Quotes About Failure

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• Some of the best lessons we ever learn we learn from our mistakes and failures. The error of the past is the wisdom of the future.
• Talk about your failures without apologizing.
• Failure is instructive. The person who really thinks learns quite as much from his failures as from his successes.
• Once the ego inflates it will only come back to earth through some jarring failure.
• You must cut yourself loose from the past and open your eyes to the present.
• Never walk away from failure. On the contrary, study it carefully and imaginatively for its hidden assets.
• Sorrow, disappointment, failure – learn from them. Then let them go.
• Failure always brings something valuable with it. I don’t let it leave until I extract that value.
• A failure doesn’t mean you are unworthy, nor does it preclude success on the next try.
• Do not waste yourself in rejection, nor bark against the bad, but chant the beauty of the good.
• Sometimes it takes a wrong turn to get you to the right place.
• Don’t bury your failures, let them inspire you.
• I don’t understand a way to work other than bold-facedly running towards failure.
• It is on our failures that we base a new and different and better success.
• You want to create a space in which people feel safe to think outside the box, test new approaches, and yes, even fail.
• I have always been pushed by the negative. The apparent failure of a play sends me back to my typewriter that very night, before the reviews are out. I am more compelled to get back to work than if I had a success.
• We need to accept that we won’t always make the right decisions, that we’ll screw up royally sometimes”understanding that failure is not the opposite of success, it’s part of success.
• Any being, any agent, who can truly say, Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time!x9d is standing on the threshold of brilliance.
• If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.
• People driven by a pursuit that puts them on the edges are often not on the periphery, but on the frontier, testing the limits of what it is possible to withstand and discover.
• In a fear-based, failure-averse culture, people will consciously or unconsciously avoid risk. They will seek instead to repeat something safe that’s been good enough in the past. Their work will be derivative, not innovative. But if you can foster a positive understanding of failure, the opposite will happen.
• I’m not the first to say that failure, when approached properly, can be an opportunity for growth.
• People need to feel safe experimenting, failing and speaking up when they see problems […] it starts with leadership being vulnerable enough to own up to failures and be open with their weaknesses.
• Failure saves lives. In the airline industry, every time a plane crashes the probability of the next crash is lowered by that. The Titanic saved lives because we’re building bigger and bigger ships. So these people died, but we have effectively improved the safety of the system, and nothing failed in vain.
• Failure doesn’t define you. It’s what you do after you fail that determines whether you are a leader or a waste of perfectly good air.
• We don’t need to celebrate failure. We do need to make it safe to admit failure – that’s how we learn from mistakes.
• The only risk of failure is promotion.
• In a crowded marketplace, fitting in is a failure. In a busy marketplace, not standing out is the same as being invisible.
• Short term pain has more impact on most people than long-term benefits do, which is why it’s so important for you to amplify the long-term benefits of not quitting.
• Most competitors quit long before they’ve created something that makes it to the top.
• You gotta act. And you gotta be willing to fail… if you’re afraid of failing, you won’t get very far.
• We don’t have to do all of it alone. We were never meant to.
• Failure and invention are inseparable twins.
• Don’t worry about failure – you only have to be right once.
• Work finally begins when the fear of doing nothing exceeds the fear of doing it badly.
• When it comes to creative endeavors, the concept of zero failures is worse than useless. It’s counterproductive.
• Don’t wait for things to be perfect before you share them with others. Show early and show often. It’ll be pretty when we get there, but it won’t be pretty along the way.
• Fear of failure is not sufficient justification for not pursuing what you want to do.
• Why waste time proving over and over how great you are, when you could be getting better?
• You must always be prepared to place a bet on yourself, on your future, by heading in a direction that others seem to fear.
• The only real stumbling block is fear of failure. In cooking you’ve got to have a ‘What the hell?’ attitude.
• It’s failure that gives you the proper perspective on success.
• My best successes came on the heels of failures.
• If you want to increase your success rate, double your failure rate.
• One makes mistakes; that is life. But it is never a mistake to have loved.
