Success Quote by Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Failure gets cast as a kind of moral deficit, but Lindbergh flips the valuation: the brave act is the attempt, not the outcome. The line works because it refuses the cultural accounting system that treats success as proof of character and failure as evidence of weakness. By pairing “tried and failed” with “tried and succeeded,” she yokes two experiences we usually separate into winners and losers, then insists the internal cost is comparable. Courage, in her framing, isn’t a medal pinned on the triumphant; it’s the willingness to expose yourself to risk, judgment, and the stubborn unpredictability of the world.

The intent is quietly corrective. Lindbergh isn’t romanticizing failure or pretending it doesn’t sting. She’s arguing that the decisive moment happens before the result, when a person chooses uncertainty over safety. The subtext is especially pointed for anyone trained to perform competence: the fear isn’t just the setback, it’s the public narrative that attaches to it. “Failed” isn’t a private verb; it’s a social label, one that can shrink future possibilities by making people risk-averse.

Context matters. Lindbergh wrote from within a life lived under intense public scrutiny, where reputation could eclipse interior reality. As a writer and thinker navigating expectations around femininity, partnership, and ambition, she understood how easily society rewards the polished outcome and punishes the messy process. This sentence is a small act of resistance: it relocates dignity from the scoreboard to the act of stepping onto the field.