99 Failure Quotes

1.  Do not fear mistakes. You will know failure. Continue to reach out. Benjamin Franklin
2. Failure doesn't mean you are a failure it just means you haven't succeeded yet. Robert H. Schuller
3. We create success or failure on the course primarily by our thoughts. Gary Player
4. 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
5. 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
6. Failure happens all the time. It happens every day in practice. What makes you better is how you react to it. Mia Hamm
7. America's most dangerous diseases have developed an immunity to politics. We suffer not from a failure of political organization or power, but a failure of love. Cal Thomas
8. 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
9. I've learned to think in terms of having a long career. Actors can have very long careers that last until the day we die, but there will be moments when you'll feel like you're a failure or when you're disappointed in yourself. Bryce Dallas Howard
10. We feel a lot of pressure about looking silly or appearing weak, whatever that means, or being a failure. You have to keep in your head: what's the worst that can happen? Michael Fassbender
11. I don't believe in failure. It is not failure if you enjoyed the process. Oprah Winfrey
12. The hippy movement was a failure. Joe Strummer
13. Failure is not fatal, but failure to change might be. John Wooden
14. They talk about the failure of socialism but where is the success of capitalism in Africa, Asia and Latin America? Fidel Castro
15. You cannot learn anything from success, you only learn from failure. Jim Dale
16. Success is usually the culmination of controlling failure. Sylvester Stallone
17. Well, I think first of all there was a failure to have real, clear information at our disposal. There was a real lack of situational awareness. We didn't have the capabilities on the ground to give us real-time, accurate assessments of the physical condition of the city. Michael Chertoff
18. Success is often achieved by those who don't know that failure is inevitable. Coco Chanel
19. Failure is only postponed success as long as courage 'coaches' ambition. The habit of persistence is the habit of victory. Herbert Kaufman
20. This dullness of vision regarding the importance of the general welfare to the individual is the measure of the failure of our schools and churches to teach the spiritual significance of genuine democracy. Henry A. Wallace
21. You get so afraid of failure and so afraid of losing and so afraid of not being the best that it's not a natural drive - it's born out of fear of failure. Which helps in Hollywood. Gabrielle Union
22. 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
23. I don't want to feel like a failure to my daughter. She's the best thing I've ever done. Buffy - pretty great and all, but Charlotte's way better. Sarah Michelle Gellar
24. There comes a point in your moviegoing life where you look at the screen and then you look at the world and you ask, 'What is going on?' You want the movies to show you the chaos and mess and risk and failure that are normal for a lot of us. Generally, the movies hide all of that. Wesley Morris
25. Indecision and delays are the parents of failure. George Canning
26. Young players need freedom of expression to develop as creative players... they should be encouraged to try skills without fear of failure. Arsene Wenger
27. Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything - all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Steve Jobs
28. Other countries, such as Israel, successfully employ behavior detection techniques at their airports, but the bloated, ineffective bureaucracy of TSA has produced another security failure for U.S. transportation systems. John Mica
29. 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
30. Failure is unimportant. It takes courage to make a fool of yourself. Charlie Chaplin
31. Every adversity, every failure, and every heartache, carries with it the Seed of an equivalent or greater Benefit. Napolean Hill
32. War is failure of diplomacy. John Dingell
33. Coming to terms with the fact that my marriage was a failure was devastating and very difficult. Sarah McLachlan
34. Failure to properly control our borders costs citizens in many ways: schools become overcrowded, medical resources are stretched too thin, other government services are overtaxed, and taxes increase further. Zach Wamp
35. 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
36. I can accept failure, everyone fails at something. But I can't accept not trying. Michael Jordan
37. The line between failure and success is so fine that we scarcely know when we pass it: so fine that we are often on the line and do not know it. Elbert Hubbard
38. Failure is a detour, not a dead-end street. Zig Ziglar
39. I love Rauschenberg. I love that he created a turning point in visual history, that he redefined the idea of beauty, that he combined painting, sculpture, photography, and everyday life with such gall, and that he was interested in, as he put it, 'the ability to conceive failure as progress.' Jerry Saltz
40. Failure is impossible. Susan B. Anthony
41. If you've gone into a marriage and you haven't been clear about how you're going to handle money, how you want to raise kids, who is going to work or stay home or what have you, then you've set yourself up for failure. Phil McGraw
42. 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
43. No matter how vast, how total, the failure of man here on earth, the work of man will be resumed elsewhere. War leaders talk of resuming operations on this front and that, but man's front embraces the whole universe. Henry Miller
44. Any man who has $10,000 left when he dies is a failure. Errol Flynn
45. The failure of women to produce genius of the first rank in most of the supreme forms of human effort has been used to block the way of all women of talent and ambition for intellectual achievement. Anna Garlin Spencer
46. 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
47. There is no middle ground in Hollywood you're a failure or you're a success. That mentality is wild. Javier Bardem
48. I've always embraced failure as a noble pursuit. It allows you to be anti whatever anyone wants you to be, and to break all the rules. Malcolm Mclaren
49. 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. Mary Pickford
