Quotes about failure

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“The art has to make it on its own, without explanations, and it’s the same for poetry. If the poem or the painting has to be explained, then it’s a failure in communication.”

“Sometimes rejections betrayal and failures become the best motivation.”

“Utopia is a spatial matter that might be thought to know potential change in fortunes in so spatialized a culture as the postmodern; but if this last is a dehistoricized and dehistorizing as I some times claim here, the synaptic chain that might lead the Utopian impulse to expression becomes harder to localize. Utopian representations knew an extraordinarily revival in the 1960's; if postmodernism is the substitute for the sixties and the compensation for their political failure, the question of Utopia would seem to be a crucial test of what is left of our capacity to imagine change at all.”

“it has now become obvious that most of the state institutions, including the judiciary, the army, the security apparatus and most of the government departments, stood against him [Morsi]. They acted in a co-ordinated manner to foment a crisis aimed at impeding the president and forcing failure on him.”

“We need to focus every inch of our being on climate change, because if we fail to do so than all our achievements and progress have been for nothing and all that will remain of our political leaders’ legacy will be the greatest failure of human history. And they will be remembered as the greatest villains of all time, because they have chosen not to listen and not to act.”

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

“Forget mistakes. Forget failure. Forget everything except what you're going to do now and do it. Today is your lucky day”

“I’ve had a lot of success; I’ve had failures, so I learn from the failure.”

“People in general are scared to death of the war and all the exhibition have been a failure, because the rich - don't want to buy anything”

“In all worthwhile undertakings, There will be risks of failure, of disappointments, of even disaster. To face them all with inner poise and firm faith is to discover the glory of final victory.”

“Winners are not afraid of losing. But losers are. Failure is part of the process of success. People who avoid failure also avoid success.”

“Three or four years ago a distinguished Frenchman, M. Hovelacque, published an article on America in the Revue de Paris in which he maintained that the essential weakness of our American civilization lay in the failure of our education to produce any equivalent of the superior man of Confucius or the καλὸς κἀγαθός of the Greeks.”

“I'd rather be a failure at something I enjoy than a success at something I hate.”

“With engineering, I view this year's failure as next year's opportunity to try it again. Failures are not something to be avoided. You want to have them happen as quickly as you can so you can make progress rapidly.”

“Successful people make their decisions quickly and change their minds slowly. Failures make their decisions slowly and change their minds quickly.”

“I don't like to cast aspersions on the fans because I know you mean well, but what I have found is that ninety-nine percent of the Jar Jar Binks haters are failures at life. In essence, these haters are taking out their frustrations on Jar Jar. I don't mean to be cruel, but we need to examine the facts. The most popular Star Wars collectibles are all Jar Jar-related. Now, the failures at life who have no money, no women, and no future will spend all day on the Internet talking about how they hate Jar Jar Binks. This is very sad. The Phantom Menace is one of the top five films of all time.”

“people who have failed in their lives, they are suffering their failure. People who have succeeded in their life, they are suffering their success.”

“More than two millennia later…. Hawthorne puts forward a similar vision: A woman must bring the 'new truth…. in order to establish the whole relation between man and woman on a surer ground of mutual happiness' (The Scarlet Letter p.241)…. With the brilliant economy of the letter A, he demonstrates why this vision is doomed to failure. The very passion that renders a woman able to see through the "iron framework" of Puritanism also disables her by causing her to be seen in the eyes of the Puritans as an impure woman, a woman who has been adulterated. This double vision… at once frees and imprisons women.”

“The significant relationships of early adulthood are thus construed as the means to an end of individual achievement, and these "transitional figures" must be cast off or reconstructed following the realization of success. If in the process, however, they become, like Dido, an impediment to the fulfillment of the Dream, then the relationship must be renounced, "to allow the developmental process" to continue. This process is defined by Levinson explicitly as one of individuation: "throughout the life cycle, but especially in the key transition periods… the developmental process of individuation is going on." The process refers "to the changes in a person's relationships to himself and to the external world," the relationships that constitute his "Life Structure" (p. 195).

If in the course of "Becoming One's Own Man," this structure is discovered to be flawed and threatens the great expectations of the Dream, then in order to avert "serious Failure or Decline," the man must "break out" to salvage his Dream. This act of breaking out is consummated by a "marker event" of separation, such as "leaving his wife, quitting his job, or moving to another region" (p. 206). Thus the road to mid-life salvation runs through either achievement or separation.”

