Failure Quotations | Page 3

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

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

If you fall during your life, it doesn't matter. You're never a failure as long as you try to get up.

It's a terrifying thing to be perhaps 16 or 17 and feel like you are a failure and a has-been.

Because of my intense hopes for the youth of China, I feel very keenly my responsibility for their future success or failure. The fate of China lies in their hands. The responsibility for organizing and training them to become worthy citizens of China, able to undertake the tasks of Resistance and Reconstruction, is mine; I cannot evade it.

The great thing about baseball is the causality is easy to determine and it always falls on the shoulders of one person. So there is absolute responsibility. That's why baseball is psychologically the cruelest sport and why it really requires psychological resources to play baseball - because you have to learn to live with failure.

It's your own fear of failure that stops you from doing things.

Once we realize that imperfect understanding is the human condition there is no shame in being wrong, only in failing to correct our mistakes.

I've learned that mistakes can often be as good a teacher as success.

You have to be able to accept failure to get better.

Smokers, male and female, inject and excuse idleness in their lives every time they light a cigarette.

In the business world today, failure is apparently not an option. We need to change this attitude toward failure - and celebrate the idea that only by falling on our collective business faces do we learn enough to succeed down the road.

He who risks and fails can be forgiven. He who never risks and never fails is a failure in his whole being.

He was a self-made man who owed his lack of success to nobody.

I would sooner fail than not be among the greatest.

Failures are like skinned knees, painful but superficial.

We failed, but in the good providence of God apparent failure often proves a blessing.

So many times in my life, people have tried to make me a failure.

Elegance is not a dispensable luxury but a factor that decides between success and failure.

The revolutions of my century, the 20th century - the Soviet revolution, or the Chinese, or the revolutions that were fomented in Latin America, such as in Cuba - failed for the most part, a failure which was completely clear by the end of the century.

We climb to heaven most often on the ruins of our cherished plans, finding our failures were successes.

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.

Having written both comedy and drama, comedy's harder because the fear of failure's so much stronger. When you write a scene and you see it cut together, and it doesn't make you laugh, it hurts in a way that failed drama doesn't. Failed drama, it's all, 'That's not that compelling,' but failed comedy just lays there.

The freedom to fail is vital if you're going to succeed. Most successful people fail from time to time, and it is a measure of their strength that failure merely propels them into some new attempt at success.

The politician who never made a mistake never made a decision.

Loss is nothing else but change, and change is Nature's delight.

The vast majority of large scale change efforts fail. Which means that the probability that you have actually experienced a failure, and your people know that and are pessimistic, therefore, about trying something again, is very high.

The failure of Christianity in the areas west from Sicily was even greater, and was increased by the spread of Arab outlooks and influence to that area, and especially to Spain.

I think the fall in Eden was ultimately a failure to give thanks.

Failure is the most terrible thing in our business. When we fail, the whole world knows about it.

Top-up fees mean that universities are increasingly under pressure to confer degrees upon students, who perceive the degree as a commodity they've purchased. Failure doesn't enter into anyone's calculations.

If those committed to the quest fail, they will be forgiven. When lost, they will find another way. The moral imperative of humanism is the endeavor alone, whether successful or not, provided the effort is honorable and failure memorable.

Well, the idea is that failure is an inevitable partner on the road to success and, if you're not willing to confront failure, you can never find out how good you are.

Our failings sometimes bind us to one another as closely as could virtue itself.

He who has never failed somewhere, that man can not be great.

It is of immense importance to learn to laugh at ourselves.

Where do we enroll in Life 101? Where are the classes dealing with the loss of a job, the death of a loved one, the failure of a relationship? Unfortunately, those lessons are mostly learned through trial by fire and the school of hard knocks.

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

There is something good in all seeming failures. You are not to see that now. Time will reveal it. Be patient.

Failure should be our teacher, not our undertaker. Failure is delay, not defeat. It is a temporary detour, not a dead end. Failure is something we can avoid only by saying nothing, doing nothing, and being nothing.

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

The biggest job we have is to teach a newly hired employee how to fail intelligently. We have to train him to experiment over and over and to keep on trying and failing until he learns what will work.

It's frustrating; terrorism is rare and largely ineffectual, yet we regularly magnify the effects of both their successes and failures by terrorizing ourselves.

The central thesis of the American failure in Afghanistan - the one you'll hear from politicians and pundits and even scholars - was succinctly propounded by Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage: 'The war in Iraq drained resources from Afghanistan before things were under control'.

In the old days, variety turns like me learned how to cope with failure - we all had nights when we 'died' on stage - but today's youngsters simply don't have that experience. For them, it really is instant make or break time - hence, all the tears and, hence, all the potential emotional damage.

Failure's inevitable. It happens all the time in a complex economy. And how did the economy produce all these amazing things that we have around us, computers and cell phones and so on? Well, the process was trial and error. There were a bunch of ideas, and the good ones grew and prospered, and the bad ones were pretty ruthlessly weeded out.

You always want to try, in everything you do, to attempt something you've never tried before, and the only way to succeed at that is through failure, and the only way to succeed through failure is just banging your head against the wall over and over until you get to that interesting thing on the other side.

We all deal with failure. If you're lucky to have a long career, it's part of the experience.

Many of the familiar little things that we use every day have typically evolved over a period of time to a state of familiarity. They balance form and function, elegance and economy, success and failure in ways that are not only acceptable, but also admirable.

