Quotes About Failure

When I was growing up, my dad would encourage my brother and I to fail. We would be sitting at the dinner table and he would ask, 'So what did you guys fail at this week?' If we didn't have something to contribute, he would be disappointed. When I did fail at something, he'd high-five me. What I didn't realize at the time was that he was completely reframing my definition of failure at a young age. To me, failure means not trying; failure isn't the outcome. If I have to look at myself in the mirror and say, 'I didn't try that because I was scared,' that is failure.

Here's a memonic device that I feel teaches how we can properly cope with failure. Forget about your failures; don't dwell on past mistakes Anticipate failure; realize that we all make mistakes. Intensity in everything you do; never be a failure for lack of effort. Learn from your mistakes; don't repeat previous errors. Understand why you failed; diagnose your mistakes so as to not repeat them. Respond, don't react to errors; responding corrects mistakes while reacting magnifies them. Elevate your self-concept. It's OK to fail, everyone does; now how are you going to deal with the failure

I was shocked when I found out who the biggest failure in the Bible actually is...The biggest one in the whole Bible is God...I mean, He lost His top-ranking, most anointed angel; the first man He ever created; the first woman He ever created; the whole earth and all the fullness therein; a third of the angels, at least - that's a big loss, man....Now, the reason you don't think of God as a failure is He never said He's a failure. And you're not a failure till you say you're one.

Look at Charlie Brown's face. Would you please hold still a minute Charlie Brown? I want Linus to study your face. Now this is what you call a failure face, Linus. Notice how it has failure written all over it. Study it carefully Linus. You rarely see such a good example. Notice the deep lines, the dull vacant look in the eyes. Yes, I would say this is one of the finest examples of a failure face that your liable to see for a long while.

Success and failure are both difficult to endure. Along with success come drugs, divorce, fornication, bullying, travel, meditation, medication, depression, neurosis and suicide. With failure comes failure.

Failure is so important. We speak about success all the time. It is the ability to resist failure or use failure that often leads to greater success. I've met people who don't want to try for fear of failing.

Failure to spend the [presentation] time wisely and well, failure to educate, entertain, elucidate, enlighten, and most important of all, failure to maintain attention and interest should be punishable by stoning. There is no excuse for tedium.

Don't be discouraged by a failure. It can be a positive experience. Failure is, in a sense, the highway to success, inasmuch as every discovery of what is false leads us to seek earnestly after what is true, and every fresh experience points out some form of error which we shall afterwards carefully avoid.

What's happening in Cuba is not a failure of the Cuban people. It's a failure of Fidel Castro and the Communists.

Every failure teaches a man something, if he will learn; and you are too sensible a man not to learn from this failure.

The essence of man is imperfection. Failure is simply a price we pay to achieve success. If we learn to embrace that new definition of failure, then we are free to start moving ahead - and failing forward.

The greatest failure is the failure to try.

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.

Finally, there is more genuine joy in climbing the hill of success, even though sweat may be spent and toes may be stubbed, than in aimlessly sliding down the path to failure. If a straight, honorable path has been chosen, the gaining of the summit yields lasting satisfaction. The morass of failure, if through laziness, indifference or other avoidable fault, yields nothing but ignominy and sorrow for self and family and friends.

Forget about the consequences of failure. Failure is only a temporary change in direction to set you straight for your next success.

Destructive Failure: Reveals limitations and weakness, highlights your shortcomings and when not processed correctly, keeps you feeling inadequate and defective. Productive failure: Reveals limitations and weakness, highlights your erroneous thinking and when processed correctly, leads you to better options and keeps you dependent on the Lord.

Choice! The key is choice. You have options. You need not spend your life wallowing in failure, ignorance, grief, poverty, shame, and self-pity. But hold on! If this is true then why have so many among us apparently elected to live in this manner? The answer is obvious. Those who live in unhappy failure have never exercised their options for a better way of life because they have never been aware that had any choices

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.

The failure of the United Nations - My failure is maybe, in retrospective, that I was not enough aggressive with the members of the Security Council.

