Quotes about Failings

If I were your enemy, I'd constantly remind you of your past mistakes and poor choices. I'd want to keep you burdened by shame and guilt, in hopes that you'll feel incapacitated by your many failings and see no point in even trying again. I'd work to convince you that you've had your chance and blown it—that your God may be able to forgive some people for some things, but not you . . . not for this.

Critics of home-schooling hate the idea of home-schooling and the freedom from the government school monopoly that it represents. Their attacks on academic success are just a transparent attempt to divert attention from their own failings.

On the other hand, she was disproportionately indulgent towards the failings of men, and was often heard to say that these were natural.

A sense of our inadequacies and failings, a recognition that we could be better people than we usually are, is one of the forces for moral growth and improvement in our society. An appropriate sense of guilt makes people try to be better. But an excessive sense of guilt, a tendency to blame ourselves for things which are clearly not our fault, robs us of our self-esteem and perhaps of our capacity to grow and to act.

The worst of the curses that people inflict on us, the real abuse and terror, can't be forgotten or undone, but they can be put to good use in the new life that one has taken up. It is a kind of death; the lid closes on what went before. But the past is not denied. And we are still here, with all of our talents, gifts, and failings, our strengths and weaknesses. All the baggage comes along: nothing wasted, nothing lost.

Mary's life was a perfect imitation of Jesus. She was humble, hidden, sorrowful and afflicted, but she also knew joys that never entered the heart of man. She is all things to all men that she might understand their failings, though she failed not.

She takes after Laura in that respect: the same tendency towards absolutism, the same refusal to compromise, the same scorn for the grosser human failings. To get away with that, you have to be beautiful. Otherwise it seems mere peevishness.

This was evidently the place Wilberforce had come to, a place of such guilt before God, of such misery at his own failings, that nothing short of being publicly pilloried would do. And so now he unburdened himself somewhat by declaring himself to his friends. One can only imagine what, in this overemotional state, he might have written to them, and one can only imagine what they would have thought upon reading his declaration.

I believe our situation in present-day America is grave, but this book is not meant to be discouraging. In fact, by way of encouragement before we consider what we have forgotten and what we must do, let's first acknowledge that despite our difficulties and considerable failings, much of America's promise has already been fulfilled, and spectacularly so, far beyond what anyone might have imagined.

It does not matter as much what bad is in us as what is good; not what corruptions remain but how we regard them; not what our particular failings are so much as what the thread and tenor of our lives are, for Christ's displeasure of that which is wrong in us does not turn to his hatred of us but to his victory over all of our weaknesses.