• Most things break, including hearts. The lessons of life amount not to wisdom, but to scar tissue and callus.
• Sometimes when things are falling apart, they may actually be falling into place.
• We pay a heavy price for our fear of failure. It is a powerful obstacle to growth. It assures the progressive narrowing of the personality and prevents exploration and experimentation.
• When you enter a mindset, you enter a new world. In one world success is about proving you’re smart or talented. Validating yourself. In the other (the world of changing qualities) it’s about stretching yourself to learn something new. Developing yourself.
• 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.
• Learning to fail well means learning to understand your mistakes, because unless you know what went wrong, you may do the wrong things to correct it.
• If you are afraid to learn from your mistakes, you will more than likely keep repeating them.
• Just because you fail once doesn’t mean you’re gonna fail at everything.
• Turn pain into progress. To be wrong as fast as you can is to sign up for aggressive, rapid learning.
• Failure doesn’t mean you are a failure… it just means you haven’t succeeded yet.
• Failure is not a bug of learning, it’s the feature.
• It’s not how far you fall, but how high you bounce that counts.
• If you don’t try at anything you can’t fail… it takes back bone to lead the life you want.
• I feel there’s an existential angst among young people. I didn’t have that. They see enormous mountains, where I only saw one little hill to climb.
• The majority of men meet with failure because of their lack of persistence in creating new plans to take the place of those which fail.
• Failures, repeated failures, are finger posts on the road to achievement. One fails forward toward success.
• Our business in life is not to succeed, but to continue to fail in good spirits.
• You’ve got to get to the stage in life where going for it is more important than winning or losing.
• Giving up is the only sure way to fail.
• What is the point of being alive if you don’t at least try to do something remarkable?
• Failure at some point in your life is inevitable, but giving up is unforgivable.
• I thank God for my failures. Maybe not at the time but after some reflection.
• Failure is a state of mind. It’s like one of those sand traps an ant lion digs. You keep sliding back. Takes one hell of a jump to get out of it.
• How we deal with tragedy defines who we are. I used to be terrible at it. Beyond terrible. You are not going to let this deflate you. You are going to pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and we will figure out what the next step is.
• Failure does not mean that you’ll never get what you want, sometimes failure means that you have to fight harder for something better.
• If you want something you can have it, but only if you want everything that goes with it, including all the hard work and the despair, and only if you’re willing to risk failure.
• The difference between average people and achieving people is their perception of and response to failure.
• You may have a fresh start any moment you choose, for this thing that we call ‘failure’ is not the falling down, but the staying down.
• Being defeated is often a temporary condition. Giving up is what makes it permanent.
• Truth is truly known only to those who suffer, lose, endure adversity and stumble from defeat to defeat.
• Do not be embarrassed by your failures, learn from them and start again.
• There are no failures, just experiences and your reactions to them.
• Age wrinkles the body. Quitting wrinkles the soul.
• Mistakes are proof that you are trying.
• The attempt to avoid failure makes failure more likely.
• If you aren’t experiencing failure, then you are making a far worse mistake: You are being driven by the desire to avoid it.
• Mistakes aren’t a necessary evil. They aren’t evil at all. They are an inevitable consequence of doing something new .
• To fail is to give up. But you are in the midst of a moving process. Nothing fails then. All goes on. Work is done. If good, you learn from it. If bad, you learn even more.
• If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. Then quit. There’s no point in being a damn fool about it.
• There is no disgrace in honest failure; there is disgrace in fearing to fail. What is past is useful only as it suggests ways and means for progress.
• You must experience and accept the extremes because if the contrast is lost, you lose appreciation; and when you lose appreciation you lose the value of everything.
• Happiness needs sadness. Success needs failure. Benevolence needs evil. Love needs hatred. Victory needs defeat. Pleasure needs pain.
• The trick is to take advantage of the particular details of the mess you’ve made, so that your next attempt will be informed by it and not just another blind stab in the dark.