“It's so freeing, it's beautiful in a way, to have a great failure, there's nowhere to go but up.”

“Failure is impossible”
- Susan B. Anthony”

“I fear being like everyone I hate, I fear failure, I fear losing control. I love balancing between chaos and control with everything I do. I always have a fear of going one way or another, getting lost in something, or losing everything to get lost in. And I fear being a completely acceptable sheep in society.”

“A visiting pastor at our church in Plains once told a story about a priest from New Orleans. Father Flanagan’s parish lay in the central part of the city, close to many taverns. One night he was walking down the street and saw a drunk thrown out of a pub. The man landed in the gutter, and Father Flanagan quickly recognized him as one of his parishioners, a fellow named Mike. Father Flanagan shook the dazed man and said, “Mike!” Mike opened his eyes and Father Flanagan said, “You’re in trouble. If there is anything I can do for you, please tell me what it is.ℍ “Well, Father,” Mike replied, “I hope you’ll pray for me.” “Yes,” the priest answered, “I’ll pray for you right now.” He knelt down in the gutter and prayed, “Father, please have mercy on this drunken man.ℍ At this, a startled Mike woke up fully and said, “Father, please don’t tell God I’m drunk.ℍ Sometimes we don’t feel much of a personal relationship between God and ourselves, as though we have a secret life full of failures and sins that God knows nothing about. We want to involve God only when we plan to give thanks or when we’re in trouble and need help. But the rest of our lives, we’d rather keep to ourselves.”

“Our Center would be nonpartisan; we would be as innovative as possible, not duplicating or competing with other organizations that were addressing issues successfully; we would not be afraid of possible failure if our goals were worthwhile; and we would operate always with a balanced budget. The”

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

“Nothing is too small. I counsel you, put down in record even your doubts and surmises. Hereafter it may be of interest to you to see how true you guess. We learn from failure, not from success!”

“When I die of heart failure the next time you frighten me like that, you can put that on my gravestone—‘I didn’t mean to startle her.”

“Life is like topography, Hobbes. There are summits of happiness and success, flat stretches of boring routine and valleys of frustration and failure.”

“It's failure that gives you the proper perspective on success.”

“There are no secrets to success: don’t waste time looking for them. Success is the result of perfection, hard work, learning from failure, loyalty to those for whom you work, and persistence.”

“Then there were those famous wings. Was Daedalus really stricken with grief when Icarus fell into the sea? Or just disappointed by the design failure?”

“During our lives… we experience so many setbacks, and fight such a hand-to-hand battle with failure, head down in the rain, just trying to stay upright and to have a little hope.”

“I knew a Buddhist once, and I've hated myself ever since. The whole thing was a failure.”

“… and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.”

“The ragamuffin who sees his life as a voyage of discovery and runs the risk of failure has a better feel for faithfulness than the timid man who hides behind the law and never finds out who he is at all.”

“I don't divide the world into the weak and the strong, or the successes and the failures, those who make it or those who don't. I divide the world into learners and nonlearners.”

“Play around. Dive into absurdity and write. Take chances. You will succeed if you are fearless of failure.”

“Don't be afraid of missing opportunities. Behind every failure is an opportunity somebody wishes they had missed.”

“Think like a queen. A queen if not afraid to fail. Failure is another stepping stone to greatness.”

“My interest in this pack of failures betrays my character.”

“If at first you don’t succeed, failure may be your style.”

“Compromise built upon compromise equals failure.”

“Christmas it seems to me is a necessary festival; we require a season when we can regret all the flaws in our human relationships: it is the feast of failure, sad but consoling.”

“Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it.”

“It is true that success is the most boring thing, it is tinny and brittle, failure runs deeper. Success is dangerous. I have a very complicated relationship with that word.”

“Failure is but the longer road to triumph.”

“The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency -- the belief that the here and now is all there is.”

“Failure is usually boring. It is the credible but unrealized threat of failure that is interesting.”

“Failure is hard, but success is far more dangerous. If you're successful at the wrong thing, the mix of praise and money and opportunity can lock you in forever.”

“If it's not exactly like you thought it would be, you think it's a failure. What about the spectrum of colors in between.”

“Your failures and your faults, they stick with you. They glob into ugly, cancerous growths inside you and make you want to die.”

“Defeat is not the worst of failures. Not to have tried is the true failure.”

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

“What is jealousy but a reflection of your own failures?”

