The only way to be sure of catching a train is to miss the one before it.
Interpretation
To ensure success, one must accept failure as part of the journey.
This quote by Gilbert K. Chesterton reflects the notion that in order to achieve our goals or reach our destination, we might need to experience setbacks or failures first. The essence of the message is that missing an opportunity doesnβt mean the end; rather, it paves the way for future chances and prepares us for eventual success.
In practice
In a motivational speech about the importance of resilience in life.
Tradition does not mean a dead town; it does not mean that the living are dead but that the dead are alive. It means that it still matters what Penn did two hundred years ago or what Franklin did a hundred years ago; I never could feel in New York that it mattered what anybody did an hour ago.
I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite.
The good Bishop of Assisi expressed a sort of horror at the hard life which the Little Brothers lived at the Portiuncula, without comforts, without possessions, eating anything they could get and sleeping anyhow on the ground. St. Francis answered him with that curious and almost stunning shrewdness which the unworldly can sometimes wield like a club of stone. He said, 'If we had any possessions, we should need weapons and laws to defend them.
The ordinary scientific man is strictly a sentimentalist. He is a sentimentalist in this essential sense, that he is soaked and swept away by mere associations.
I suppose every one must have reflected how primeval and how poetical are the things that one carries in one's pocket; the pocket-knife, for instance, the type of all human tools, the infant of the sword. Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about things in my pockets. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.
Madness does not come by breaking out, but by giving in; by settling down in some dirty, little, self-repeating circle of ideas; by being tamed.
If women are not perceived to be fully within the structures of power, surely it is power that we need to redefine rather than women?
The search for scapegoats is essentially an abnegation of responsibility: it indicates an inability to assess honestly and intelligently the true nature of the problems which lie at the root of social and economic difficulties and a lack of resolve in grappling with them.
The problems of a period are the existential crises of what can be but hasn't yet been resolved; and regardless of how seriously we take that word 'resolved,' if there were not some new possibility, there would be no crisis - there would be only despair.
A very great part of the mischiefs that vex the world arises from words.
We should live totally in the face of the night and of the Evil.
Because we believe that our ethnic group, our society, our political party, our God, is better than your God, we kill each other.
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