Failure is instructive. The ...

Failure is instructive. The person who really thinks learns quite as much from his failures as from his successes. Genuine ignorance is profitable because it is likely to be accompanied by humility, curiosity, and open-mindedness; whereas ability to repeat catch-phrases, can\'t terms, familiar propositions, gives the conceit of learning and coats the mind with varnish waterproof to new ideas.
Failure is instructive. The person who really thinks learns quite as much from his failures as from his successes. Genuine ignorance is profitable because it is likely to be accompanied by humility, curiosity, and open-mindedness; whereas ability to repeat catch-phrases, can't terms, familiar propositions, gives the conceit of learning and coats the mind with varnish waterproof to new ideas.

Quotes from the same author

Arriving at one point is the starting point to another.
The self is not something ready-made, but something in continuous formation through choice of action.
Conflict is the gadfly of thought. It stirs us to observation and memory. It instigates to invention. It shocks us out of sheeplike passivity, and sets us at noting and contriving.
Without some goals and some efforts to reach it, no man can live.
Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of the imagination.