Pyrrhic Victory Quotes

We are beginning to learn that intangibles have more specific gravity than we suspected, that ideas can generate as much forward thrust as Atlas missiles. We may win a victory in exploring the infinities of outer space, but it will be a Pyrrhic victory unless we can also explore the infinities of our inner spirit. We have supersensitive thermographs to show us the slightest variations in skin temperature. No devices can teach us the irrelevance of skin color. WE can transplant a heart from one person to another in a brilliant feat of surgical virtuosity. Now we are ready to try it the hard way: transplanting understanding, compassion, and love from one person to another. ~ Lloyd Alexander

The exegesis Fat labored on month after month struck me as a Pyrrhic victory if there ever was one
in this case an attempt by a beleaguered mind to make sense out of the inscrutable. Perhaps this is the bottom line to mental illness: incomprehensible events occur; your life becomes a bin for hoax-like fluctuations of what used to be reality. And not only that
as if that weren't enough
but you, like Fat, ponder forever over these fluctuations in an effort to order them into a coherency, when in fact the only sense they make is the sense you impose on them, out of necessity to restore everything into shapes and processes you can recognize. The first thing to depart in mental illness is the familiar. And what takes its place is bad news because not only can you not understand it, you also cannot communicate it to other people. The madman experiences something, but what it is or where it comes from he does not know. ~ Philip K. Dick

Any momentary triumph you think you have gained through argument is really a Pyrrhic victory. The resentment and ill will you stir up is stronger and lasts longer than any momentary change of opinion. It is much more powerful to get others to agree with you through your actions, without saying a word. Demonstrate, do not explicate. ~ Robert Greene

Technically it was a victory for the British, who attacked the patriot fortifications but a Pyrrhic victory if ever there was: out of 2,200 British soldiers 1,034 were killed or wounded, including one in nine of all the officers the British lost in the whole war. ~ Geoffrey Wheatcroft

For upon reaching his destination, a man with a past full of misfortunes can both taste the bitter drops of his sorrow and grin in triumph despite them. In reaching the desired end of his voyage there is an outbreak of joy. Even in a pyrrhic victory, a man of past and present tragedies experiences the sweetness of that unfamiliar emotion. ~ Asaad Almohammad

My net worth is the market value of holdings less the tax payable upon sale. The liability is just as real as the asset unless the value of the asset declines (ouch), the asset is given away (no comment), or I die with it. The latter course of action would appear to at least border on a Pyrrhic victory. ~ Warren Buffett

The woman thought a moment; her voice came up through her bandaged face afflicted with subterranean melodies: "I'm sharing the fate of the women of my time who challenged men to battle." "To your vast surprise it was just like all battles," he answered, adopting her formal diction. "Just like all battles." She thought this over. "You pick a set-up, or else win a Pyrrhic victory, or you're wrecked and ruined - you're a ghostly echo from a broken wall. ~ Anonymous

A victory over others is a Pyrrhic victory; however, a victory over himself is the only truth. ~ Kristian Goldmund Aumann

Ferguson argued that British involvement in World War I was unnecessary, far too costly in lives and money for any advantage gained, and a Pyrrhic victory that in many ways contributed to the end of the Empire. ~ David Harsanyi

Another such victory over the Romans, and we are undone. ~ Pyrrhus

Walking a short way back along the embankment, almost to where the cross stood, Smiley took another look at the bridge, as if to establish whether anything had changed, but clearly it had not, and though the wind appeared a little stronger, the snow was still swirling in all directions. ~ John Le Carre

I've never considered the possibility of defeat. I've never planned for it. That's the job for those people who plan for such things. My job is to only plan for success ... victory; it has my complete focus. ~ Spuds Crawford

Wars are fought to gain a certain objective. War itself is not the objective; victory is not the objective; you fight to remove the obstruction that comes in the way of your objective. If you let victory become the end in itself then you've gone astray and forgotten what you were originally fighting about. ~ Jawaharlal Nehru

The path to victory is the path you're on. It becomes a path to victory the moment you decide it does. ~ Scott Hamilton

The one victory we can ever call complete will be that one which proclaims that there is not one slave or one drunkard on the face of God's green earth. ~ Abraham Lincoln

They dispute not in order to find or even to seek Truth, but for victory, and to appear the more learned and strenuous upholders of a contrary opinion. Such persons should be avoided by all who have not a good breastplate of patience. ~ Giordano Bruno

A reactionary is anyone who is not prepared to buy his victory at any price. ~ Nicolas Gomez Davila

Victories are easy and cheap. The only victories worth anything are those achieved through hard work and dedication. ~ Henry Ward Beecher

