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Failure Quotes


Restlessness is discontent and discontent is the first necessity of progress. Show me a thoroughly satisfied man and I will show you a failure.
– Thomas A. Edison
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He who has conquered doubt and fear has conquered failure.
– James Lane Allen
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If you want to increase your success rate, double your failure rate.
– Thomas John Watson, Sr.
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Success is not forever and failure isn't fatal.
– Don Shula
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Risk taking is inherently failure-prone. Otherwise, it would be called sure-thing-taking.
– Jim McMahon
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The will to persevere is often the difference between failure and success.
– David Sarnoff
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The great question is not whether you have failed, but whether you are content with failure.
– Laurence J. Peter
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The only risk of failure is promotion.
– Scott Adams
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We climb to heaven most often on the ruins of our cherished plans, finding our failures were successes.
– Amos Bronson Alcott
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I rise today to offer a formal and heartfelt apology to all the victims of lynching in our history, and for the failure of the United States Senate to take action when action was most needed.
– George Allen
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To put away aimlessness and weakness, and to begin to think with purpose, is to enter the ranks of those strong ones who only recognize failure as one of the pathways to attainment; who make all conditions serve them, and who think strongly, attempt fearlessly, and accomplish masterfully.
– James Allen
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If you're not failing every now and again, it's a sign you're not doing anything very innovative.
– Woody Allen
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I knew that there were several, among African-American leaders, who had been put out by me because of my failure or reluctance to endorse Sen. Kerry.
– Rodney Alexander
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I have never described the time I was in Doctor Who as anything except a kind of ecstatic success, but all the rest has been rather a muddle and a disappointment. Compared to Doctor Who, it has been an outrageous failure really - it's so boring.
– Tom Baker
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The young think that failure is the Siberian end of the line, banishment from all the living, and tend to do what I then did - which was to hide.
– James A. Baldwin
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Do not blame anybody for your mistakes and failures.
– Bernard Baruch
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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.
– Ambrose Bierce
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Destiny: A tyrant's authority for crime and a fool's excuse for failure.
– Ambrose Bierce
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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
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Over the next four years, we will be bold. We will be willing to experiment. We will not fear failure.
– Matt Blunt
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A failure establishes only this, that our determination to succeed was not strong enough.
– Christian Nestell Bovee
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A man can get discouraged many times but he is not a failure until he begins to blame somebody else and stops trying.
– John Burroughs
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The dream is real, my friends. The failure to realize it is the only unreality.
– Toni Cade Bambara
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There's tons of creative people in television that have one failure after another, and they just step up higher. I could never get over that. When I had a failure, there was no such thing as just getting over it.
– Chuck Barris
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I wasn't afraid to fail. Something good always comes out of failure.
– Anne Baxter
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It's best to have failure happen early in life. It wakes up the Phoenix bird in you so you rise from the ashes.
– Anne Baxter
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There's only one thing that can guarantee our failure, and that's if we quit.
– Craig Breedlove
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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.
– Elias Canetti
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Indecision and delays are the parents of failure.
– George Canning
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Failure is unimportant. It takes courage to make a fool of yourself.
– Charlie Chaplin
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Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.
– Sir Winston Churchill
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Failure and its accompanying misery is for the artist his most vital source of creative energy.
– Montgomery Clift
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The only failure is not to try.
– George Clooney
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Failure sometimes enlarges the spirit. You have to fall back upon humanity and God.
– Charles Horton Cooley
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It has now been over 7 years since Congress last raised the minimum wage to its current level of $5.15 per hour. Since that last increase, Congress's failure to adjust the wage for inflation has reduced the purchasing power of the minimum wage to record low levels.
– Jon Corzine
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The main failure of education is that it has not prepared people to comprehend matters concerning human destiny.
– Norman Cousins
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If at first you don't succeed, failure may be your style.
– Quentin Crisp
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Heaven knows that I have done all that a mortal could do, to save the people, and the failure was not my fault, but the fault of others.
– Davy Crockett
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At the root of many a woman's failure to become a great cook lies her failure to develop a workmanlike regard for knives.
– Robert Farrar Capon
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You must accept that you might fail; then, if you do your best and still don't win, at least you can be satisfied that you've tried. If you don't accept failure as a possibility, you don't set high goals, you don't branch out, you don't try - you don't take the risk.
– Rosalynn Carter
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Rather than viewing a brief relapse back to inactivity as a failure, treat it as a challenge and try to get back on track as soon as possible.
– Jimmy Connors
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You can't have any successes unless you can accept failure.
– George Cukor
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Failure is instructive. The person who really thinks learns quite as much from his failures as from his successes.
– John Dewey
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It really is impossible not to like him. His success was his failure.
– Arthur C. Danto
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The most important of my discoveries have been suggested to me by my failures.
– Humphrey Davy
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Sometimes a noble failure serves the world as faithfully as a distinguished success.
– Edward Dowden
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Translation is the art of failure.
– Umberto Eco
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There is only one failure in life possible, and that is not to be true to the best one knows.
– George Eliot
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Persistent people begin their success where others end in failure.
– Edward Eggleston
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Slowly the poison the whole blood stream fills. It is not the effort nor the failure tires. The waste remains, the waste remains and kills.
– William Empson
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Children love and want to be loved and they very much prefer the joy of accomplishment to the triumph of hateful failure. Do not mistake a child for his symptom.