I didn't want to get divorced, but at the point where your children are part of it, you have to do something. I would really love it not to have happened because it haunts you, it will never go away, and it is probably the biggest failure, and I have to live with that.

In any restaurant, my eyes alight first, as if by an atavistic pull, on the meat dishes on the menu. In any dinner party I throw, I think of the non-vegetarian dish as central. I view this as a combination of weakness, greed and moral failure. Someone please help.

Life is to be lived, not controlled, and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.

They say President Wilson has blundered. Perhaps he has, but I notice he usually blunders forward.

Everybody is an expert on one thing - that's what I learned in my high school journalism class - and that's, of course, his own life. And everybody deserves to live and have his story told. And if it doesn't seem like an interesting story, then that's the failure of the listener, or the journalist who retells it badly.

Nothing helps make a leader more approachable than admitting your struggles, screw-ups and behind-the-scenes thinking on hard calls. If the leader makes this a priority, the whole company will be more open and methodical learning from failure.

Is there any possibility of giving international air travel, which we all need and use and hate, a touch of glamour, or even of reliable, soulless efficiency? I suspect future historians will puzzle over our failure. But by then, of course, we shall be in the age of mass space travel, with its fresh and unimaginable crop of horrors.

We can't have a failure in Iraq, but we also can't be there for the next 10 years because if we are, it's going to become, I think, a failure in and of itself.

After college, I was living in New York and wrote furiously, a huge novel that I knew was a failure. I hoped that the book would work, but to be honest, I think I knew it would never work, even as I was finishing it.

I don't think anybody whose ever been divorced can tell you divorce is easy or fun or feels like anything other than a tremendous failure.

If Liberia has failed, then, it is no evidence of the failure of the Negro in government. It is merely evidence of the failure of slavery.

Experience teaches slowly, and at the cost of mistakes.

Life is nothing but a bunch of experiences. There's no such thing as success or failure.

We stumble and fall constantly even when we are most enlightened. But when we are in true spiritual darkness, we do not even know that we have fallen.

Most leadership strategies are doomed to failure from the outset.

It is a changing world because of the newcomers who keep arriving and who leave us behind. Trying to keep pace with them is doomed to inglorious failure, especially as the pace has quickened so much.

Intemperance and intolerance serve no one, and hatred guarantees failure.

It's - everybody's looking at the bottom line all the time, and failure doesn't look good on the bottom line, and yet you don't learn anything without failing.

The Conservatives are a confusing lot. They first denied climate change was a serious issue and then suggested strengthening the nuclear industry as a solution to it. They oppose the European Union, but support joining North American Free Trade Agreement, despite its obvious failure.

It's difficult because we tend to overrate the pain of failure. We fear it too much. That's research that emerges from psychology. We think it's going to be worse than it really is. And, I think, as we get a bit older, really after we leave school or college, we quickly stop experimenting.

The paradox is that when we model future designs on past successes, we are inviting failure down the line; when we take into account past failures and anticipate potential new ways in which failure can occur, we are more likely to produce successful designs.

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.

In God's world, for those who are in earnest, there is no failure. No work truly done, no word earnestly spoken, no sacrifice freely made, was ever made in vain (as long as it was done out of love, not personal glory)

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

When I was 18, I couldn't wait to move away. I was like: 'If I ever have to come back here, I'll kill myself.' Glasgow seemed like failure and death to me back then, but not any more.

A fictionalised memoir of my father would be a failure as a novel.

Christmas is the season I use to clock failure in life. It stops time, as it were, on the year - where you are in it, where you are in your travail unto the grave.

I've always had to have some kind of failure before I was successful.

Good fiction is about asserting the beauties of the world, inventing a new, positive thing. Where am I going to get that? And it should be original; it should not be cliched. So the way I looked at history was not to accuse it of failure.

I always say that failure was my friend. I learned nothing at school, so I just lived in my own world.

In politics, what begins in fear usually ends in failure.

The more times I was turned down, the more I believed I was getting closer to making it. A lot of people in Korea say that failure is the mother of success, so I believed that more times I failed, the more likely I was to succeed.

What is there to be afraid of? The worst thing that can happen is you fail. So what? I failed at a lot of things. My first record was horrible.

Failure doesn't mean you are a failure... it just means you haven't succeeded yet. Failure is a detour, not a dead-end street.

In Iraq we must succeed. Failure is not an option.

I think you have to try and fail, because failure gets you closer to what you're good at.

There is no loneliness greater than the loneliness of a failure. The failure is a stranger in his own house.

The theory seems to be that as long as a man is a failure he is one of God's children, but that as soon as he succeeds he is taken over by the Devil.

Fact: From quitting smoking to skiing, we succeed to the degree we try, fail, and learn. Studies show that people who worry about mistakes shut down, but those who are relaxed about doing badly soon learn to do well. Success is built on failure.

I thank God for my failures. Maybe not at the time but after some reflection. I never feel like a failure just because something I tried has failed.

Failing to be there when a man wants her is a woman's greatest sin, except to be there when he doesn't want her.

We only think when we are confronted with problems.

Every great mistake has a halfway moment, a split second when it can be recalled and perhaps remedied.

Success and failure are both part of life. Both are not permanent.

The failures and successes are necessary for learning.

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.

Our failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq thus far has been deeply troubling, and our intelligence-gathering process needs thorough and unbiased investigation.

The path of least resistance is the path of the loser.

There is much to be said for failure. It is much more interesting than success.

The main failure of education is that it has not prepared people to comprehend matters concerning human destiny.

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