Justice & Law Quote by Alan Rickman

To want to swim in both directions at once is to admit, with a kind of elegant impatience, that ambition isn’t a straight lane so much as a riptide. Rickman frames contradiction not as confusion but as a deliberate creative posture: the person who craves success yet “courts failure” is refusing the tidy myth that good work comes from confidence alone. The phrasing makes it tactile. “Swim” suggests exertion, breath-control, the constant risk of going under. “Court” turns failure into a flirtation, something chosen, even seduced, rather than suffered.

Coming from an actor, the line reads like a private manifesto against the careerist version of artistry. Acting is built on audition rooms, rejection, and public misfires; the job requires you to believe in your own magnetism while staying porous enough to be reshaped. Rickman’s intent seems less self-pity than self-engineering: if you only desire success, you start selecting safe roles, safe interpretations, safe emotions. Courting failure keeps you experimentally alive. It’s a way to protect the work from the marketplace’s preference for repeatable “types” and to protect yourself from the deadening comfort of being reliably good.

The subtext is also psychological: wanting both outcomes is a hedge against shame. If failure is something you pursued, it can’t entirely define you. Rickman turns that defensive move into an ethic: risk as a chosen discipline, not an accident. In a culture that treats success as proof of virtue, his line insists the opposite: failure is often the price of seriousness.