Quotes about failure
page 3

“Courage is going from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm.”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Courage, Inspirational, Courageous, Powerful

“If you want to increase your success rate, double your failure rate.”

Thomas Watson, Jr. (1914–1993) American businessman and diplomat

Success, Success

“Failure is good only when you have time to spare, but useless if you want to get everything done on time. In reality, no one has that time to spare!”

Mwanandeke Kindembo (1996) Congolese author

Reality, Time

“If you don’t give up, You still have a Chance to Win. Giving up is a Great Failure.”

Jack Ma (1964) Chinese businessman

Source: Jack Ma Quotes That Will Change Your Life Forever https://www.yourselfquotes.com/jack-ma-quotes/

Chance

“It is unimaginable how much the peoples of the region pay for the failure of a strong, efficient and integrated Maghreb union.”

Mohamed Ould Ghazouani (1956) Mauritanian former general and politician

Source: Mohamed Ould Ghazouani (2021) cited in " El Ghazouani: Mauritania Offers Hand in Restoring Ties Between Maghreb Countries https://www.moroccoworldnews.com/2021/12/346185/el-ghazouani-mauritania-offers-hand-in-restoring-ties-between-maghreb-countries" on Morocco World News, 24 December 2021.

People, Strong

“Failure isn't Fatal”

Stephie Pahlavi Zan

“Failure does not mean you are a failure… it just means you have not succeeded…yet.
Motivation,
Drive,
Willingness,
Practice,
Fearlessness,
Tirelessness,
Focus,
Persistance,
Competitiveness
and
Ability to see things from Both Sides,
will be your
Stepping Stones
to becoming
Triumphant.”

Stephie Pahlavi Zan

Motivation

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

Bill Watterson (1958) American comic artist

Life, Happiness, Success

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

Ellen DeGeneres (1958) American stand-up comedian, television host, and actress

Source: Seriously... I'm Kidding

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.”

Colin Powell (1937) Former U.S. Secretary of State and retired four-star general

Secret, Learning, Time, Success

“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?”

Alison Bechdel (1960) American cartoonist, author

Source: Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

Disappointment, Sea

“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.”

Lance Armstrong book It's Not About the Bike: My Journey Back to Life

Source: It's Not About the Bike: My Journey Back to Life

Hope, Fight

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

Hunter S. Thompson (1937–2005) American journalist and author

2000s, Kingdom of Fear: Loathsome Secrets of a Star-crossed Child in the Final Days of the American Century (2004)
Source: Kingdom of Fear: Loathsome Secrets of a Star-Crossed Child in the Final Days of the American Century

Hate

“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.”

Brennan Manning (1934–2013) writer, American Roman Catholic priest and United States Marine

Source: The Ragamuffin Gospel: Good News for the Bedraggled, Beat-Up, and Burnt Out

Life, Faith, Law, Feeling

“… 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.”

John Steinbeck book The Grapes of Wrath

Source: The Grapes of Wrath

People, Soul

“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.”

Benjamin R. Barber (1939–2017) US political scientist

Source: The Reader's digest vol. 140, no. 837-842 (1992), p. 159

World, Strong, Success

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

Natalie Goldberg (1948) American writer

Source: Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within

Chance

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

Lily Tomlin (1939) American actress, comedian, writer, and producer

Contributions of Jane Wagner

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

Oprah Winfrey (1954) American businesswoman, talk show host, actress, producer, and philanthropist

Thinking, Motivational, For women, Deep

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

Leonard Cohen book Beautiful Losers

Source: Beautiful Losers

“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.”

Graham Greene (1904–1991) English writer, playwright and literary critic

Source: Travels With My Aunt

Sadness, Christmas, Season

“Compromise built upon compromise equals failure.”

Lysa TerKeurst

Made to Crave: Satisfying Your Deepest Desire with God, Not Food

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

Quentin Crisp (1908–1999) writer, Actor

Source: The Naked Civil Servant; How To Become A Virgin; Resident Alien

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

Thomas Sowell (1930) American economist, social theorist, political philosopher and author

Source: The Thomas Sowell Reader, New York: NY, Basic Books (2011) p. 144, Forbes magazine, "The survival of the left" (Sept. 8, 1997)

“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.”

