Quotations by Subject

Failure Page 1 of 1

Related Topic(s): Darkness; Decay; Decline; Despair; Disease; Dying; Emergency; Existential; Prison; Rain; Storms; Suffering

A Hard Rain's A'Gonna Fall
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Dyl

Related Topic(s): Adversity; Depth; Despair; Strength

Our life is always deeper than we know, is always more divine
than it seems, and hence we are able to survive degradations and
despairs which otherwise must engulf us.
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William James

Related Topic(s): Anger; Despair; Emotions

Despair is not a useful emotion.
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Unknown

Research useless.

Related Topic(s): Defeat; Jesting; Men Women

WHEN HELEN LIVED

We have cried in our despair
That men desert,
For some trivial affair
Or noisy, insolent sport,
Beauty that we have won
From bitterest hours;
Yet we, had we walked within
Those topless towers
Where Helen walked with her boy,
Had given but as the rest
Of the men and women of Troy,
A word and a jest.
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W.B. Yeats

William Butler Yeats was born in Sandymount, County Dublin, Ireland. His father, John Butler Yeats, was a descendant of Jervis Yeats, a Williamite soldier and linen merchant who died in 1712. Jervis' grandson Benjamin married Mary Butler, daughter of a landed family in County Kildare. At the time of his marriage, John Yeats was studying law but abandoned his studies to study art at Heatherley"ï¿½s Art School in London. His mother, Susan Mary Pollexfen, came from a wealthy Anglo-Irish family in County Sligo who owned a prosperous milling and shipping business. Soon after William's birth the family relocated to Sligo to stay with her extended family, and the young poet came to think of the area as his childhood and spiritual home. Its landscape became, over time, both literally and symbolically, his "country of the heart". The Butler Yeats family were highly artistic; his brother Jack went on to be a highly regarded painter, while his sisters Elizabeth and Susan Mary""known to family and friends as Lollie and Lily""became involved in the Arts and Crafts movement.

Yeats grew up as a member of the former Protestant Ascendancy at the time undergoing a crisis of identity. While his family was broadly supportive of the changes Ireland was experiencing, the nationalist revival of the late 19th century directly disadvantaged his heritage, and informed his outlook for the remainder of his life. In 1997, his biographer R. F. Foster observed that Napoleon's dictum that to understand the man you have to know what was happening in the world when he was twenty "is manifestly true of W.B.Y." Yeats's childhood and young adulthood were shadowed by the power shift away from the minority Protestant Ascendancy. The 1880s saw the rise of Parnell and the Home rule movement, the 1890s the momentum of nationalism, while the Catholics became prominent around the turn of the century. These developments were to have a profound effect on his poetry, and his subsequent explorations of Irish identity had a significant influence on the creation of his country's biography.[10]

1907 Portrait by Augustus John

Author Information from Wikipedia

Related Topic(s): Defeat; Indifference; Power; Resignation

It may well be that our means are fairly limited and our possibilities restricted when it comes to applying pressure on our government. But is this a reason to do nothing? Despair is not an answer. Neither is resignation. Resignation only leads to indifference, which is not merely a sin but a punishment

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Elie Wiesel

Related Topic(s): Defeat; FAILURE; Illusion

...defeat can be as much of an illusion as victory.

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Gioconda Belli

Related Topic(s): Defeat; Indifference; Power; Resignation

Elie Wiesel

Related Topic(s): Challenge; Emptiness; Salvation; WORK

Once you fully apprehend the vacuity of a life without struggle, you are equipped with the basic means of salvation.

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Tennessee Williams