Quotes
The common idea that success spoils people by making them vain, egotistic and self-complacent is erroneous; on the contrary it makes them, for the most part, humble, tolerant and kind. Failure makes people bitter and cruel.
p. 182
Cunning and deceit will every time serve a man better than force to rise from a base condition to great fortune.
Any time you see someone more successful than you are, they are doing something you aren't.
"Actually, it would have made no difference," he said.
"Then why are you sorry you didn't do it?"
"Only because I prefer a positive to a negative. In this game that we're playing, we can't win. Some kinds of failure are better than other kinds, that's all."
Social failure, artistic failure, sexual failure - they are all the same. And lack of money is at the bottom of them all.
'But man is not made for defeat,' he said. 'A man can be destroyed but not defeated.'
It is easy when you are beaten, he thought. I never knew how easy it was. And what beat you, he thought.
“Nothing,” he said aloud. “I went out too far.”
I have noticed that doctors who fail in the practice of medicine have a tendency to seek one another's company and aid in consultation. A doctor who cannot take out your appendix properly will recommend you to a doctor who will be unable to remove your tonsils with success.
Someone brought a sheet from the Jolly Cricketers; and having covered him, they carried him into that house. And there it was, on a shabby bed in a tawdry, ill-lighted bedroom, surrounded by a crowd of ignorant and excited people, broken and wounded, betrayed and unpitied, that Griffin, the first of all men to make himself invisible, Griffin, the most gifted physicist the world has ever seen, ended in infinite disaster his strange and terrible career.
It is a maxim, that those to whom everybody allows the second place have an undoubted title to the first.
Who overcomes
By force, hath overcome but half his foe.
Surer to prosper than prosperity
Could have assur'd us.
