Failure Quotes

Our best successes often come after our greatest disappointments.

A person who doubts himself is like a man who would enlist in the ranks of his enemies and bear arms agains himself. He makes his failure certain by himself being the first person to be convinced of it.

Destiny: A tyrant's authority for crime and a fool's excuse for failure.

If you're doing your best, you won't have any time to worry about failure.

A man can fail many times, but he isn't a failure until he begins to blame somebody else.

A man can get discouraged many times but he is not a failure until he begins to blame somebody else and stops trying.

Failure, it is thought, is what sells, and what people want to hear and read about. I am not so sure.

At the end of the day I have always seen the end of my relationships as a personal failure. There is nothing ever pretty in saying goodbye.

The paranoiac is the exact image of the ruler. The only difference is their position in the world. One might even think the paranoiac the more impressive of the two because he is sufficient unto himself and cannot be shaken by failure.

Indecision and delays are the parents of failure.

At the root of many a woman's failure to become a great cook lies her failure to develop a workmanlike regard for knives.

Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor.

Develop success from failures. Discouragement and failure are two of the surest stepping stones to success.

Once you start a working on something, don't be afraid of failure and don't abandon it. People who work sincerely are the happiest.

Success is often achieved by those who don't know that failure is inevitable.

Failure is unimportant. It takes courage to make a fool of yourself.

I think you can have 10,000 explanations for failure, but no good explanation for success.

Success depends upon previous preparation, and without such preparation there is sure to be failure.

Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not: nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not: the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.

In order to succeed, your desire for success should be greater than your fear of failure.

I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.

The only real failure in life is one not learned from.

You cannot learn anything from success, you only learn from failure.

I don't think there's any way it could have failed. We don't know failure in this band. We didn't know failure. We got to know it a little after awhile but at that time there was no such word.

The failure of national economic policy is costing us more than jobs; it has begun to weaken that uniquely American spirit of risk-taking, large ambition, and optimism about the future. We must rally them now to bold departures that rebuild our national morale as well as our material prosperity.

It really is impossible not to like him. His success was his failure.

Spend enough time around success and failure, and you learn a reverence for possibility.

It was an interesting question as to whether the BBC had a future in the digital world, and what form of market failure could justify the licence fee system.

The road to success and the road to failure are almost exactly the same.

Failure is instructive. The person who really thinks learns quite as much from his failures as from his successes.

Through perseverance many people win success out of what seemed destined to be certain failure.

Women, like men, should try to do the impossible. And when they fail, their failure should be a challenge to others.

Women must try to do things as men have tried. When they fail their failure must be but a challenge to others.

Please know that I am aware of the hazards. I want to do it because I want to do it. Women must try to do things as men have tried. When they fail, their failure must be a challenge to others.

Translation is the art of failure.

Show me a thoroughly satisfied man and I will show you a failure.

Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.

Restlessness is discontent and discontent is the first necessity of progress. Show me a thoroughly satisfied man and I will show you a failure.

To me, all war is failure for humanity, though it often is a bounty for commerce.

Persistent people begin their success where others end in failure.

America traditionally represents the greatest possibility of someone's going from nothing to something. Why? In theory, if not practice, the government stays out of the way and lets individuals take risks and reap rewards or accept the consequences of failure. We call this capitalism - or, at least, we used to.

The only failure one should fear, is not hugging to the purpose they see as best.

There is only one failure in life possible, and that is not to be true to the best one knows.

I'm proof against that word failure. I've seen behind it. The only failure a man ought to fear is failure of cleaving to the purpose he sees to be best.

Failure after long perseverance is much grander than never to have a striving good enough to be called a failure.

In taking stock of ourselves, we should not forget that fear plays a large part in the drama of failure. That is the first thing to be dropped. Fear is a mental deficiency susceptible of correction, if taken in hand before it gains an ascendency over us. Fear comes with the thought of failure.

War is something Arafat sends others to do for him. That is, the poor souls who believe in him. This pompous incompetent caused the failure of the Camp David negotiations, Clinton's mediation.

It has always felt like a failure that Bjorn and I couldn't keep our family together. You never get it back, but to this day I don't regret splitting up. The reason behind our separation is one of those things I definitely don't want to go into!

If you're not a born-again Christian, you're a failure as a human being.

It's a European Union of economic failure, of mass unemployment and of low growth.

The banking collapse was caused, more than anything, by bad government policy and the total failure of bad regulation, rather than by greed.

There is only one real failure in life that is possible, and that is, not to be true to the best one knows.

If you try to do your best there is no failure.

We feel a lot of pressure about looking silly or appearing weak, whatever that means, or being a failure. You have to keep in your head: what's the worst that can happen?

I may be a successful football player, but I feel like such a failure.

The assertion of failure coming from such persons does not mean that Mr. Mill failed to promote the practical success of those objects the advocacy of which forms the chief feature of his political writings.

No man is a failure who is enjoying life.

I'm kind of a failure. I mean, I'll be honest. I'm successful in that I'm getting to work on great stuff, but I think I'm a failure in all the personal stuff that is most important to me.

It's not that we fly by the seat of our pants. We're not afraid of failure.

Questioning the nature and implications of liminal instances necessarily involves failure, if only in the specifically technical sense of entering spaces where prevailing criteria of success scarcely apply.

There would seem to be a limit, even for an art preoccupied with boundaries and transgressions, beyond which a work reaches its breaking point and becomes an actual failure, a mere experimentation.

One day, I said to my father, 'I'm thinking of giving the comedy thing a try, what's your advice?' He goes, 'If it wasn't based on luck, I wouldn't worry about it, because you have talent. Just know that there's a lot of luck involved and if you eventually decide to do something else, don't treat it as a failure. Just know it's one-in-a-million.'

It's not a very high failure rate if you choose people that you really like the sound of.

In Chicago, you have an absence of strong family units, and that absence gets filled by gangs. You have a failure in the school system, after-school programs and other social programs to help keep kids off the streets. Amnesty International speaks to that in some way, by keeping these issues in the forefront.

In Torch Song, I did that character almost non-stop from 1978 until I made the movie in 1987. Then I had some failure, which also colors how you react to doing other things.

Failure is success if we learn from it.

Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.

There's always failure. And there's always disappointment. And there's always loss. But the secret is learning from the loss, and realizing that none of those holes are vacuums.

Do not fear mistakes. You will know failure. Continue to reach out.

War remains the decisive human failure.

One of the reasons people stop learning is that they become less and less willing to risk failure.

We may be personally defeated, but our principles never!

It's fine to celebrate success but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure.

Our health-care morass is like the problems of global warming and the national debt - the kind of vast policy failure that is far easier to get into than to get out of. Americans say that they want leaders who will take on these problems.

You want to ensure people can do it right 99 percent of time. When we have to fire one of our surgical trainees, it is never because they don't have the physical skills but because they don't have the moral skills - to practise and admit failure.