Failing

I came across a sentence in a book I was editing today. It's from an essay by Laurence Shames:

"Success is what people settle for when they can’t think of something noble enough to be worth failing at."

It seems somehow to echo a Rufus Jones quotation I used to know well, something about how an act of love that fails is just as much a part of the divine life as an act of love which succeeds.

In the margins of my Quaker Faith and Practice, I've scribbled quotations. There's one from Henri Nouwen: "Somewhere we know that without a lonely place, our actions quickly become empty gestures...In the lonely place, Jesus was made free to fail."

Three quotations about being free to fail.