Arundhati Roy (1961) Indian novelist, essayist

Success

“Failure is but the longer road to triumph.”

Steve Hockensmith (1968) American writer

Source: Dreadfully Ever After

“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.”

Allan Bloom book The Closing of the American Mind

Source: The Closing of the American Mind

Books, Reading

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

Robin D. Laws (1964) Canadian writer and game designer

“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.”

Po Bronson (1964) American writer

Money, Success

“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.”

Sara Evans (1971) American country singer and songwriter

Source: Softly and Tenderly

Color, Thinking

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

Julie Anne Peters (1952) American writer

Source: By the Time You Read This, I'll Be Dead

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

George E. Woodberry (1855–1930) American poet and literary critic

Success, Peaceful

“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.”

Alexandre Dumas (1802–1870) French writer and dramatist, father of the homonym writer and dramatist

Personality

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

Michael Connelly book The Last Coyote

Source: The Last Coyote

Jealousy

“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.”

Jeanette Winterson book The Stone Gods

Source: The Stone Gods

Happiness, 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.”

Dan Brown book Deception Point

Source: Deception Point

Women, Men, History, Drawing

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

Jack Canfield (1944) American writer

Source: Chicken Soup for the Soul

Chance, For Team

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

Joyce Carol Oates (1938) American author

Life, Feeling

“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.”

William Faulkner (1897–1962) American writer

On himself and his contemporaries.
Paris Review interview (1958)

Dreams, Perfection

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

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Envy

“Someone else's success is not your failure.”

Alexandra Robbins book The Overachievers

The Overachievers: The Secret Lives of Driven Kids

Success, Powerful

“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”

Immanuel Kant book Critique of Pure Reason

Source: Critique of Pure Reason

Pain, Pleasure, Beauty, Imagination

“Success and failure are equally disastrous.”

Tennessee Williams (1911–1983) American playwright

Success

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

Napoleon Hill (1883–1970) American author

Variant: Every adversity, every failure, every heartache carries with it the seed of an equal or greater benefit.
Source: Think and Grow Rich: The Landmark Bestseller - Now Revised and Updated for the 21st Century

“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.”

Douglas Coupland book Miss Wyoming

Source: Miss Wyoming

World, Religion, Sex, Learning

“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.”

Dorothy Dunnett (1923–2001) British writer

Source: The Disorderly Knights

Sadness

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

Paulo Coelho book Eleven Minutes

Source: Eleven Minutes

People

“The key to success is failure”

Michael Jordan (1963) American retired professional basketball player and businessman

Success

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

Katherine Mansfield (1888–1923) New Zealand author

Journal entry, "Reading Notes" (1905-1907), quoted in Ruth Elvish Mantz and John Middleton Murry, The Life of Katherine Mansfield (1933), p. 212

Fear, Birth

“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.”

Garth Stein The Art of Racing in the Rain

Variant: Such a simple concept, yet so true: 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.
Source: The Art of Racing in the Rain

Success

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

Dallas Willard (1935–2013) American philosopher

Source: The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life In God

“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.”

Chuck Palahniuk book Diary

Source: Diary

Dreams, Drink, Time, Personality

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

Leo Buscaglia (1924–1998) Motivational speaker, writer

Fear, Personality

“premature design commitment is a design failure mode”

Mary Poppendieck

Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit: An Agile Toolkit

“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?”

Tucker Max book Assholes Finish First

Source: Assholes Finish First

“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.”

Anthony Robbins (1960) Author, actor, professional speaker

Understanding, Past

“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.”

Paulo Coelho book Aleph

Source: Aleph (2011)
Context: 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 responsibility. You can try to stop time, but it’s a complete waste of energy.

Life, World, Success

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

Elizabeth Gilbert Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear

Source: Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear

Success

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald book Tender Is the Night

Variant: Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.
Source: Tender Is the Night

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

Ian Caldwell book The Rule of Four

Source: The Rule of Four

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.”