And everybody praised the Duke Who this great fight did win. "But what good came of it at last?" Quoth little Peterkin. "Why, that I cannot tell," said he, "But 'twas a famous victory." ~ Robert Southey

I tell you," went on Syme with passion, "that every time a train comes in I feel that it has broken past batteries of besiegers, and that man has won a battle against chaos. You say contemptuously that when one has left Sloane Square one must come to Victoria. I say that one might do a thousand things instead, and that whenever I really come there I have the sense of hairbreadth escape. And when I hear the guard shout out the word 'Victoria,' it is not an unmeaning word. It is to me the cry of a herald announcing conquest. It is to me indeed 'Victoria'; it is the victory of Adam. ~ G.K. Chesterton

In war, indeed, there can be no substitute for victory. ~ Douglas MacArthur

I hope that in victory we are more grateful than proud. ~ David Brooks

If it is nothingness that awaits us, let us make an injustice of it, let us fight against destiny, even without hope of victory. ~ Miguel De Unamuno

Faith and daily life, faith and work-these are not separate things. They are one and the same. To think of them as separate-that faith is faith, and work is work-is theoretical faith. Based on the recognition that work and faith are one and the same, we should put one hundred percent of our energy into our jobs and one hundred percent into our faith, too. When we resolve to do this, we enter the path of victory in life. Faith means to show irrefutable proof of victory amid the realities of society and in our own daily lives. ~ Daisaku Ikeda

V-day is a movement: an organized effort to finally end violence against women.
V-Day is a vision: we see a civilization where women live in freedom and safety.
V-Day is a spirit: affirming that life should be live creating and thriving rather than surviving or recovering from terrible atrocities.
V-Day is a catalyst: by raising wide public awareness of the issue, it will reinvigorates efforts already under way and commence new initiatives in publicity, education, and law.
V-Day is a vital ongoing process: we proclaim Valentine's Day as V'day until the violence against women stops, and the it will become Victory Day. ~ Eve Ensler

Sonia Gandhi and her son play an important part in all of this. Their job is to run the Department of Compassion and Charisma and to win elections. They are allowed to make (and also to take credit for) decisions which appear progressive but are actually tactical and symbolic, meant to take the edge off popular anger and allow the big ship to keep on rolling. (The best example of this is the rally that was organised for Rahul Gandhi to claim victory for the cancellation of Vedanta's permission to mine Niyamgiri for bauxite - a battle that the Dongria Kondh tribe and a coalition of activists, local as well as international, have been fighting for years. At the rally, Rahul Gandhi announced that he was "a soldier for the tribal people". He didn't mention that the economic policies of his party are predicated on the mass displacement of tribal people. Or that every other bauxite "giri" - hill - in the neighbourhood was having the hell mined out of it, while this "soldier for the tribal people" looked away. Rahul Gandhi may be a decent man. But for him to go around talking about the two Indias - the "Rich India" and the "Poor India" - as though the party he represents has nothing to do with it, is an insult to everybody's intelligence, including his own.)

The division of labour between politicians who have a mass base and win elections, and those who actually run the country but either do not need to (judges and bureaucrats) or have been freed of the constraint of winn ~ Arundhati Roy

Events in America show the extent to which democracy there is fuelled by populism - Barack Obama's victory is a manifestation not of Washington's need for change, but of America's. That is not how democracy works in England. ~ Andrew O'Hagan

Jehovah, the great and mighty God of Israel, protects and gives His warriors victory over His enemies, Selah."

~R. Alan Woods [2013] ~ R. Alan Woods

Hate's ultimate victory is to make us dependent on it. ~ Marty Rubin

Victory is the normal experience of a Christian; defeat should be the abnormal experience. ~ Watchman Nee

Not Every Battle You Lose is considered as a loss sometimes this loss leads to the best victory, You just have to be Patient and to take advantage Of every unexpected event that happened during your struggle your own war . ~ Ahmed

If the amount of times we get up is just one less than the amount of times that we've been knocked down, then we're spending our lives lying down. ~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

But however minimal, however threadbare, it (collective memory) is ballast of a kind. We all need that seven-eighths of the iceberg, the ballast of the past, a general past, the place from which we came.
That is why history should be taught in school. to all children, as much of it as possible. If you have no sense of the past, no access to historical narrative, you are afloat, untethered; you cannot see yourself as a part of the narrative, you cannot place yourself within a context. You will not have an understanding of time, and a respect for memory and its subtle victory over the remorselessness of time. ~ Penelope Lively

To the girls that gave me a hard time in high school. I want to say thank you. This is a victory for all the nerds out there. ~ Amy Van Dyken

