“Defeat is not the worst of failures. Not to have tried is the true failure.”
Documented source
Every quote here is traced to a documented source. How we verify →
About this line
Woodberry spent his career writing about people who showed up anyway — artists, reformers, people history tends to remember only in retrospect. Phillips was one of them: a Boston lawyer who gave up his practice and his social standing to spend three 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.
The design
The words sit inside an ensō, a circle drawn in one brushstroke and left open. The stroke stops short of closing. The attempt is the whole mark.
The tee, the organic tee and the journal carry the same design.