50. Mass transportation is doomed to failure in North America because a person's car is the only place where he can be alone and think. Marshall McLuhan
51. I went to a motivational training course once, a course of self-discovery, and I found out after a week that my fear - it was not a fear of not being accepted - was a very violent fear of failure. Emanuel Steward
52. The only failure one should fear, is not hugging to the purpose they see as best. George Eliot
53. With failure, you just try again. Judd Nelson
54. I think somehow you need to get to a certain point in your life where the notion of failure is absurd. Jeff Tweedy
55. Failure is instructive. The person who really thinks learns quite as much from his failures as from his successes. John Dewey
56. Failure is nature's plan to prepare you for great responsibilities. Napolean Hill
57. Don't be afraid of missing opportunities. Behind every failure is an opportunity somebody wishes they had missed. Lily Tomlin
58. The failure of the White House and Congress to seriously address the nation's fiscal situation is certain to broaden the belief among many voters that the U.S. political system is broken. Ron Fournier
59. Do not be embarrassed by your failures, learn from them and start again. Richard Branson
60. We all struggle with our failure to communicate and our failure to reach beyond fear to love people. Mira Sorvino
61. 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
62. Every failure is a step to success. William Whewell
63. 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
64. Think like a queen. A queen is not afraid to fail. Failure is another steppingstone to greatness. Oprah Winfrey
65. I find writing very difficult. It's hard and it hurts sometimes, and it's scary because of the fear of failure and the very unpleasant feeling that you may have reached the limit of your abilities. Tony Kushner
66. Learning starts with failure the first failure is the beginning of education. John Hersey
67. 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
68. There can be no failure to a man who has not lost his courage, his character, his self respect, or his self-confidence. He is still a King. Orison Swett Marden
69. I mean, I love L.A. - I love living here. But I wish that we could make things without the need to hit a home run every single time. It's a unique thing to Hollywood that if you don't do that every time, then you're considered a failure. But it's like, 'Well, are you making movies to be successful? Or are you making movies to learn something?' Kristen Stewart
70. It's a failure of national vision when you regard children as weapons, and talents as materials you can mine, assay, and fabricate for profit and defense. John Hersey
71. Questioning the nature and implications of liminal instances necessarily involves failure, if only in the specifically technical sense of entering spaces where prevailing criteria of success scarcely apply. Brian Ferneyhough
72. In Britain, by contrast, we still think that class plays a part in determining a person's life chances, so we're less inclined to celebrate success and less inclined to condemn failure. The upshot is that it's much easier to be a failure in Britain than it is in America. Toby Young
73. They who have conquered doubt and fear have conquered failure. James Allen
74. You'll never convince me there is a hopeless situation or there is any finality in any success or any failure. Carlos Ghosn
75. Enjoy failure and learn from it. You can never learn from success. James Dyson
76. It really is impossible not to like him. His success was his failure. Arthur C. Danto
77. The person interested in success has to learn to view failure as a healthy, inevitable part of the process of getting to the top. Joyce Brothers
78. What is more comforting to the terrorists around the world: the failure to pass the 9/11 legislation because we lacked 'a majority of the majority,' or putting aside partisan politics to enact tough new legislation with America's security foremost in mind? Rahm Emanuel
79. Unwillingness to risk failure is always there, but it gets harder when you feel you have more to lose. Demi Moore
80. We go there with confidence, but we know there is a very fine line between success and failure in this game. Alan Shearer
81. 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. Napoleon Hill
82. 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
83. Humanitarian missions are little different from any other public enterprise, diplomacy included, which is susceptible of misinterpretation by the public, hence ultimately of failure. Alvin Adams
84. A failure is not always a mistake, it may simply be the best one can do under the circumstances. The real mistake is to stop trying. B. F. Skinner
85. Success and failure are equally disastrous. Tennessee Williams
86. Belief in the supernatural reflects a failure of the imagination. Edward Abbey
87. Failure's a natural part of life. John Malkovich
88. Success represents the 1% of your work which results from the 99% that is called failure. Soichiro Honda
89. Women must try to do things as men have tried. When they fail their failure must be but a challenge to others. Amelia Earhart
90. Sometimes failure isn't an opportunity in disguise, it's just you. Doug Coupland
91. If you're 40 years old and you've never had a failure, you've been deprived. Gloria Swanson
92. 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
93. There is an increasingly pervasive sense not only of failure, but of futility. The legislative process has become a cruel shell game and the service system has become a bureaucratic maze, inefficient, incomprehensible, and inaccessible. Elliot Richardson
94. The very reasons sometimes that you make a film are the reasons for its failure. Sydney Pollack
95. There's always failure. And there's always disappointment. And there's always loss. But the secret is learning from the loss, and realizing that none of those holes are vacuums. Michael J. Fox
96. It's fine to celebrate success but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure. Bill Gates
97. I think that failure by your own standards is certainly a form of success. Bonnie Hunt
98. It was an interesting question as to whether the BBC had a future in the digital world, and what form of market failure could justify the licence fee system. Gavyn Davies
99. Failure comes only when we forget our ideals and objectives and principles. Jawaharlal Nehru