“The key to happiness, she said, is tolerance of those who do not do as you do.' `What if those who do not do as you do are gunning you down?' I said…. Alaska frowned. `Guns are intolerant. Guns are a failure of communication.”

“In my mind, the men and women of NASA are history's modern pioneers. They attempt the impossible, accept failure, and then back to the drawing board while the rest of us stand back and criticize.”

“Don't worry about failures, worry about the chances you miss when you don't even try.”

“I'm drawn to failure. I feel that I'm contending with it constantly in my own life.”

“All of us failed to match our dreams of perfection. So I rate us on the basis of our splendid failure to do the impossible.”

“Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery..”

“Whereas the beautiful is limited, the sublime is limitless, so that the mind in the presence of the sublime, attempting to imagine what it cannot, has pain in the failure but pleasure in contemplating the immensity of the attempt”

“Success and failure are equally disastrous.”

“Every adversity, every failure, every heartbreak, carries with it the seed of an equal or greater benefit.”

“If he'd learned one thing while he'd been away, it was that loneliness is the most taboo subject in the world. Forget sex or politics or religion. Or even failure. Loneliness is what clears out a room.”

“Today,’ said Lymond, ‘if you must know, I don’t like living at all. But that’s just immaturity boggling at the sad face of failure. Tomorrow I’ll be bright as a bedbug again.”

“Don't listen to the malicious comments of those friends who, never taking any risks themselves, can only see other people's failures.”

“The key to success is failure”

“To acknowledge the presence of fear is to give birth to failure.”

“That which we manifest is before us; we are the creators of our own destiny. Be it through intention or ignorance, our successes and our failures have been brought on by none other than ourselves.”

“Suppose our failures occur, not in spite of what we are doing, but precisely because of it.”

“Any time some well-meaning person forces you to demonstrate you have no talent and rubs your nose in the fact you're a failure at the only dream you ever had, take another drink.”

“The most unfortunate thing that happens to a person who fears failure is that he limits himself by becoming afraid to try anything new.”

“premature design commitment is a design failure mode”

“I could never kill myself. What if it doesn't work. Then I'll have failed at the only thing that could save me from my failures. Where do you go from there?”

“I've come to believe that all my past failure and frustration were actually laying
the foundation for the understandings that have created the new level of living I
now enjoy.”

“It's always easy to blame others. You can spend your entire life blaming the world, but your successes or failures are entirely your own.”

“You can measure your worth by your dedication to your path, not by your successes or failures.”

“In any case you mustn't confuse a single failure with a final defeat.”

“Never invest yourself in anything so deeply that its failure could cost you your happiness.”

“We have much to be judged on when he comes, slums and battlefields and insane asylums, but these are the symptoms of our illness and the result of our failures in love.”

“Failure is just a few seconds away from success.”

“When you resort to violence to prove a point, you’ve just experienced a profound failure of imagination.”

“War is an absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political. That a war can be represented as helping a people to 'feel good' about themselves, or their country, is a measure of that failure.”

“If you think something is ugly, look harder. Ugliness is just a failure of seeing.”

“Better to be the failure who nobly strived than the success who never really had to.”

“When I face the desolate impossibility of writing five hundred pages, a sick sense of failure falls on me, and I know I can never do it. Then gradually, I write one page and then another. One day's work is all I can permit myself to contemplate.”

“The difference between average people and achieving people is their perception of and response to… failure.”

“It has always been my belief that people are remembered for the sum of their accomplishments but defined by their singular failure.”

“There is no disgrace in honest failure; there is disgrace in fearing to fail”

“If you try to be anyone but yourself, you will fail; if you are not true to your own heart, you will fail. Then again, there's no success like failure”

“Once there had been joy, but now there was only sadness, and it was not, he knew, alone the sadness of an empty house; it was the sadness of all else, the sadness of the Earth, the sadness of the failures and the empty triumphs.”

“There is no failure except in no longer trying.”

“I dreamt -- marvellous error! -- that I had a beehive here inside my heart. And the golden bees were making white combs and sweet honey from my old failures.”

“A friend of mine, the most innocuous dreamer who ever lived, once set a forest on fire to see, as he said, if it would catch as easily as people said. The first ten times the experiment was a failure; but on the eleventh it succeeded all too well.”

“there is moss on the walls
and the stain of thought and failure and
waiting”

“I learned failure early and mastered it.”

“Good people are good because they've come to wisdom through failure.”

“Do not think of todays failures, but of the success that may come tomorrow.”

“I define anxiety as experiencing failure in advance.”