Lewis H. Lapham Quotes

A man's life is interesting primarily when he has failed—I know well. For it is a sign that he tried to surpass himself.

Too late, I found you can't wait to become perfect, you got to go out and fall down and get up with everybody else.

We stumble and fall constantly, even when we are most enlightened.

It took me years of attempts and failed drafts before I finally wrote the elegies I needed to write.

Sometimes I lie awake at night, and ask, 'Where have I gone wrong?' Then a voice says to me, 'This is going to take more than one night.'

In football you have an adversary; in cinema that adversary is yourself.

Too often we just look at these glistening successes. Behind them in many, many cases is failure along the way, and that doesn't get put into the Wikipedia story or the bio. Yet those failures teach you every bit as much as the successes.

So you've got to test the envelope, find out what are your abilities and if you falter, pick yourself up and test it again. Otherwise, what is it all about, you know?

It is in the failures of our striving that we find ourselves, and it is then, in the rising above them and trying again, that we carry ourselves to the next level. If the runner stumbles, they get up and run again.

All of my experiences modeling, acting, doing theater, it's all in the work now. And the work freed me to transform myself.

What people call success is only preparation for the next failure.

Failure is an indispensable prerequisite of success. It is how you learn the lessons you need.

From success, you learn absolutely nothing. From failure and setbacks conclusions can be drawn. That goes for your private life as well as your career.

Man errs, till he has ceased to strive.

Failure will never stand int he way of success if you learn from it.

Embrace every challenge you have, every person you meet, every place you visit, every task you succeed at, and especially those at which you fail. You will learn from them all. You'll learn about the world at large and about other people but most important, you'll learn about yourself.

As you step every day and we're going to see challenges, we going to see failures, we should certainly learn from the failures and be gracious with our successes too as well.

It doesn't matter how far you might rise. At some point you are bound to stumble because if you’re constantly doing what we do, raising the bar. If you're constantly pushing yourself higher, higher the law of averages not to mention the Myth of Icarus predicts that you will at some point fall. And when you do I want you to know this, remember this: there is no such thing as failure. Failure is just life trying to move us in another direction.

Take risks. Fail. Pick yourself back up again. And always, always remember this: there is no adversity capable of stopping you once the choice to persevere is made.

There were decades I didn't play sober. I thought, Who would want to? But at some point, I decided that if it was important enough to me to keep doing it as art, I should do it with all my tools.

Failure means you've now learned another valuable lesson that pushes you one step closer to success.

Rereading places you at the point where it has to go on, knowing it is as good as you can get it up to there. There is always juice somewhere.

You can be shaped, or you can be broken. There is not much in between. Try to learn. Be coachable. Try to learn from everybody, especially those who fail. This is hard. ... How promising you are as a Student of the Game is a function of what you can pay attention to without running away.

There is nothing you can do except try to write it the way that it was. So you must write each day better than you possibly can and use the sorrow that you have now to make you know how the early sorrow came. And you must always remember the things you believed because if you know them they will be there in the writing and you won’t betray them. The writing is the only progress you make.

Obstacles are necessary for success because in selling, as in all careers of importance, victory comes only after many struggles and countless defeats. Yet each struggle, each defeat, sharpens your skills and strengths, your courage and your endurance, your ability and your confidence and thus each obstacle is a comrade-in-arms forcing you to become better... or quit. Each rebuff is an opportunity to move forward; turn away from them, avoid them, and you throw away your future.