Many a man fails as an original thinker simply because his memory it too good.

At places like Davos, people like to tell success stories. But their financial success has come with an unthinkable price tag. And on climate change, we have to acknowledge we have failed.

There is no innovation and creativity without failure. Period.

The intersection of law, politics, and technology is going to force a lot of good thinking.

Maybe I should say that memory interests me a great deal, because I think we all tell stories of our lives to ourselves as well as to other people. Well, women do, anyway. Women do this a lot. And I think when men get older, they do this too, but maybe in slightly different terms.

You tell me: Can you live crushed under the weight of the present? Without a memory of the past and without the desire to look ahead to the future by building something, a future, a family? Can you go on like this? This, to me, is the most urgent problem that the Church is facing.

I failed to make the chess team because of my height.

Principles and rules are intended to provide a thinking man with a frame of reference.

Think left and think right and think low and think high. Oh, the thinks you can think up if only you try!

I still live, I still think: I still have to live, for I still have to think.

I’ve always been very liberal when it comes to people thinking for themselves.

No memory of having starred atones for later disregard, or keeps the end from being hard.

If you’re not failing every now and again, it’s a sign you’re not doing anything very innovative.

Voters quickly forget what a man says.

Yesterday’s just a memory, tomorrow is never what it’s supposed to be.

I remember at the age of five travelling on a trolley car with my mother past a group of women on a picket line at a textile plant, seeing them being viciously beaten by security people. So that kind of thing stayed with me.

Of my mental cycles, I devote maybe ten percent to business thinking. Business isn’t that complicated. I wouldn’t want to put it on my business card.

Nobody is forgotten when it is convenient to remember him.

Faith is an oasis in the heart which will never be reached by the caravan of thinking.

Sometimes I’ll jot a clever turn of phrase down. Sometimes I’ll just remember it.

Why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because 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.

The biggest risk is not taking any risk… In a world that is changing really quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks.

I’ve had a lot of success; I’ve had failures, so I learn from the failure.

Well, I screwed it up real good, didn’t I?

Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge.

The only failure one should fear, is not hugging to the purpose they see as best.

Success is the result of perfection, hard work, learning from failure, loyalty, and persistence.

I don’t digest things with my mind.

We do not know where to look, or what to look for, when something is memorized. We do not know what it means, or what change there is in the nervous system, when a fact is learned. This is a very important problem which has not been solved at all.

Hold those things that tell your history and protect them. During slavery, who was able to read or write or keep anything? The ability to have somebody to tell your story to is so important. It says: ‚I was here. I may be sold tomorrow. But you know I was here.‘

I didn’t fail the test, I just found 100 ways to do it wrong.

I met Howard Zinn in 1961, my first year at Spelman College in Atlanta. He was the tall, rangy, good-looking professor that many of the girls at Spelman swooned over.

Every adversity, every failure, every heartache carries with it the seed of an equal or greater benefit.

My great concern is not whether you have failed, but whether you are content with your failure.

Reading is equivalent to thinking with someone else’s head instead of with one’s own.

The Vietnam War required us to emphasize the national interest rather than abstract principles. What President Nixon and I tried to do was unnatural. And that is why we didn’t make it.

The true art of memory is the art of attention.

If in the twilight of memory we should meet once more, we shall speak again together and you shall sing to me a deeper song.

People in their handlings of affairs often fail when they are about to succeed. If one remains as careful at the end as he was at the beginning, there will be no failure.

Far better is it to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure… than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much, because they live in a gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.

It seems that it had been destined before that I should occupy myself so thoroughly with the vulture, for it comes to my mind as a very early memory, when I was still in the cradle, a vulture came down to me, he opened my mouth with his tail and struck me a few times with his tail against my lips.

Well, I think that there’s a very thin dividing line between success and failure. And I think if you start a business without financial backing, you’re likely to go the wrong side of that dividing line.

Most of one’s life is one prolonged effort to prevent oneself thinking.

When the mind is thinking it is talking to itself.

The difference between false memories and true ones is the same as for jewels: it is always the false ones that look the most real, the most brilliant.

Without failure there is no achievement.

If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl.

Most people have the opportunity of a lifetime flash right in front of them, and they fail to see it. A year later, they find out about it, after everyone else got rich.

I never heard of an old man forgetting where he had buried his money! Old people remember what interests them: the dates fixed for their lawsuits, and the names of their debtors and creditors.

All human actions are equivalent and all are on principle doomed to failure.

Why should anybody be interested in some old man who was a failure?

You can’t be afraid to fail. It’s the only way you succeed – you’re not gonna succeed all the time, and I know that.

If something’s important enough, you should try. Even if – the probable outcome is failure.

No one is ever successful at everything that they do.

To not follow your passion in life is a recipe for failure and unhappiness.

It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed.

Ambition never is in a greater hurry than I; it merely keeps pace with circumstances and with my general way of thinking.

Memory is the way we keep telling ourselves our stories – and telling other people a somewhat different version of our stories.

Nobody likes to fail. I want to succeed in everything I do, which isn’t much. But the things that I’m really passionate about, if I fail at those, if I’m not successful, what do I have?

The nature of the human mind is such that unless it is stimulated by images of things acting upon it from without, all remembrance of them passes easily away.

Kindnesses are easily forgotten; but injuries! what worthy man does not keep those in mind?