– Erik Erikson
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The man who has won millions at the cost of his conscience is a failure.
– B. C. Forbes
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The rise of China as a new power is another great challenge for the US. Our failure to properly handle Germany and Japan earlier in the 20th century cost us and the world dearly. We must not make this same mistake with China.
– Steve Forbes
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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!
– Agnetha Faltskog
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Any man who has $10,000 left when he dies is a failure.
– Errol Flynn
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There are no mistakes, save one: the failure to learn from a mistake.
– Robert Fripp
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We may be personally defeated, but our principles never!
– William Lloyd Garrison
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Our managers hadn't had that kind of success - the record company hadn't, we hadn't - and the feeling was that the next record had to be even bigger, and if it wasn't it would be some kind of failure.
– Roland Gift
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If we don't succeed, we run the risk of failure.
– Al Gore
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Failure too is a form of death.
– Graham Greene
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We do not know, in most cases, how far social failure and success are due to heredity, and how far to environment. But environment is the easier of the two to improve.
– John B. S. Haldane
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The failure of Socialism since 1945 is that whilst encouraging us all, the creators of wealth, to produce less through strikes, it has caused us all to demand a higher level of our own product.
– Brian Harris
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Notice the difference between what happens when a man says to himself, I have failed three times, and what happens when he says, I am a failure.
– S. I. Hayakawa
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Failure in the theater is more dramatic and uglier than any other form of writing. It costs so much, you feel so guilty.
– Lillian Hellman
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Why should anybody be interested in some old man who was a failure?
– Ernest Hemingway
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Every adversity, every failure, every heartache carries with it the seed on an equal or greater benefit.
– Napoleon Hill
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It is often the failure who is the pioneer in new lands, new undertakings, and new forms of expression.
– Eric Hoffer
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There is no loneliness greater than the loneliness of a failure. The failure is a stranger in his own house.
– Eric Hoffer
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I never see failure as failure, but only as the game I must play and win.
– Tom Hopkins
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A failure is a man who has blundered, but is not able to cash in the experience.
– Elbert Hubbard
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Optimism is a kind of heart stimulant - the digitalis of failure.
– Elbert Hubbard
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There is no failure except in no longer trying.
– Elbert Hubbard
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There is no failure except in no longer trying. There is no defeat except from within, no really insurmountable barrier save our own inherent weakness of purpose.
– Kin Hubbard
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Attempt something so impossible that unless God is in it, it's doomed to failure.
– John Haggai
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The failure to dissect the cause of war leaves us open for the next installment.
– Chris Hedges
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Having in my life been bitten by the jaws of both victory and defeat, I must rush to add that success is to failure as butter pecan ice cream is to death.
– Rupert Holmes
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Americans, who make more of marrying for love than any other people, also break up more of their marriages, but the figure reflects not so much the failure of love as the determination of people not to live without it.
– Morton Hunt
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I think that failure by your own standards is certainly a form of success.
– Bonnie Hunt
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Don't be afraid to fail. Don't waste energy trying to cover up failure. Learn from your failures and go on to the next challenge. It's OK to fail. If you're not failing, you're not growing.
– H. Stanley Judd
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Never walk away from failure. On the contrary, study it carefully and imaginatively for its hidden assets.
– Michael Korda
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Success and failure are greatly overrated. But failure gives you a whole lot more to talk about.
– Hildegard Knef
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Pressure is a word that is misused in our vocabulary. When you start thinking of pressure, it's because you've started to think of failure.
– Tommy Lasorda
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Failures are finger posts on the road to achievement.
– C. S. Lewis
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Greatly begin. Though thou have time, but for a line, be that sublime . Not failure, but low aim is crime.
– James Russell Lowell
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By virtually any measure, the record of the Republican Majority is an appalling failure.
– Sheila Jackson Lee
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Often the difference between a successful man and a failure is not one's better abilities or ideas, but the courage that one has to bet on his ideas, to take a calculated risk, and to act.
– Maxwell Maltz
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One's only rival is one's own potentialities. One's only failure is failing to live up to one's own possibilities. In this sense, every man can be a king, and must therefore be treated like a king.
– Abraham Maslow
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Of course, Third World leaders love you. By ascribing third world ills to First World sins, you absolve them of blame for their countries' failure to advance.
– John McCarthy
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Do not let your ambitions become a sanctuary for your failures.
– Bryant H. McGill
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My life has been nothing but a failure.
– Claude Monet
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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.
– Gordon Moore
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There is always time for failure.
– John Mortimer
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Often the difference between a successful person and a failure is not one has better abilities or ideas, but the courage that one has to bet on one's ideas, to take a calculated risk - and to act.
– Andre Malraux
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No failure in America, whether of love or money, is ever simple; it is always a kind of betrayal, of a mass of shadowy, shared hopes.
– Greil Marcus
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Failure to prepare is preparing to fail.
– Mike Murdock
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Before you can win a game, you have to not lose it.
– Chuck Noll
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Is the proposed operation likely to succeed? What might the consequences of failure? Is it in the realm of practicability in terms of material and supplies?
– Chester W. Nimitz
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Most people think of success and failure as opposites, but they both are products of the same process.
– Roger von Oech
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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
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Losing is no disgrace if you've given your best.
– Jim Palmer
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