• With a hint of good judgment, to fear nothing, not failure or suffering or even death, indicates that you value life the most. You live to the extreme; you push limits; you spend your time building legacies. Those do not die.
• Bad times have a scientific value. These are occasions a good learner would not miss.
• If I had to live my life again, I’d make the same mistakes, only sooner.
• Always remember that failure is an event, not a person.
• You’ve got to experience failure to understand that you can survive it.
• I’ve come to realize that all my past failures and frustrations were actually laying the foundation for the understanding that have created the new level of living I now enjoy.
• There’s meaning in every failure. Find it.
• Failure is nothing more than learning how to win.
• Blame is not for failure. It is for failing to help or ask for help.
• Mistakes and failures are precisely your means of education. They tell you about your own inadequacies.
• Once we realize that imperfect understanding is the human condition there is no shame in being wrong, only in failing to correct our mistakes.
• Just because you failed doesn’t mean you can’t succeed. We all fail. Mentally resilient people realize that its not failure that defines your identity but how you respond.
• If you experiment a lot you will fail often but at the same time your odds of success will also increase. Success and failure go hand in hand; they are not mutually exclusive. Learn to look at success and failure as gradations on a continuum, not as binary opposites.
• It is wise to keep in mind that neither success nor failure is ever final.
• People who have the ability to fail in public under their own names actually gain a lot of power.
• What would you be glad you did – even if you failed?
• An action committed in anger, is an action doomed to failure.
• Keep your head up in failure, and your head down in success.
• It is your own bad strategies, not the unfair opponent, that are to blame for your failures. You are responsible for the good and bad in your life.
• Ninety-nine percent of the failures come from people who have the habit of making excuses.
• Mishaps are like knives, that either serve us or cut us, as we grasp them by the blade or the handle.
• We read the world wrong and say that it deceives us.
• The chief trick to making good mistakes is not to hide them ” especially not from yourself.
• It’s not easy, but if you accept your misfortune and handle it right, your perceived failure can become a catalyst for profound reinvention.
• Ultimately, we all have to decide for ourselves what constitutes failure. But the world is quite eager to give you a set of criteria if you let it.
• It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all – in which case, you fail by default.
• 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.
• 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.
• When you take risks you learn that there will be times when you succeed and there will be times when you fail, and both are equally important.
• There are two kinds of failures: those who thought and never did, and those who did and never thought.
• Those who truly fail in my eyes are the ones who never try at all. The ones who sit on the couch and whine and moan and wait for the world to change for them.
• Your failure does not define you, your determination does.
• Success or failure is caused more by mental attitude than by mental capacity.
• Keep on beginning and failing. Each time you fail, start all over again, and you will grow stronger until you have accomplished a purpose – not the one you began with perhaps, but one you’ll be glad to remember.
• Life is a Tetris. Do something good, it disappears immediately. But mistakes, they accumulate themselves. In the end everyone loses.
• I think perfection is ugly. Somewhere in the things humans make, I want to see scars, failure, disorder, distortion.
• Excuses are the nails used to build a house of failure.
• We are all failures – at least the best of us are.
• Failure is not fatal, but failure to change might be.
• If at first you don’t succeed, get a bigger hammer.
• Maybe I’m lucky to be going so slowly, because I may be going in the wrong direction.
• Never be afraid to try something new. Remember, amateurs built the ark; professionals built the Titanic.
• Get a bike that’s as low to the ground as you can find, put on elbow and knee pads so you’re not afraid of falling, and go.
• The real embarrassing issue about failure is your own acknowledgement that you’re not a genius, that you’re not as good as you thought you were. […] There’s only one solution: You must embrace failure.
• Failure after long perseverance is much grander than never to have a striving good enough to be called a failure.
• There is nothing in the world so easy to explain as failure ” it is, after all, what everybody does all the time.
• The only time you don’t fail is the last time you try anything – and it works.
• Ever meet someone who’s always had everything work out for them with zero struggle? They usually have the depth of a puddle. Or they don’t exist.
• An architect’s most useful tools are an eraser at the drafting board, and a wrecking bar at the site.