If you can look at your failure and answer yes to the questions, "Did I give it my absolute best effort?" and "Have I learned something valuable?" then you have failed in the right way. By these standards, I've failed many times in my career. But every failure has made me stronger and wiser. Inevitably, success has always followed.

The only failure is the failure to learn from conscious and deliberate efforts to make things better, even if those attempts fall short of the mark.

The danger to America is not in the direction of the failure to maintain its economic position, but in the direction of the failure to maintain its ideals.

If you want to be rich, never give up. People tend to give up. If you have persistence, you will come out ahead of most people. More importantly, you will learn. When you do something, you might fail. But that's not because you're a failure. It's because you have not learnt enough. Do it differently each time. One day, you will do it right. Failure is your friend.

I don't look at failure as death, I don't look at failure as finality. I just look at it and pick myself up and say 'we shouldn't have done that' and move on.

Kipling said that Success and Failure are both imposters, and we should all listen to Kipling, if only because none of us are likely to know anybody else named Rudyard. But having been bitten in my life 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.

Learning starts with failure; the first failure is the beginning of education.

It's the ability to resist failure, in many ways, or use failure that often leads to the greatest success, isn't it?

Failure is an event, something that happens at a specific time on a certain day. If you want to be successful, you have to embrace failure and get back up every single time.

Mediocrity is my biggest fear. I'm not afraid of total failure because I don't think that will happen. I'm not afraid of success because that beats the hell out of failure. It's being in the middle that scares me.

I don't think something is a failure if you put your all into it. I'm a big fan of the saying, "Nothing beats a failure but a try."

Failure isn't failure if a lesson from it's learned. I guess love would not be love without a risk of being burned.

The only real failure in life is the failure to try.

There is a distinction between failing and being a failure. Few things are learned in life without failing at least once. Did you learn to roller skate without falling a few times? Did you learn to ride a bike without losing your balance? Chances are you didn't. You may have wanted to do those things so intensely that you quickly put unsuccessful attempts behind you and kept trying. Soon you acquired the skill to do the thing you wanted. Even though in the process of learning you may have failed many times, you were not a failure. "Failing" simply became an open door to try again.

Do you want to succeed? Then, double you rate of failure. Success lies on the far side of failure.

Nostalgia is a necessary thing, I believe, and a way for all of us to find peace in that which we have accomplished, or even failed to accomplish. At the same time, if nostalgia precipitates actions to return to that fabled, rosy-painted time, particularly in one who believes his life to be a failure, then it is an empty thing, doomed to produce nothing but frustration and an even greater sense of failure.

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.

If failure is not an option, neither is success. Innovation is just repeated failure till you come up with something that works.

Love and action always imply a failure, but this failure must not keep us from loving and acting. For we have not only to establish what our situation is, we have to choose it in the very heart of its ambiguity.

Failure is always present as an actor. I make my living by taking chances. If I'm not risking something, then I'm not doing my job, so I'm constantly failing. In fact, I'm trying to fail bigger. I try to focus on the positive, the moment, and try to realize where I'm at in an attempt to understand the failure.

This idea that failure is not an option: It makes failure invisible, inconceivable and inevitable.

The solution is to change from the negative to the positive and one way to do that is to remember that failure is an event - it is not a person. Another way is to understand that your child might make a mistake, but the child is not a mistake

Honesty is about the scars. Its about the blemishes. But its more than just bragging about failure, which could be a form of ego. Its about truly helping people.

Among all the tests President Obama faced in his first term, his biggest failure was climate change.

With every effort, I learned a lot. With every mistake and failure, not only mine, but of those around me, I learned what not to do. I also got to study the success of those I did business with as well. I had more than a healthy dose of fear, and an unlimited amount of hope, and more importantly, no limit on time and effort.

The guy who takes a chance, who walks the line between the known and unknown, who is unafraid of failure, will succeed.

Anxiety is practising failure in advance. Anxiety is needless and imaginary. It's fear about fear, fear that means nothing.

I was once young and now I am old, but not once have I been witness to God's failure to supply my need when first I had given for the furtherance of His work. He has never failed in His promise, so I cannot fail in my service to Him.

Richard Avedon taught me that if you go into a photo session and come out with what you had hoped for, it’s a failure. You need to be surprised if you want it to be magical.