Tao Te Ching
Failure
Success and Failure - the mega Carrot and Stick - such seemingly powerful dictators so easily deposed.
Freud wrote that all neurosis has a foundation in an unconscious need we have to punish ourselves. Much of that unhealthy impulse may arise from mistaken understandings of failure and the deception that “success” defines goodness and instills happiness. The fear of failure also makes almost any kind of creative innovation impossible. Failure defines our uniqueness, opens doors to insight, and creates an infrastructure for creativity. Much of the success in our materialistic world is based on getting people to like us. Part of what makes a sage wise is not caring if people like us or not—at least not letting approval-seeking change behavior. Sages steep in authentic presence, humility, and compassion. Materialistic success relies on deception, arrogance, and greed. Instead of killing the messenger and punishing ourselves for failures, we could appreciate and welcome them as as wise and very personal teachers.
Quotes (88)
“He could not look farther than the moment… He met the event as it came and so events buffeted him and blew him about”
“Every man carries two bags about him, one in front and one behind, and both are full of faults. The bag in front contains his neighbors' faults, the one behind his own. Hence it is that men do not see their own faults, but never fail to see those of others.”
“When you succeed, be one with success. When you fail, be one with failure.
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“Those who win success, think deeply before doing anything. Those who suffer failure, avoid contemplation and make few calculations beforehand.”
“One skilled at battle takes a stand in the ground of no defeat… the victorious military is first victorious and after than does battle… And so one who is skilled cultivates Tao and preserves method.”
“To live is to die, to be awake is to sleep, to be young is to be old, for the one flows into the other, and the process is capable of being reversed.”
“Achievement is the beginning of failure. Fame is the beginning of disgrace.”
“Since nothing is permanent, why become so attached to success and failure?”
“People who are favored are honored. And because they are honored, they act proud. And because they act proud, they are hated… Hence sages consider success as well as failure to be a warning.”
“No self is the Way. Success. Failure. I don’t see how they differ.”
“The tongue is very small and light but it can take you to the greatest heights and it can put you in the lowest depths.”
“Struggle is over; gain and loss are assimilated. I sing the song of the village woodsman, and play the tunes of the children.”
“By their failures lovers are made aware... Lack of success is the guide to Paradise.”
“Natural means free from success and therefore free from failure… If the wise do succeed or fail,there minds are not affected.”
“Words mean traces. Traces mean knowledge. Knowledge means presumption. Presumption means involvement. And involvement means failure.”
“Message to his son’s teacher: 'Teach him the wonder of books but also give him quiet time to ponder the eternal mystery of birds in the sky, bees in the sun, and the flowers on a green hillside. Teach him it is far more honorable to fail than to cheat.'”
“The strength of a beam is measured by its weakest part, of a man by his strongest..”
“Failure after long perseverance is much grander than never to have a striving good enough to be called a failure.”
“Liberty is poorly served by men whose good intent is quelled from one failure or two failures or any number of failures”
“what is success without failure? what is a win without a loss? what is health without illness? you have to experience each if you are to appreciate the other. there is always going to be suffering. it’s how you look at your suffering, how you deal with it, that will define you.”
“Losers visualize the penalties of failure. Winners visualize the rewards of success.”
“A man can fail many times, but he isn't a failure until he begins to blame somebody else”
“A thinker sees his own actions as experiments and questions--as attempts to find out something. Success and failure are for him answers above all.”
“I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work… Mistakes are the portals of discovery.”
“When I was young, I observed that nine out of ten things I did were failures. So I did ten times more work.”
“Our virtues and our failings are inseparable, like force and matter. When they separate, man is no more.”
“The line between failure and success is so fine. . . that we are often on the line and do not know it.”
“Failure is instructive. The person who really thinks learns quite as much from his failures as from his successes.”
“If you can lose, and start again at your beginnings and never breathe a word about your loss;… Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it”
“We know that our dreams are not realizable; but it is useful to have dreams in order to see them come to naught and to learn by their failure.”
“Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.”
“How you think when you lose determines how long it will be until you win.”
“Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.”
“he has the secret of those people to whom success comes by itself... he never fears failure, he is never worried about a loss.”
“When a person no longer confuses a personal body with self and recognizes all people as members of their own body, neither failure or success can bother them and they become safe to guide and guard others.”
“It is common sense to take a method and try it: If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.”
“There is no harm in being sometimes wrong - especially if one is promptly found out.”
“Forget mistakes. Forget failure. Forget everything except what you're going to do now and do it.”
