There is a defeat that is useful. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]

Defeat may be victory in disguise. [ Longfellow ]

Noble souls, through dust and heat.
Rise from disaster and defeat
The stronger;
And conscious still of the divine
Within them, lie on earth supine
No longer. [ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ]

But noble souls, through dust and heat,
Rise from disaster and defeat
The stronger. [ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Sifting Of Peter ]

Not in the clamor of the crowded street.
Not in the shouts and plaudits of the throng,
But in ourselves are triumph and defeat. [ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ]

Defeat is a school in which truth always grows strong. [ Ward Beecher ]

Defeat is nothing but education, nothing but the first step to something better. [ Wendell Phillips ]

The general of a large army may be defeated, but you cannot defeat the determined will of a peasant. [ Confucius ]

Liberty knows nothing but victories. Soldiers call Bunker Hill a defeat; but liberty dates from it though Warren lay dead on the field. [ Wendell Phillips ]

Emulation looks out for merits, that she may exert herself by a victory; envy spies out blemishes, that she may have another by a defeat. [ Colton ]

The power of words is immense. A well-chosen word has often sufficed to stop a flying army, to change defeat into victory, and to save an empire. [ E. de Girardin ]

Society is but the contest of a thousand little opposite interests - an eternal contest between all the vanities that clash with each other, wounded, humiliated the one by the other, and which expiate tomorrow in the disgust of a defeat the triumph of today. To live in solitude, to avoid being crushed in the surging throng, is what the world calls being a nonentity - to have no existence. Poor, miserable humanity! [ Chamfort ]