Failure Quotes

Failure comes only when we forget our ideals and objectives and principles.
– Jawaharlal Nehru
Failure doesn't kill you... it increases your desire to make something happen.
– Kevin Costner
Failure and things of this sort - you can take it one of two ways. You can either let that hurt you and really affect the way that you live your life in the future, or you can use that as an opportunity for growth.
– Matt Emmons
Failure after long perseverance is much grander than never to have a striving good enough to be called a failure.
– George Eliot
Everyone should be commended for allowing people to make disasters, to make failures - you've just got to be sure that it's a magnificent failure and that, by creating a magnificent failure, you plant the seed.
– Malcolm Mclaren
Everybody keeps saying that India's a poor country. Yes, we have poverty. But I blame the government of India, the political establishment, for their failure to educate and therefore their failure to control the poverty.
– Vijay Mallya
Every great work, every big accomplishment, has been brought into manifestation through holding to the vision, and often just before the big achievement, comes apparent failure and discouragement.
– Florence Scovel Shinn
Every book I've written has been a different attempt to understand something, and the success or failure of the previous one is irrelevant. I write the book I want.
– Yann Martel
Every adversity, every failure, and every heartache, carries with it the Seed of an equivalent or greater Benefit.
– Napolean Hill
Even when you have doubts, take that step. Take chances. Mistakes are never a failure - they can be turned into wisdom.
– Cat Cora
Even in a gleefully negative comic, there is optimism, although it's slightly hidden: It comes out through a comic character's sheer tenacity. He keeps going and trying to find some sort of fulfillment regardless of his perpetual failure record. That's a form of hope, a form of optimism. Really hokey I know, but it's true.
– Lev Yilmaz
Even as far back as when I started acting at 14, I know I've never considered failure.
– Jennifer Lawrence
Enjoy failure and learn from it. You can never learn from success.
– James Dyson
Elegance is not a dispensable luxury but a factor that decides between success and failure.
– Edsger Dijkstra
Educational institutes can no longer be prizes in church politics or furnish berths for failure in other walks of life.
– E. Franklin Frazier
Don't take too much comfort in the fact that you're successful today because tomorrow could bring failure. There's no surety in life.
– Michael Savage
Don't fear failure so much that you refuse to try new things. The saddest summary of a life contains three descriptions: could have, might have, and should have.
– Louis E. Boone
Don't come home a failure.
– Ty Cobb
Don't be afraid of failure be afraid of petty success.
– Maude Adams
Don't be afraid of missing opportunities. Behind every failure is an opportunity somebody wishes they had missed.
– Lily Tomlin
Do not brood over your past mistakes and failures as this will only fill your mind with grief, regret and depression. Do not repeat them in the future.
– Sivananda
Do not be embarrassed by your failures, learn from them and start again.
– Richard Branson
Divorce is so common and accepted in America that beating myself up over it may sound ridiculous. But I was raised to believe that divorce wasn't an option to me, divorce equaled failure. I wasn't able to change that equation until I found myself in the right relationship.
– Trisha Yearwood
Divorce is never a pleasant experience. You look upon it as a failure. But I learned to be a different person once we broke up. Sometimes you learn more from failure than you do from success.
– Michael Crawford
Discipline is based on pride, on meticulous attention to details, and on mutual respect and confidence. Discipline must be a habit so ingrained that it is stronger than the excitement of the goal or the fear of failure.
– Gary Ryan Blair
Directly after the show people might have responded better to it, but who really knows. It did what it did and while it seems like a failure to most but it was a success for me and has given me so many opportunities.
– Justin Guarini
Definitely, it's a fear of failure that drives me.
– Jerry Bruckheimer
Defeat is not the worst of failures. Not to have tried is the true failure.
– George Edward Woodberry
Critics? Don't talk to me of critics! You think some jackanapes journalist, his soul eaten away by the maggots of jealousy and failure, has anything worthwhile to say of art? I don't.
– Jonathan Raban
Creative risk taking is essential to success in any goal where the stakes are high. Thoughtless risks are destructive, of course, but perhaps even more wasteful is thoughtless caution which prompts inaction and promotes failure to seize opportunity.
– Gary Ryan Blair
Coming to terms with the fact that my marriage was a failure was devastating and very difficult.
– Sarah McLachlan
Civilization is a failure. We need to think what we can do together in love and peace.
