Forward: I have been a coin collector since the age of eight when I discovered Indian Head pennies.   A friend sent me an erroneous article the other day about the U.S. government minting a new one dollar coin without the “In God We Trust” logo.   Since I knew about the old law regulating the production of U.S. money, I responded with the correct information about a minting error.   However, the mistake got me to musing about failure/success which are the two sides of the same coin of life.   This HTML is my creation in response to the suicide of a close childhood friend and the false conception about our U.S. money.

I dedicate this work to Charles Bassett who seems to have suffered that crisis sometimes termed “A Mid-Life Crisis” with a fatal determination.   And I relate this story in honor of Charlie's success as one of life's players at Murray High School.   It was the end of the Physical Education class one cloudy fall day.   We boys had been playing tag football for a number of days on the lower football field.   For those that don't know, we played in gym shorts with a strip of cloth hanging from the back of our shorts.   The opposing players would stop the play by grabbing the strip/tag out of the pants of the player running with the football.

It was the last game of the season.   I was quarterback for our team which had the best win/loss record among the teams.   The gymnastics coach decided that the other teams should pick their best players for an all-star team to play against us.   Jim Ullyot was the all-star quarterback.   We were tied at the end of the gym period and my team had possession for one last play.   We were a long ways from the end-zone.   In the huddle I told everyone that I was going to pass high into the end-zone.   If anyone caught the ball and had his cloth pulled, he would already be in the end-zone and would have already scored the winning touchdown.   The only problem was that I was going to have to run around until everyone on my team had a chance to get in the end-zone.

The ball was snapped.   All of our players made a dash for the end-zone.   I ran around until they got in position and I tossed the ball as high as I could.   As the ball fell into the group of players, Charlie Bassett, one of the smallest members of our team, jumped high out of the middle of the crowd and caught the ball.   Charlie went on to graduate as one of the top students at Murray High School.   Rest in peace my childhood friend and fellow traveler through life's successes and failures.   “In God We Trust” is still on our money and this old veteran has always remembered Charles Bassett.

Failure/Success Are Both Part of Life.

Edward Bono, Guru of creative thinking, had this to say about failure: “It is better to have enough ideas for some of them to be wrong, than to be always right by having no ideas at all.”

Anais Nin: “Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.”

Ashley Montagu: “The deepest human defeat suffered by human beings is constituted by the difference between what one was capable of becoming and what one has in fact become.”

Corita Kent: “Love the moment. Flowers grow out of dark moments. Therefore, each moment is vital. It affects the whole. Life is a succession of such moments and to live each, is to succeed.”

Elaine Maxwell: “My will shall shape the future. Whether I fail or succeed shall be no man's doing but my own. I am the force; I can clear any obstacle before me or I can be lost in the maze. My choice; my responsibility; win or lose, only I hold the key to my destiny.”

Elbert Hubbard: “A failure is a man who has blundered but is not capable of cashing in on the experience.”

Elizabeth Drew: “The torment of human frustration, whatever its immediate cause, is the knowledge that the self is in prison, its vital force and "mangled mind" leaking away in lonely, wasteful self-conflict.”

George Bernard Shaw: “A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable but more useful than a life spent in doing nothing.”

George Bernard Shaw: “My reputation grows with every failure.”

Havelock Ellis: “It is on our failures that we base a new and different and better success.”

Herbert B. Swope: “I cannot give you the formula for success, but I can give you the formula for failure: which is: Try to please everybody.”

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis: “If you bungle raising your children, I don't think whatever else you do well matters very much.”

James Russell Lowell: “Mishaps are like knives, that either serve us or cut us, as we grasp them by the blade or the handle.”

Jessamyn West: “It is very easy to forgive others their mistakes; it takes more grit and gumption to forgive them for having witnessed your own.”

John Dewey: “Failure is instructive. The person who really thinks learns quite as much from his failures as from his successes.”

Kin Hubbard: “You won't skid if you stay in a rut.”

Laurence J. Peter: “There are two kinds of failures: those who thought and never did, and those who did and never thought.”

Lloyd Jones (adapted): “Those who try to do something and fail are infinitely better than those who try nothing and succeed.”

Madame de Stael: “The mystery of existence is the connection between our faults and our misfortunes.”

May Sarton: “A garden is always a series of losses set against a few triumphs, like life itself.”

Mohandas K. Gandhi: “Freedom is not worth having if it does not connote freedom to err.”

Oscar Wilde: “Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes.”

Paulo Coelho: “But there is suffering in life, and there are defeats. No one can avoid them. But it's better to lose some of the battles in the struggles for your dreams than to be defeated without ever knowing what you're fighting for.”

Pearl S. Buck: “Every great mistake has a halfway moment, a split second when it can be recalled and perhaps remedied.”

Peter Drucker: “There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.”

Rabindranath Tagore: “We read the world wrong and say that it deceives us.”

Ralph Ellison: “Life is to be lived, not controlled, and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Do not waste yourself in rejection, nor bark against the bad, but chant the beauty of the good.”

Robert F. Kennedy: “Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.”

Robert Frost: “The best way out is always through.”

Samuel Goldwyn: “You've got to take the bitter with the sour.”

Samuel Smiles: “It is a mistake to suppose that men succeed through success; they much oftener succeed through failures. Precept, study, advice, and example could never have taught them so well as failure has done.”

Samuel Smiles: “We learn wisdom from failure much more than from success. We often discover what will do, by finding out what will not do; and probably he who never made a mistake never made a discovery.”