• Failure is a bruise, not a tattoo.
• Even the worst shit that happens to you can be converted into gold if you are clever enough.
• I didn’t fail the test, I just found 100 ways to do it wrong.
• If at first you don’t succeed, destroy all evidence that you tried.
• Failure changes for the better, success for the worse.
• It’s much, much better to wind up with a lot of crap having tried it than to overthink in the beginning and not do it.
• It is very important to embrace failure and to do a lot of stuff ” as much stuff as possible ” with as little fear as possible.
• Success is often achieved by those who don’t know that failure is inevitable.
• Your dream doesn’t have an expiration date. Take a deep breath and try again.
• I think you have to try and fail, because failure gets you closer to what you’re good at.
• Embrace failure. Never never quit. Get very comfortable with that uneasy feeling of going against the grain and trying something new.
• No matter what one does, regardless of failure or success, the experience is a form of success in itself.
• The real test is not whether you avoid this failure, because you won’t. It’s whether you let it harden or shame you into inaction, or whether you learn from it; whether you choose to persevere.
• Every adversity, every failure, every heartache carries with it the seed on an equal or greater benefit.
• There is no failure unless one stops. Not to work is to cease, tighten up, become nervous and therefore destructive of the creative process.
• Failure doesn’t kill you… it increases your desire to make something happen.
• A hundred failures would not matter, when one single success could change the destiny of the world.
• If you aren’t making mistakes, you aren’t taking enough risks.
• You may be disappointed if you fail, but you are doomed if you don’t try.
• You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated. In fact, it may be necessary to encounter the defeats, so you can know who you are, what you can rise from, how you can still come out of it.
• Everything negative – pressure, challenges – is all an opportunity for me to rise.
• It’s only when you risk failure that you discover things. When you play it safe, you’re not expressing the utmost of your human experience.
• Do the one thing you think you cannot do. Fail at it. Try again. Do better the second time. The only people who never tumble are those who never mount the high wire.
• You build on failure. You use it as a steppingstone. 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.
• Forget the mistakes of the past and press on to the greater achievements of the future.
• It doesn’t matter how many times you have failed, you only have to be right once.
• Failure either ruins you or turns you into the man you can become.
• Not failure, but low aim, is a crime.
• Failure is a detour, not a dead-end street.
• You make mistakes. Mistakes don’t make you.
• No garden is without its weeds.
• My reputation grows with every failure.
• Tough situations build strong people.
• The bigger the failure, the greater the lesson.
• Failure open doors to new opportunities.
• Key to failure: Trying to please everyone.
• AttitudeAxa0is the essence of failure or success.
• It’s not failure, it’s unfinished success.
• Apprentice yourself in failure.
• You always pass failure on the way to success.
• Without failure there is no achievement.
• The only failures are those who fail to try.
• We are all full of weakness and errors; let us mutually pardon each other our follies.
• Science, my lad, is made up of mistakes, but they are mistakes which it is useful to make, because they lead little by little to the truth.
• When you fail to prepare, you’re preparing to fail.
• Victory has a hundred fathers, but failure is an orphan.
• My great concern is not whether you have failed, but whether you are content with your failure.
• It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed.
• 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.
• If you set your goals ridiculously high and it’s a failure, you will fail above everyone else’s success.
• In a world that’s changing really quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is to not taking risks.
• Failure is an importance part of your growth… Don’t be afraid to fail.
• You have to be able to accept failure to get better.
• Sometimes life’s going to hit you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith.
• Success is usually the culmination of controlling failure.
• Failure is unimportant. It takes courage to make a fool of yourself.
• Sport and life is about losing. It’s about understanding how to lose.
• Don’t think of it as failure. Think of it as time-released success.
• There is no such thing as failure, only results.
• Negative results are just what I want. They’re just as valuable to me as positive results. I can never find the thing that does the job best until I find the ones that don’t.
• Success depends upon previous preparation, and without such preparation there is sure to be failure.
• Rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I built my life.
