is, to see the good in what it is, and only to wonder why the hell things look the way they do and not - and not some other way. — Elizabeth Wurtzel

Love is not necessary for sex. — Patricia Briggs

Life goes on and on after one's luck has run out. Youthfulness persists, alas, long after one has ceased to be young. — Glenway Wescott

In 1995, when Steve Jobs was trying to convince us that we should go public, one of his key arguments was that we would eventually make a film that failed at the box office, and we needed to be prepared, financially, for that day. Going public would give us the capital to fund our own projects and, thus, to have more say about where we were headed, but it would also give us a buffer that could sustain us through failure. Steve's feeling was that Pixar's survival could not depend solely on the performance of each and every movie. The underlying logic of his reasoning shook me: We were going to screw up, it was inevitable. And we didn't know when or how. We had to prepare, then, for an unknown problem - a hidden problem. From that day on, I resolved to bring as many hidden problems as possible to light, a process that would require what might seem like an uncommon commitment to self-assessment. — Ed Catmull

Doing goodness is good only when you don't expect anything in return; not a medal, not even a simple thanking! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

Failure cannot be erased. It is built in to a life and helps us grow. Failure cannot be erased, but it can be understood.
Most people carry around a load of feeling that they bury or pretend is not there because it is too painful and alarming to cope with or because it involved unbearable guilt. Anger against a parent, for example.
I knew the tide of woe was rising, that woe that seizes me like anger, and is a form of anger, and I didn't know what to do to stop it, so I got up and picked flowers, cooked my dinner, looked at the news, all the same usual routine that can ward off the devils or suddenly clear the air as when a thunderstorm seems to be coming and then dissipates ... .it always happens when there is a galaxy of problems that get knit together into one huge outcry against the sense of being abandoned or orphanhood ... — May Sarton

It's not about finding ways to avoid God's judgment and feeling like a failure if you don't do everything perfectly. It's about fully experiencing God's love and letting it perfect you. It's not about being somebody you are not. It's about becoming who you really are. — Stormie O'martian

Category IV spending tends also to corrupt the people involved. All such programs put some people in a position to decide what is good for other people. The effect is to instill in the one group a feeling of almost God-like power; in the other, a feeling of childlike dependence. The capacity of the beneficiaries for independence, for making their own decisions, atrophies through disuse. In addition to the waste of money, in addition to the failure to achieve the intended objectives, the end result is to rot the moral fabric that holds a decent society together. — Milton Friedman

It is quite possible that, even if you set the most relevant, realistic goals, you may not achieve them in the way or the time you wanted to. Life may throw something unexpected in your path, which stops you from achieving what you want, when you want. This is not failure. Feeling like you have failed is bound to lead to low mood, and can often come about if things haven't quite gone according to plan. However, the best thing to do is to draw a mental line under the experience, learn from what has happened and try again. As long as you are still trying, you are working towards your long-term aims; and as long as you are doing that, you are never truly failing. — Anna Barnes

I acknowledge that the sacrament of the altar is very God's body in form of bread, but it is in another manner God's body than it is in heaven. — John Wycliffe