Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Quotes

All of us failed to match our dreams of perfection.

I did the best I could, and in some arenas, my best was not good enough. I've made some bad choices.

The longing to produce great inspirations didn't produce anything but more longing.

All of us failed to match our dreams of perfection. So I rate us on the base of our splendid failure to do the impossible.

I constantly experience failure in that my work is never as good as I want it to be. So I live with failure.

All I can do will only ever be a faint image of what I see and my success will always be less than my failure or perhaps equal to the failure.

There are so many people who try so hard and have such big dreams, and it doesn't happen for them.

I have to stop watching the Olympics. It just reminds me that I forgot to try really hard at something.

I'm a perfectly equipped failure.

Oh, the secret life of man and woman--dreaming how much better we would be than we are if we were somebody else or even ourselves, and feeling that our estate has been unexploited to its fullest.

There are always things that I think I wish I could have done better.

Why did I keep hitching myself to dreams as big as that Montana sky? I was like Rooster Jim's chickens, with no way to fly that high.

Once again, I've been thwarted by the massive difference between my vision of the successful me and the me I'm currently stuck with.

Let us acknowledge it wiser, if not more sagacious to follow out one's day-dream to its natural consummation, although if the vision has been worth the having, it is certain never to be consummated otherwise than by a failure.

Some of you may be perfectly happy with mediocrity. Some of you will get nothing but heartbreak. Some of you will be heralded as geniuses and become huge. Of course, all of you think that one describes you...hence the delusion necessary to push on.

I don't like to be second in anything. I was trying, I just wasn't going anywhere.

I have dreamed much and have done very little.

Dreams fulfilled are imperfect.

And the dream that our mind had sketched in haste Shall others continue, but never complete. For none upon earth can achieve his scheme; The best as the worst are futile here: We wake at the self-same point of the dream, All is here begun, and finished elsewhere.

Many men and women spend their lives in unsuccessful attempts to spin the flax God sends them upon a wheel they can never use.

When people try to do what they can not do, they wish to give up.

All I wanted to do was be a hero... But do I ever get to be a hero? All I ever get to be is the stupid goat!" "Don't be discouraged, Charlie Brown... In this life we live, there are always some bitter pills to be swallowed..." "If it's all the same with you, I'd rather not renew my perscription!

I think I'm what they call a never-was.

I used to be a chemical-engineering student, but I started studying acting, and I went for a cattle call, up against hundreds of people. They tore me down because I was too tall. They said "How tall are you?" "6'5"." "Next."

Reaching for the stars, perfectionists may end up clutching at air.