“The hero of my tale, whom I love with all the strength of my soul, whom I have tried to set forth in all his beauty, and who has always been, is, and always will be most beautiful, is—the truth.

Art is not a pleasure, a solace, or an amusement; art is a great matter. Art is an organ of human life, transmitting man’s reasonable perception into feeling.

A real work of art can only arise in the soul of an artist, occasionally as the fruit of the life he has lived

The cause of the production of real art is the artist’s inner need to express a feeling that has accumulated.”

— Leo Tolstoy “WHAT IS ART? & WHEREIN IS TRUTH IN ART? (Meditations on Aesthetics & Literature)

Failure does not exist.

It only exists to those who are more concerned with appearing successful.

In order to continue growing as a person with your respective craft, you have to set unreasonable goals. That's the point. You have to aim outside of your comfort zone and push yourself to stretch for things that you cannot yet do. As we like to say around the office, "If you know what you're doing, you aren't trying hard enough."

However, in order to actually set goals far outside your comfort zone, you have to understand and be ok with the fact that you will "fail." You won't get there the first, or second, or third time. You will fall short. You will make mistakes and it won't be a straight shot to the end.

However, "failing" to meet the expectations you set for yourself when aiming outside your comfort zone actually moves you much closer towards your goals than if you were to "achieve" something easily within reach.

Thus: Achievement, in this sense, is actually detrimental. "Failure" is the real win.

The truly successful, the innovators, the creative geniuses, the legends all share this in common. They do not care about appearing successful or as having failed. They only care about knowledge of their craft, and they are willing to go to whatever length to get it. You can't discover anything new without "failing." You can't explore different ways of doing things without "failing." You can't forge a name of your own without going off the beaten path, getting lost, and then coming back and sharing what you've found.

Nicolas Cole

I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.

Negative results are just what I want. They’re just as valuable to me as positive results. I can never find the thing that does the job best until I find the ones that don’t.

Thomas Edison

Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.

Winston S. Churchill 

Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.

Robert F. Kennedy

Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

I didn't fail the test, I just found 100 ways to do it wrong.

Benjamin Franklin

We are all failures- at least the best of us are.

J.M. Barrie

Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

Samuel Beckett

If we will be quiet and ready enough, we shall find compensation in every disappointment.

Henry David Thoreau

Winners are not afraid of losing. But losers are. Failure is part of the process of success. People who avoid failure also avoid success.

Robert T. Kiyosaki

The phoenix must burn to emerge.

Janet Fitch

How much you can learn when you fail determines how far you will go into achieving your goals.

Roy T. Bennett

There is no failure except in no longer trying.

Elbert Hubbard

The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing.

Henry Ford

I was never afraid of failure; for I would sooner fail than not be among the greatest.

John Keats

If you don’t try at anything, you can’t fail… it takes back bone to lead the life you want

Richard Yates

“Everyone knows what it is to start a piece of work, either intellectual or muscular, feeling stale… And everybody knows what it is to “warm up” to his job. The process of warming up gets particularly striking in the phenomenon known as “second wind.” On usual occasions we make a practice of stopping an occupation as soon as we meet the first effective layer (so to call it) of fatigue. We have then walked, played, or worked “enough,” so we desist. That amount of fatigue is an efficacious obstruction on this side of which our usual life is cast. But if an unusual necessity forces us to press onward a surprising thing occurs. The fatigue gets worse up to a certain critical point, when gradually or suddenly it passes away, and we are fresher than before. We have evidently tapped a level of new energy, masked until then by the fatigue-obstacle usually obeyed… In exceptional cases we may find, beyond the very extremity of fatigue-distress, amounts of ease and power that we never dreamed ourselves to own — sources of strength habitually not taxed at all, because habitually we never push through the obstruction, never pass those early critical points.”

— William James

“What’s the impulse behind art? It’s saying in whatever language is the language of your work...

If I could move you as much as it moved me … if I can move anyone a tenth as much as that moved me, if I can spark the same sense of mystery and awe and surprise as that sparked in me, well that’s why I do what I do.

What art does — maybe what it does most completely — is tell us, make us feel that what we think we know, we don’t.”

— Greil Marcus

“We are all alone, born alone, die alone, and — in spite of true romance magazines — we shall all someday look back on our lives and see that, in spite of our company, we were alone the whole way. I do not say lonely — at least, not all the time — but essentially, and finally, alone. This is what makes your self-respect so important, and i don’t see how you can respect yourself if you must look in the hearts and minds of others for your happiness.”

— William S. Burroughs