unsuccessfulness

Some 350 years ago, the chemist Robert Boyle penned essays on “the unsuccessfulness of experiments”.

The author of How to Lose Friends and Alienate People has made a career out of unsuccessfulness, and by the look of things he's done all right out of it – he's got a nice wife who finds him amusing and a big house in west London with an enviable shed-office at the bottom of the garden.

Whoever considers the revolutions of learning, and the various questions of greater or less importance, upon which wit and reason have exercised their powers, must lament the unsuccessfulness of inquiry, and the slow advances of truth, when he reflects that great part of the labour of every writer is only the destruction of those that went before him.

You are not," said she, "to confound impatience with resentment, or to suppose, that I charge you with negligence, because I repine at your unsuccessfulness.

While they think themselves under a necessity of reasoning, they cannot but show the force of a just argument, by the unsuccessfulness of their endeavours to confute it, and the propriety of an useful and salutary motion, by the slight objections which they raise against it.