You were made by God and for God, and until you understand that, life will never make sense.

Ultimately, all human activities have as their goal the realization of happiness. Why, then, have we ended up producing the opposite result? Could the underlying cause be our failure to correctly understand the true nature of happiness?

As soon as I did my first five minutes of stand-up I knew that I would rather be a failure at comedy than a success in marketing.

As long as the G.O.P., led by its increasingly visible women, continues to insist that the problem is not their policies but women's failure to understand their own lives and interests, the gender gap won't go away.

I understand the harsh feelings and sentiments from my opponents and their supporters because I myself have been defeated twice in my political life in the past and I understand very well it is hard to accept your own failure.

I can understand failure: I've failed loads of times in my life; it's not a problem. I've never feared it, because it's a part of life.

Nixon's grand mistake was his failure to understand that Americans are forgiving, and if he had admitted error early and apologized to the country, he would have escaped.

Right from my childhood, I have believed in a Supreme Power. I don't know whether it has form, or it is formless. I am a high school dropout. How come life has given me so much? It's not my intelligence, it's not my abilities. This understanding makes me scared even in success. I don't own my success. Neither do I own my failure.

For decades, conventional wisdom in the United States held that it was only a matter of time before China would become more liberal, first economically and then politically. We could not have been more wrong - a miscalculation that stands as the greatest failure of U.S. foreign policy since the 1930s.

I've struggled a lot in my life with feeling like a failure. I lived in a 'prison of perfectionism,' holding myself to a standard I couldn't possibly live up to. Then I became a mom, and all of a sudden, there arose even more opportunities for failure.

By far the most important factor in the success or failure of any school, far more important than tests or standards or business-model methods of accountability, is simply attracting the best-educated, most exciting young people into urban schools and keeping them there.

The Bush Administration's failure to be consistently involved in helping Israel achieve peace with the Palestinians has been both wrong for our friendship with Israel, as well as badly damaging to our standing in the Arab world.

Anything less than gold is a failure to me. It's extreme pressure, but I hold myself to a high standard.

Without failure there is no sweetness in success. There's no understanding of it.

The reason was the failure of both Japan and China to understand each other and the inability of America and the European powers to sympathize, without prejudice, with the peoples of East Asia.

Everyone understands the European Union is a failure. It has not kept any of its promises - in particular about prosperity, security - and, worst of all, has put us under a guardianship.

'No one can make you successful; the will to success comes from within.' I've made this my motto. I've internalized it to the point of understanding that the success of my actions and/or endeavors doesn't depend on anyone else, and that includes a possible failure.

He who refuses to stoop, who cannot be bribed by the promise of success or the fear of failure - who walks the highway of the right, and in disaster stands erect, is the only victor.

Failure is central to engineering. Every single calculation that an engineer makes is a failure calculation. Successful engineering is all about understanding how things break or fail.

In a crowded marketplace, fitting in is a failure. In a busy marketplace, not standing out is the same as being invisible.

Testing leads to failure, and failure leads to understanding.

We need to accept that we won't always make the right decisions, that we'll screw up royally sometimes - understanding that failure is not the opposite of success, it's part of success.

I've come to believe that all my past failure and frustration were actually laying the foundation for the understandings that have created the new level of living I now enjoy.

You have to understand that PTSD has to be an event that you experience, a very traumatic event. And actually, there is evidence that brain chemistry changes during this event in certain individuals where it's imprinted indelibly forever and there's an emotion associated with this which triggers the condition.