“The essential cause of Rome's decline lay in her people, her morals, her class struggle, her failing trade, her bureaucratic despotism, her stifling taxes, her consuming wars... it was an empty shell when Christianity arose and invasion came.”
“Globalization inevitably implies more standardization and therefore a decrease in diversity, which in turn would slow down the rate of social innovations. Another danger of globalization is that excessive interdependence of systems increases the likelihood of collective disasters if one of the subsystems fails”
“- It is wrong to think that belief in freedom always leads to victory; we must always be prepared for it to lead to defeat. If we choose freedom, then we must be prepared to perish along with it.
“Only because I prefer a positive to a negative. In this game that we're playing, we can't win. Some kinds of failure are better than other kinds, that's all.”
“There’s something you should know about failure, Tintin… you can never let it defeat you.”
“Lifelong dissent has more than acclimated me cheerfully to defeat. It has made me suspicious of victory. I feel uneasy at the very idea of a Movement. I see every insight degenerating into a dogma, and fresh thoughts freezing into lifeless party line. (1969)”
“No man leaves where he is and seeks a distant place unless he is in some respect a failure.”
“They give up the dream of what may lie ahead on the heights of tomorrow for a perpetual nightmare - an endless succession of days fearing the loss of a tenuous security.”
“We are living in a world of mass media which daily exposes society’s innate hypocrisy, its contradictions and the apparent failure of almost every facet of our social and political life.”
“My fault, my failure, is not in the passions I have, but in my lack of control of them.”
“Success and failure are greatly overrated. But failure gives you a whole lot more to talk about.
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“Children have a lesson adults should learn, to not be ashamed of failing, but to get up and try again. Most of us adults are so afraid, so cautious, so 'safe,' and therefore so shrinking and rigid and afraid that it is why so many humans fail. Most middle-aged adults have resigned themselves to failure.”
“You have to have confidence in your ability, and then be tough enough to follow through. If you 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.”
“Our defects are so tenuous, so delicate, that we’re hardly able to perceive them. In fact, we have to rise a notch in our evolution to know”
“Identify yourself with loss, failure, the obscure, the unpossessible, and you’ll be at home even there.”
“F. Scott Fitzgerald died in 1940 fearing that he was a failure, forgotten. The Great Gatsby led the Fitzgerald rediscovery and restoration because it is a miracle—though not his only miracle. Literary miracles are the work of writers who come closer than other writers to expressing what is in their minds through innate genius augmented by control, technique, craft.”
“unless we believe we actually are the losers the audience sees us to be, we will not have the necessary desire to win.”
“He feels the joy and sorrow of love in everything he does. He feels hot and cold, sweet and sour, simultaneously. Whether things go well or things go badly, whether there is success or failure, he feels sad and delighted at once.”
“The search for an external protector has met with no success.”
“There’s no success like failure, and failure’s no success at all.”
“Any strategy that involves crossing a valley—accepting short-term losses to reach a higher hill in the distance—will soon be brought to a halt by the demands of a system that celebrates short-term gains and tolerates stagnation, but condemns anything else as failure. In short, a world where big stuff can never get done.”
“It is the self that fears failure and longs for success, fears hell and longs for heaven... It weaves a cocoon around itself like a silkworm; but, unlike a silkworm, it doesn't know how to find the way out,”
“If there was a single thread running through the life of Angelou it was her carpe diem approach to living... She was an 'experimentalist', someone who viewed life as a smorgasbord of possibilities and experiences there for the tasting even when it involved risk and the prospect of failure.”
“failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me... Failure gave me an inner security that I had never attained by passing examinations. Failure taught me things about myself that I could have learned no other way.”
“We don't really learn anything properly until there is a problem, until we are in pain, until something fails to go as we had hoped.”
“It is not technology that explains failure; it is less about technology, per se, and more about the leaders' failure to envision the future of their business as the world changes around them.”
“Creativity means staying open to change, and risking failure... We are always taking a chance, precisely because there is no certainty.”
“the Anna Karenina principle: successful states are all alike, but every failed state fails in its own way”
“the mark of science is the willingness to admit failure and try a different tack. That's why scientists learn how to grow better crops and make better medicines, whereas priests and gurus learn only how to make better excuses... why the entire world has increasingly become a single civilization.”
“You can't solve mysteries through guesswork. You start with what you know, and continue adding in more of what you know, until there is nothing left of what you know. Only then do yo even begin to add logic, reason, and speculation. Guessing is truly a last resort... an admission of failure.”
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