George Edward Woodberry
“Defeat is not the worst of failures. Not to have tried is the true failure.”
George Edward Woodberry, Wendell Phillips: The Faith of an American (1912), p. 45
Documented source
Attribution
George Edward Woodberry
Source
George Edward Woodberry, Wendell Phillips: The Faith of an American (1912), p. 45
In full
“Defeat is not the worst of failures. Not to have tried is the true failure.”
Status
Public domain in the United States
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About this line
Woodberry spent his career watching people who showed up anyway — artists, reformers, people history tends to remember only in retrospect. Phillips was one of them: a Boston lawyer who walked away from a comfortable career to spend four decades arguing against slavery, getting shouted off stages and worse, and never stopping. Woodberry was not writing a eulogy. He was drawing a conclusion from evidence: that the verdict history renders on a life has nothing to do with whether it won, and everything to do with whether it tried.
Why we carry this line
Not trying is the real failure — a verdict, not a pep talk. From a writer I’d never met until this line found me.
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