• In any case, you must not confuse a single failure with a final defeat.
• Failure is an attitude, not an outcome.
• You should become a connoisseur of your own mistakes, turning them over in your mind as if they were works of art, which in a way they are.
• Don’t worry about failures, worry about the chances you miss when you don’t even try.
• Mistakes are the portals of discovery.
• Failure is simply an opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.
• Losers quit when they fail. Winners fail until they succeed.
• Make new mistakes. Make glorious, amazing mistakes. Make mistakes nobody’s ever made before.
• I don’t believe in failure. It is not failure if you enjoyed the process.
• No man is defeated without until he has first been defeated within.
• Anyone who attempts is not a failure.
• All my successes have been built on my failures.
• Try again. Fail again. Fail better.
• Failures can be seen as information or they can be seen as a threat to your sense of self. Embracing the former definition will help you learn and improve. Succumbing to the latter will make you timid and resentful.
• No human ever became interesting by not failing. The more you fail and recover and improve, the better you are as a person.
• Human beings are the only creatures who are allowed to fail. If an ant fails, it’s dead. But we’re allowed to learn from our mistakes and from our failures. And that’s how I learn, by falling flat on my face and picking myself up and starting all over again.
• Failure is enriching. It’s also important to accept that you’ll make mistakes ” it’s how you build your expertise. The trick is to learn a positive lesson from all of life’s negative moments.
• When defeat comes, accept it as a signal that your plans are not sound, rebuild those plans, and set sail once more toward your coveted goal.
• Failure is painful, and our feelings about this pain tend to screw up our understanding of its worth. To disentangle the good and the bad parts of failure, we have to recognize both the reality of the pain and the benefit of the resulting growth.
• Being open about problems is the first step toward learning from them… We must think of the cost of failure as an investment in the future.
• You are not your idea, and if you identify too closely with your ideas, you will take offense when they are challenged.
• When you make a mistake, you should learn to take a deep breath, grit your teeth, and then examine your own recollections of the mistake as ruthlessly and as dispassionately as you can manage.
• Try to acquire the weird practice of savoring your mistakes, delighting in uncovering the strange quirks that led you astray.
• Sometimes people let the same problem make them miserable for years when they could just say so whatx9d. That’s one of my favorite things to say: So whatx9d.
• Every time they told me nox9d, I just got stronger.
• Most great people have attained their greatest success just one step beyond their greatest failure.
• I am I lion and I refuse to talk, to walk, to sleep with the sheep. I will not hear those that weep and complain for their disease is contagious. Let them join the sheep. The slaughterhouse of failure is not in my destiny.
• Nothing fails like success because we don’t learn from it. We learn only from failure.
• It doesn’t matter how far you might rise ” at some point, you are bound to stumble. Because if you’re constantly doing what we do ” raising the bar ” if you’re constantly pushing yourself higher, higher, the law of averages predicts that you will, at some point, fall.
• Remember this: There is no such thing as failure ” failure is just life trying to move us in another direction.
• When we give ourselves permission to fail, we, at the same time, give ourselves permission to excel.
• There are defeats more triumphant than victories.
• What would life be if we had no courage to attempt anything?
• There is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve: the fear of failure.
• Face failure head on, don’t be afraid of it, and people will support and welcome you even more.
• I don’t want the fear of failure to stop me from doing what I really care about.
• Defeat is not the worst of failures. Not to have tried is the true failure.
• If you’re waiting until you feel talented enough to make it, you’ll never make it.
• Failure is part of the process of success. People who avoid failure also avoid success.
• But instead of spending our lives running towards our dreams, we are often running away from a fear of failure or a fear of criticism.
• I must say a word about fear. It is life’s only true opponent. Only fear can defeat life. It is a clever, treacherous adversary, how well I know.
• It has no decency, respects no law or convention, shows no mercy. It goes for your weakest spot, which it finds with unnerving ease.
• It begins in your mind, always… so you must fight hard to express it. You must fight hard to shine the light of words upon it.