– Serj Tankian
Catastrophes are often stimulated by the failure to feel the emergence of a domain, and so what cannot be felt in the imagination is experienced as embodied sensation in the catastrophe.
– William Irwin Thompson
By far the most important factor in the success or failure of any school, far more important than tests or standards or business-model methods of accountability, is simply attracting the best-educated, most exciting young people into urban schools and keeping them there.
– Jonathan Kozol
But while success and failure depend on conditions, the mind neither waxes nor wanes.
– Bodhidharma
But whatever my failure, I have this thing to remember - that I was a pioneer in my profession, just as my grandfathers were in theirs, in that I was the first man in this section to earn his living as a writer.
– Robert E. Howard
But thankfully, my first album, 'Wide Screen,' was sort of a critics' darling - everyone raved about it, but no one bought it. They only manufactured 10,000 copies I wasn't even in the running for failure!
– Rupert Holmes
But if you have a solid walk with the Lord, then you won't fear that failure.
– Cliff Richard
But if you look at WorldCom, which is the biggest failure to date, they grew dramatically, they were buying companies that were bigger than they were and they were doing it off inflated stock.
– Don Nickles
But all actors go through the process, it's hit and miss, you have achievement and failure.
– Thomas Haden Church
Big companies are like marching bands. Even if half the band is playing random notes, it still sounds kind of like music. The concealment of failure is built into them.
– Doug Coupland
Beside every great success are the seeds of enormous failure. In every failure, there's the opportunity seeds of great success. They're not miles apart. So if they're that close together, and if you're really working, you're always gonna have that likelihood that something's not going to work.
– Peter Guber
Belief in the supernatural reflects a failure of the imagination.
– Edward Abbey
Before this government came to power, many failing schools were simply allowed to drift on in a pattern of continuing failure. The government is determined to break that pattern and is successfully doing so.
– Estelle Morris
Before I was married, I didn't consider my failure to manage even basic hand tools a feminist inadequacy. I thought it had more to do with being Jewish. The Jews I knew growing up didn't do 'do-it-yourself.' When my father needed to hammer something he generally used his shoe, and the only real tool he owned was a pair of needle-nose pliers.
– Ayelet Waldman
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.
– Elisabetta Canalis
At least I have the modesty to admit that lack of modesty is one of my failings.
– Hector Berlioz
At first I wasn't sure that I had the talent, but I did know I had a fear of failure, and that fear compelled me to fight off anything that might abet it.
– Gordon Parks
As soon as I did my first five minutes of stand-up I knew that I would rather be a failure at comedy than a success in marketing.
– Jimmy Carr
As might be supposed, my parents were quite poor, but we somehow never seemed to lack anything we needed, and I never saw a trace of discontent or a failure in cheerfulness over their lot in life, as indeed over anything.
– Albert J. Nock
As long as the G.O.P., led by its increasingly visible women, continues to insist that the problem is not their policies but women's failure to understand their own lives and interests, the gender gap won't go away.
– Dee Dee Myers
As kids we're not taught how to deal with success we're taught how to deal with failure. If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. If at first you succeed, then what?
– Charlie Sheen
As I said there is nothing wrong with failing. Pick yourself up and try it again. You never are going to know how good you really are until you go out and face failure.
– Henry Kravis
As efforts to fix this failure at the Veterans Administration continue, I also intend to persist in demanding answers and action on the establishment of a new clinic to serve the veterans in North Central Washington.
– Doc Hastings
As a younger player, you always kind of play with that fear of failure.
– Jason Giambi
Art school had taught me it was far better to be a flamboyant failure than any kind of benign success.
– Malcolm Mclaren
Any critic is entitled to wrong judgments, of course. But certain lapses of judgment indicate the radical failure of an entire sensibility.
– Susan Sontag
And obviously, with hindsight now, now knowing what went on in the company, it would have been absolutely appropriate back then for us to have the chief executive of the company, most senior person in the United Kingdom, come and answer for the policy they were pursuing. And we ducked that, and frankly that's a failure of Parliament.
– Tom A. Watson
And in reality, I don't think it's a real documentary. It's more a story of her life. It's a story of survival. It's a story of the time in which she lived. The story of success and failure.
– Maximilian Schell
And I went to New York and died for 10 years I walked those pavements. I can't think of New York without feeling uncomfortable and feeling like a failure.
– Harvey Korman
American democracy must be a failure because it places the supreme authority in the hands of the poorest and most ignorant part of the society.