Madeleine L'Engle (1918–2007) American writer

Love

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

John Flanagan (1873–1938) Irish-American hammer thrower

Source: The Battle for Skandia

Success

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

Sherman Alexie (1966) Native American author and filmmaker

Source: The Toughest Indian in the World

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.”

Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) American poet, essayist and feminist

War, People, Feeling, Imagination

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

Matt Haig (1975) British writer

Source: The Humans

Thinking

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

Brandon Sanderson (1975) American fantasy writer

Source: Firstborn

Success

“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.”

John Steinbeck book Travels with Charley: In Search of America

Source: Travels with Charley: In Search of America

Sense

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

John C. Maxwell (1947) American author, speaker and pastor

Source: Failing Forward

People

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

Chuck Klosterman (1972) Author, Columnist

Source: I Wear the Black Hat: Grappling With Villains

People

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

Henry Ford book My Life and Work

Source: My Life and Work (1922), pp. 19–20. Quoted in Samuel Crowther, "Henry Ford's Problem," The Magazine of Business, vol. 52 (1927), p. 182
Source: My Life And Work
Context: Failure is only the opportunity more intelligently to begin again. There is no disgrace in honest failure; there is disgrace in fearing to fail.

Fear

“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”

Bob Dylan (1941) American singer-songwriter, musician, author, and artist

Success, Heart

“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.”

Clifford D. Simak book City

Source: City

Sadness, Joy, Housing

“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.”

Antonio Machado (1875–1939) Spanish poet

Error, Bee, Heart

“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.”

Charles Baudelaire book Le Spleen de Paris

Source: Paris Spleen

People, Time

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

Charles Bukowski book The People Look Like Flowers at Last

Source: The People Look Like Flowers at Last

Waiting

“I learned failure early and mastered it.”

Gregory Maguire book Son of a Witch

Source: Son of a Witch

Learning

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

William Saroyan (1908–1981) American writer

My Heart's in the Highlands (1939)
Context: Good people are good because they've come to wisdom through failure. We get very little wisdom from success, you know.

Wisdom, People

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

Helen Keller book The Story of My Life

Source: The Story of My Life

Thinking, Success

“The only failure is not knowing how to be happy."---My Story”

Céline Dion (1968) Canadian singer

Happiness

“I define anxiety as experiencing failure in advance.”

Seth Godin (1960) American entrepreneur, author and public speaker

Source: Poke the Box

“Most great people have attained their greatest success just one step beyond their greatest failure.”

Napoleon Hill (1883–1970) American author

People, Success, Business

“They had created themselves together, and they always saw themselves, their youth, their love, their lost youth and lost love, their failures and memories, as a sort of living fiction.”

Elizabeth Hardwick (1916–2007) Novelist, short story writer, literary critic

Source: Seduction and Betrayal: Women and Literature

Love, Youth, Memory

“To try is to risk failure, but risks must be taken, because the greatest hazard in life is to risk nothing.”

Leo Buscaglia (1924–1998) Motivational speaker, writer

Living, Loving, and Learning (1982)
Variant: Risks must be taken because the greatest hazard in life is to risk nothing.
Source: Living Loving and Learning
Context: To love is to risk not being loved in return. To hope is to risk pain. To try is to risk failure, but risks must be taken, because the greatest hazard in life is to risk nothing.

Life, Courageous

“Remember the two benefits of failure. First, if you do fail, you learn what doesn't work; and second, the failure gives you the opportunity to try a new approach.”

Roger von Oech (1948) Creativity theorist and inventor

Learning

“I don't know why I started writing. I don't know why anybody does it. Maybe they're bored, or failures at something else.”

Cormac McCarthy (1933) American novelist, playwright, and screenwriter

“For every failure, there's an alternative
course of action. You just have to find it.
When you come to a roadblock,
take a detour.”

Mary Kay Ash (1918–2001) Entrepreneur

“When I thought about why I was sometimes reluctant to push myself, I realized that it was because I was afraid of failure - but in order to have more success, I needed to be willing to accept more failure.”

Gretchen Rubin (1966) American writer

Source: The Happiness Project: Or Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun

Success