A warrior is always aware of what is worth fighting for. He does not go into combat over things that do not concern him, and he never wastes his time over provocations. A warrior accepts defeat. He does not treat it as a matter of indifference, nor does he attempt to transform it into a victory. The pain of defeat is bitter to him; he suffers at indifference and becomes
desperate with loneliness. After all this has passed, he licks his wounds
and begins everything anew. A warrior knows that war is made of many
battles; he goes on. Tragedies do happen. We can discover the reason, blame others, imagine how different our lives would be had they not occurred. But none of that is important: they did occur, and so be it. From there onward we must put aside the fear that they awoke in us and begin to rebuild. ~ Paulo Coelho

The odds seemed pretty long from where I was standing, certainly, but then again, I reminded myself, the history of science was in many ways an almanac of highly unlikely victories. ~ Mark O'Connell

Or there, in the clay-baked piedmont of the South, that lean and tan-faced boy who sprawls there in the creaking chair among admiring cronies before the open doorways of the fire department, and tells them how he pitched the team to shut-out victory to-day. What visions burn, what dreams possess him, seeker of the night? The packed stands of the stadium, the bleachers sweltering with their unshaded hordes, the faultless velvet of the diamond, unlike the clay-balked outfields down in Georgia. The mounting roar of eighty thousand voices and Gehrig coming up to bat, the boy himself upon the pitching mound, the lean face steady as a hound's; then the nod, the signal, and the wind-up, the rawhide arm that snaps and crackles like a whip, the small white bullet of the blazing ball, its loud report in the oiled pocket of the catcher's mitt, the umpire's thumb jerked upwards, the clean strike. ~ Thomas Wolfe

Death appears as the harsh victory of the law of our ancestors of the dimension of our becoming. It is a fact that, as productivity increases, each succeeding generation becomes smaller in stature. The defeat of our fathers is revisited upon us as the limits of our world. Yes, structure is human, it is the monumentalization of congealed sweat, sweat squeezed from old exploitation and represented as nature, the world we inhabit, the objective ground. We do not, in our insect-like comings and going, make the immediate world in which we live, we do not make a contribution, on the contrary we are set in motion by it; a generation will pass before what we have done, as an exploited class, will seep through as an effect of objectivity. (Our wealth is laid down in heaven.) The structure of the world has been built by the dead, they were paid in wages, and when the wages were spent and they were in the ground, what they had made continued to exist, these cities, roads and factories are their calcified bones. They had nothing but their wages to show for what they had done, who they were and what they did has been cancelled out. But what they made has continued into our present, their burial and decay is our present. This is the definition of class hatred. We are no closer now to rest, to freedom, to communism than they were, their sacrifice has brought us nothing, what they did counted for nothing, we have inherited nothing, but they did produce value, they did make the world in which ~ Frére Dupont

Any philosophy, whether of a religious or political nature - and sometimes the dividing line is hard to determine - fights less for the negative destruction of the opposing ideology than for the positive promotion of its own. Hence its struggle is less defensive than offensive. It therefore has the advantage even in determining the goal, since this goal represents the victory of its own idea, while, conversely,it is hard to determine when the negative aim of the destruction of a hostile doctrine may be regarded as achieved and assured. For this reason alone, the philosophy's offensive will be more systematic and also more powerful than the defensive against a philosophy, since here, too, as always, the attack and not the defence makes the decision. The fight against a spiritual power with methods of violence remains defensive, however, until the sword becomes the support,the herald and disseminator, of a new spiritual doctrine. ~ Adolf Hitler

If we know that our own men are in a condition to attack, but are unaware that the enemy is not open to attack, we have gone only halfway towards victory. ~ Sun Tzu

In the tabernacle of grace, all your obstacles will be tackled. Wake up to see it happen live. You are victorious in all things! ~ Israelmore Ayivor

Men of success meet with tragedy. It was the will of God that I won the Olympics, and it was the will of God that I met with my accident. I accepted those victories as I accept this tragedy. I have to accept both circumstances as facts of life and live happily. ~ Abebe Bikila

Don't focus on the victory, focus on the task. ~ Erik Spoelstra

There are no victories at discount prices. ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower

Nature always begins by resisting the artist, but he who really takes it seriously does not allow that resistance to put him off his stride; on the contrary, it is that much more of a stimulus to fight for victory. ~ Vincent Van Gogh

A bloody and complete victory has sometimes yielded no more than the possession of the field and the loss of ten thousand men has sometimes been sufficient to destroy, in a single day, the work of ages. ~ Edward Gibbon

What coward would not fight when he is sure of victory? ~ Richard Sibbes

Above all, don't dwell on yesterday's victory. If your focus is on what's behind you rather than what's ahead, you will crash. ~ John C. Maxwell