– Thomas Babington Macaulay
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.
– Larry Elder
America thinks of itself as a meritocracy, so people have more respect for success and more contempt for failure.
– Toby Young
Ambitious failure, magnificent failure, is a very good thing.
– Guy Kawasaki
All I can do will only ever be a faint image of what I see and my success will always be less than my failure or perhaps equal to the failure.
– Alberto Giacometti
All human actions are equivalent and all are on principle doomed to failure.
– Jean-Paul Sartre
All human actions are equivalent... and all are on principle doomed to failure.
– Carl Sandburg
After that he turned to the question of invading England. Hitler said that during the previous year he could not afford to risk a possible failure apart from that, he had not wished to provoke the British, as he hoped to arrange peace talks.
– Kurt Student
African Americans make up about 13 percent of the U.S. population but comprise 32 percent of patients treated for kidney failure, giving them a kidney failure rate that is 4.2 times greater than that of white Americans.
– Xavier Becerra
Admitting failure is quite cleansing, but never - pleasurable.
– Michael Morpurgo
Acting allows me the freedom to let go, to be in the moment, to be spontaneous. I no longer have the fear of losing, of failure.
– Cathy Rigby
A real failure does not need an excuse. It is an end in itself.
– Gertrude Stein
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 failure certain by himself being the first person to be convinced of it.
– Alexandre Dumas
A love of nature is a consolation against failure.
– Berthe Morisot
A little more persistence, a little more effort, and what seemed hopeless failure may turn to glorious success.
– Elbert Hubbard
A life which does not go into action is a failure.
– Arnold J. Toynbee
A hatred of failure has always been part of my nature.
– J. Paul Getty
A film's success or failure is strictly on the director's shoulders.
– Robin Tunney
A failure will not appear until a unit has passed final inspection.
– Arthur Bloch
A Failure in this Duty did once involve our Nation in all the Horrors of Rebellion and Civil War.
– Charles Inglis
Learn the art of patience. Apply discipline to your thoughts when they become anxious over the outcome of a goal. Impatience breeds anxiety, fear, discouragement and failure. Patience creates confidence, decisiveness and a rational outlook, which eventually leads to success.
– Brian Adams
Failure is impossible.
– Susan B. Anthony
We pay just as dearly for our triumphs as we do for our defeats. Go ahead and fail. But fail with wit, fail with grace, fail with style. A mediocre failure is as insufferable as a mediocre success. Embrace failure! Seek it out. Learn to love it. That may be the only way any of us will ever be free. Tom Robbins before you give up hope, turn back and read the attacks that were made on Lincoln.
– Bruce Barton
There is much to be said for failure. It is much more interesting than success.
– Max Beerbohm
Our government, at least according to the NIGHTLINE program that ran, financed STAR GATE over 20 years with 20 million dollars or something like that, at the end of which they more or less declared it to be a failure, and stopped the program.
– Art Bell
In the publishing business you have to learn to greet failure with the same handshake as you would success.
– Eddie Bell
All war represents a failure of diplomacy.
– Tony Benn
Failure is an event, never a person.
– William D. Brown
A minute's success pays the failure of years.
– Robert Browning
The only real failure in life is not to be true to the best one knows.
– Buddha
I'd rather be a failure at something I love than a success at something I hate.
– George Burns
I'm hopeful. I know there is a lot of ambition in Washington, obviously. But I hope the ambitious realize that they are more likely to succeed with success as opposed to failure.
– George W. Bush
It is wise to keep in mind that neither success nor failure is ever final.
– Roger Babson
War is the most striking instance of the failure of intelligence to master the problem of human relationships.
– Harry Elmer Barnes
The failure of Malthus's simple model of fertility persuaded economists that family-size decisions lay beyond economic calculus.
– Gary Becker
All that is necessary to break the spell of inertia and frustration is this: Act as if it were impossible to fail. That is the talisman, the formula, the command of right about face which turns us from failure to success.
– Dorthea Brande
The person interested in success has to learn to view failure as a healthy, inevitable part of the process of getting to the top.
– Dr. Joyce Brothers
Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor.
– Truman Capote
Develop success from failures. Discouragement and failure are two of the surest stepping stones to success.
– Dale Carnegie
You build on failure. You use it as a stepping stone. Close the door on the past. You don't try to forget the mistakes, but you don't dwell on it. You don't let it have any of your energy, or any of your time, or any of your space.
– Johnny Cash