QUOTE NOTE: The Fires of Spring is a heavily autobiographical novel, and I have always regarded this passage as something of a personal credo of the author. James Michener, the voice of the narrator, in The Fires of Spring: A Novel (1949) If they fail in this, it doesn’t matter much what else they find: Money, position, fame, many loves, revenge are all of little consequence, and when the tickets are collected at the end of the ride they are tossed into the bin marked FAILURE. This attributed quotation from Foster’s quotation anthology was given legitimacy when it appeared in a 1936 article in the “Saturday Review of Books and Art” in the New York Times.įor this is the journey that men make: to find themselves. Second, the popular version above is a slight abridgment of the original phrasing that was attributed to Keats-but without source information-in Elon Foster’s New Cyclopaedia of Prose Illustrations (1877):Īlbeit failure in any cause produces a correspondent misery in the soul, yet it is, in a sense, the highway to success, inasmuch as every discovery of what is false leads us to seek earnestly after what is true, and every fresh experience points out some form of error which we shall afterward carefully eschew. First, it has not been found in the writings of Keats, or reported in biographies or other accounts of his life.

John Keats, attributedĮRROR ALERT: This quotation has become extremely popular, but it is in error in two ways. Failure is, in a sense, the highway to success, inasmuch as every discovery of what is false leads us to seek earnestly after what is true.

Mister Splitfoot by Helen McCloy