• Because if you don’t, if your fear becomes a wordless darkness that you avoid, perhaps even manage to forget, you open yourself to further attacks of fear because you never truly fought the opponent who defeated you.
• There is no growth or success without change.
• Pain is the not the only way to learn a lesson, but it is the surest way to never forget one.
• 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.
• Even those who venture to dip a toe in the pond of risk never allow themselves to get used to the water.
• Like success, failure is many things to many people. With positive mental attitude, failure is a learning experience, a rung on the ladder, and a plateau at which to get your thoughts in order to prepare to try again.
• I will persist until I succeed. I was not delivered unto this world in defeat, nor does failure course in my veins. I am not a sheep waiting to be prodded by my shepherd.
• You need to have faith in yourself. Be brave and take risks. You don’t have to have it all figured out to move forward.
• I’m not crying because of you; you’re not worth it. I’m crying because my delusion of who you were was shattered by the truth of who you are.
• Ever has it been that loves knows not its own death until the hour of separation.
• People settle. They settle for less than they are capable of.
• Quit or be exceptional. Average is for losers.
• A little more persistence a little more effort and what seemed hopeless failure may turn to glorious success.
• You can measure your worth by your dedication to your path, not by your successes or failures.
• I honestly think it is better to be a failure at something you love than to be a success at something you hate.
• I’m not going to get somewhere and say, ‘OK, I’m done.’ Success is never final; I’ll just keep on going. The same way as failure never being fatal. Just keep going. I’m going to the stars and then past them.
• In my experience, each failure contains the seeds of your next success – if you are willing to learn from it.
• The greatest mistake you can make in life is to be continually fearing you will make one.
• The road to success and the road to failure are almost exactly the same.
• When all is said and done, success without happiness is the worst kind of failure.
• It is a mistake to suppose that people succeed through success; they often succeed through failures.
• The only real failure is the failure to try, and the measure of success is how we cope with disappointment.
• Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive.
• I think it’s important to have a good hard failure when you’re young. I learned a lot out of that. Because it makes you kind of aware of what can happen to you. Because of it I’ve never had any fear in my whole life when we’ve been near collapse and all of that. I’ve never been afraid. I’ve never had the feeling I couldn’t walk out and get a job doing something.
• There is no learning without some difficulty and fumbling. If you want to keep on learning, you must keep on risking failure ” all your life. It’s as simple as that.
• The men who try to do something and fail are infinitely better than those who try to do nothing and succeed.
• A word of encouragement during a failure is worth more than an hour of praise after success.
• The brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something. Because the brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want it badly enough. They’re there to stop the other people.
• The person who failed often knows how to avoid future failures. The person who knows only success can be more oblivious to all the pitfalls.
• When you’re down in the hole, when that moment comes, it’s really okay to feel bad for a little while ” give yourself time to mourn what you think you may have lost ” but, then, here’s the key: Learn from every mistake.
• Every experience, encounter, and particularly your mistakes are there to teach you and force you into being more of who you are.
• No matter what challenges or setbacks or disappointments you may encounter along the way, you will find true success and happiness if you have only one goal ” there really is only one, and that is this: To fulfill the highest, most truthful expression of yourself as a human being.
• Never let success get to your head and never let failure get to your heart.
• The heart will break, but broken live on.
• No worldly success can compensate for failure in the home.
• You got to go down a lot of wrong roads to find the right one.
• Yes, I am imperfect and vulnerable and sometimes afraid, but that doesn’t change the truth that I am brave and worthy of love and belonging.
• I must be taken as I have been made. The success is not mine, the failure is not mine, but the two together make me.
• You will have to rise up and say, I don’t care how hard this is, I don’t care how disappointed I am, I’m not going to let this get the best of me. I’m moving on with my lifex9d.
• Tryingx9d is the biggest mistake you can make early on in a relationship. It sets a false expectation that you will eventually tire of.
• The hottest love has the coldest end.
• Heavy hearts, like heavy clouds in the sky, are best relieved by the letting of a little water.