Theodore Roosevelt (From a speech given in Paris at the Sorbonne in 1910): “It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes short again and again, who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spends himself in a worthy cause, who at best knows achievement and who at the worst if he fails at least fails while daring greatly so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.”

Thomas Alva Edison: “Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.”

Thomas Alva Edison: “I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.”

Thomas Fuller: “No garden is without its weeds.”

Wallace Stegner: “Most things break, including hearts. The lessons of life amount not to wisdom, but to scar tissue and callus.”

William M. Winans: “Not doing more than the average is what keeps the average down.”

William Saroyan: “Good people are good because they've come to wisdom through failure. We get very little wisdom from success, you know.”

Winston Churchill: “Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.”

Winston Churchill: “Courage is going from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm.”

“If you can’t make a mistake, you can’t make anything. ”

“Try again. Fail again. Fail better. ”

“If you are not big enough to lose, you are not big enough to win.”

“There are defeats more triumphant than victories. ”

“The only real failure in life is the failure to try.”

“No man is a failure who is enjoying life.”

“Men succeed when they realize that their failures are the preparation for their victories.”

“There are no failures - just experiences and your reactions to them.”

“Success builds character, failure reveals it”

“Failure changes for the better, success for the worse.”

“You don’t drown by falling in the water; you drown by staying there.”

“Failure is only a temporary change in direction to set you straight for your next success.”

“Our business in life is not to succeed, but to continue to fail in good spirits.”

“If there exists no possibility of failure, then victory is meaningless.”

“One must be a god to be able to tell successes from failures without making a mistake.”

“There are no secrets to success. It is the result of preparation, hard work, and learning from failure.”

“Life’s real failure is when you do not realize how close you were to success when you gave up.”

“Failure is the tuition you pay for success.”

“A man may fall many times, but he won’t be a failure until he says that someone pushed him.”

“Failure is not falling down but refusing to get up.”

“You cannot do wrong without suffering wrong.”

“He who fails to plan, plans to fail.”

“Notice the difference between what happens when a man says to himself, “I have failed three times,” and what happens when he says, “I am a failure.”

“Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.”

No One Is A Failure Who Has Friends

“A part of you has grown in me, and so you see, it's you and me together forever. Never apart, maybe in distance, but never in heart.”

“Friendship improves happiness, and abates misery, by doubling our joy, and dividing our grief.”

“Friendship is the only rose without thorns.”

“Friends are forever, you might lose them but you'll never forget them.”

“A ring is round it has no end and that is how long I will be your friend"

“If I'm in heaven and your not there, I'd carve your name in golden chairs, for all the angels there to see, that I love you and you love me. If your not there on judgement day, I'll know you've gone the other way, so just to prove our love is true, I'd go to hell to be with you.”

“A friend is a shoulder to lean on, an ear to listen, and a heart to comfort.”

“There is a friend who sticks closer than a brother.”

“There can be no friendship without confidence, and no confidence without integrity.”

“In every friend we lose a part of ourselves, and the best part.”

“Depth of friendship does not depend upon length of acquaintance.”

“He who covers a transgression seeks love, but he who repeats a matter separates friends.”

“Friendship is the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person, having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words.

“True Friendship is like sound health, the value of it is seldom known until it is lost.”

“Friendship is one of the sweetest joys of life. Many might have failed beneath the bitterness of their trial had they not found a friend.”

“A blessed thing it is for any man or woman to have a friend, one human soul whom we can trust utterly, who knows the best and worst of us, and who loves us in spite of all our faults.”

“We cannot tell the precise moment when friendship is formed. As in filling a vessel drop by drop, there is at last a drop which makes it run over; so in a series of kindnesses there is at last one which makes the heart run over.”

“A friend is one who walks in when the rest of the world walks out.”

“A friend is one to whom one can pour out all the contents of one's heart, chaff and grain together, knowing that the gentlest of hands will take and sift it, keep what is worth keeping, and, with the breath of kindness, blow the rest away.”

“As my friend, you are...A sponge when I need to soak up sorrow. A mop when I've made a mess. A signpost when I'm searching. A tear when I need to cry. A song when I need to dance.”

“A friend is someone we turn to when our spirits need a lift, A friend is someone we treasure for our friendship is a gift. A friend is someone who fills our lives with beauty, joy, and grace And makes the whole world we live in a better and happier place.”

“Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.”

“A friend is one who believes in you when you have ceased to believe in yourself.”

“Every person is a new door to a different world.”

“Truth and tears clear the way to a deep and lasting friendship.”

“What is a friend? A single soul in two bodies.”

“Friendship is like a violin; the music may stop now and then, but the strings will last forever.”

“Friendship happens in that special moment when someone reaches out to another, trusts, comforts, believes in another, and makes a special difference that no one else can make.”

“Fate chooses our relatives, we choose our friends.”

“Friendship is Love without its wings!"

“Friendship is genuine when two friends can enjoy each others company without speaking a word to one another.”

“Use friendliness but do not use your friends.”

“True friendship is a plant of slow growth, and must undergo and withstand the shocks of adversity before it is entitled to the appellation.”

“Forsake not an old friend, for the new is not comparable unto him. A new friend is as new wine: when it is old thou shalt drink it with pleasure.”

“True friendship comes when silence between two people is comfortable.”

“Friendship! mysterious cement of the soul, sweet'ner of life, and solder of society.”

“Friendship makes prosperity brighter, while it lightens adversity by sharing its griefs and anxieties.”

“Friendship demands the ability to do without it.”