Quotes About Failure

If you try to make interesting films, you're going to be disappointed most of the time. I choose just not to look at it that way. I don't look at American History X as a failure, or Fight Club as a failure, or 25th Hour as a failure, or Larry Flynt as a failure, or any of the movies that I care about that I've made that were not immediately successful. I'll stand with those movies any day over 90 percent of the movies that came out at the same time that made a hundred million dollars

There is only one kind of failure I cannot tolerate: the failure to risk failure.

People aren't afraid of failure, they just don't know how to succeed. We are each responsible for our own success (or failure). Winning at what you do is no exception. To ensure a win, you must take a proactive approach. Prevention of failure is an important part of that process.

Do not simplify. Do not worry about failure. Failure is a badge of honour. It means you risked failure.

Failure instructs, failure improves. Failure shouldn't deter you.

Take care of yourself: When you don't sleep, eat crap, don't exercise, and are living off adrenaline for too long, your performance suffers. Your decisions suffer. Your company suffers. Love those close to you: Failure of your company is not failure in life. Failure in your relationship is.

What is failure? We can’t possibly know what failure is. Most people think they do, but that’s because they’re judging how their lives should be and what they need it to be: a success. Who is to say what’s a success and what’s a failure? Do your best. Trust. Relax. Do your best. Enjoy yourself.

The opposite of success is not failure. Unsuccessful efforts are not failures unless they so discourage you that you abandon further efforts to achieve your goal. Even then, the venture or effort may be a failure but you are not. Failure is an event not a character trait.

You can feel good about failure. Failure means you did something. You finished the story even if it wasn't what you'd hoped. Failure means you're learning. Growing. Doing.

What is to be got at to make the air sweet, the ground good under the feet, can only be got at by failure, trial, again and again and again failure.

I'm kind of a failure. I mean, I'll be honest. I'm successful in that I'm getting to work on great stuff, but I think I'm a failure in all the personal stuff that is most important to me.

The unfulfilling job is not the failure; not pursuing your dreams is the real failure. Developing a vision requires conquering your fears and finding motivation from within.

Failure is not an option. Failure is necessary...We try. We fail. We learn. We adjust.

I always thought I'd get farther. I'd like to blame the world for what I've failed to do, but the failure - the failure that sometimes washes over me as anger, makes me so angry I could spit - is all mine, in the end. What made my obstacles insurmountable, what consigned me to mediocrity, is me, just me. I thought for so long, forever, that I was strong enough -- or I misunderstood what strength was.

If success were easy, then it would not necessarily be true success. Some of history's most successful people learned to cope with failure as a natural offshoot of the experimental and creative process and often learned more from their failures than their successes. By taking the attitude that failure is merely a detour on the way to our destination, hope can blossom into success.

There's something to be said for failing. It's not the failure you feel, it's the failure that people project when something disappoints. You're back to ground zero, where there's no expectations, and that's where I like to be.

Failure seldom stops you. What stops you is the fear of failure.

Don't stay in a bad situation - whether it is a relationship or a job - out of fear of failure. It's not a failure to walk away and choose to be happy. It takes a lot of courage.

Failure isn't failing at the project at hand. Failure is giving up on yourself.

The greatest failure in life is the failure to participate in life.

Surprisingly, it's forgiveness, not guilt, that increases accountability. Researchers have found that taking a self-compassionate point of view on a personal failure makes people more likely to take personal responsibility for the failure than when they take a self-critical point of view. They also are more willing to receive feedback and advice from others, and more likely to learn from the experience.

The man who meets with a failure attributes this failure rather to the ill will of another than to fate.

This Creative Mechanism within you is impersonal. It will work automatically and impersonally to achieve goals of success and happiness, or unhappiness and failure, depending upon the goals which you yourself set for it. Present it with success goals and it functions as a Success Mechanism. Present it with negative goals, and it operates just as impersonally, and just as faithfully as a Failure Mechanism.

I don't have to pad my resume. Normal people are astounded by my resume, because normal people never let their dreams get beyond their front door, because they are scared of failure. I have never been scared of failure, and I have never failed.

I train so hard to make sure failure doesn't happen. If I do everything I can, and run as fast as I possibly can and someone still beats me, I don't think of that as failure.

Pain is not a punishment. And pleasure is not a reward. You could argue that failure is not punishment and Success is not reward. They're just failure and success. You can choose how you respond.

It is Basic Management 101 that if you reward failure you are going to get more failure, and if you want success you should reward success. But if you look at the way this administration has approached national security, they have kind of got that principle backwards.

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.

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

You can only succeed. You cannot fail. Failure is impossible; it is an illusion. Nothing is a failure. Nothing. Everything moves the human story, and hence the process of evolution, forward. Everything advances you on your journey.

Positive mental attitude is the right mental attitude in all circumstances. Success attracts more success while failure attracts more failure.

The Yogic sages say that all the pain of a human life is caused by words, as is all the joy. We create words to define our experience and those words bring attendant emotions that jerk us around like dogs on a leash. We get seduced by our own mantras (I'm a failure I'm lonely I'm a failure I'm lonely) and we become monuments to them. To stop talking for a while, then, is to attempt to strip away the power of words, to stop choking ourselves with words, to liberate ourselves from our suffocating mantras.

Tomorrow is the day reserved for the labor of the lazy. I am not lazy. Tomorrow is the day when the failure will succeed. I am not a failure. I will act now.

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

Failure is an event, not a person. You are NOT a failure!

Willpower should be understood to be the strength of the mind, which makes it capable of meeting success or failure with equanimity. It is not synonymous with certain success. Why should one's attempts always be attended by success? Success breeds arrogance and man's spiritual progress is thus arrested. Failure, on the other hand, is beneficial, inasmuch as it opens his eyes to his limitations and prepares him to surrender himself. Self surrender is synonymous with eternal happiness.

A person of intellect without energy added to it, is a failure.

Failure to summon forth the courage to risk a nondogmatic and nonevasive stance on such crucial existential matters can also blur our ethical vision. If our actions in the world are to stem from an encounter with what is central in life, they must be unclouded by either dogma or prevarication. Agnosticism is no excuse for indecision. If anything, it is a catalyst for action; for in shifting concern away from a future life and back to the present, it demands an ethics of empathy rather than a metaphysics of fear and hope.

It's failure, really, that you grow by, although nobody likes to experience it.

Failure to read what is happening in another's soul is not easily seen as a cause of unhappiness: but those who fail to attend the motions of their own soul are necessarily unhappy.

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.

You must bring every particle of your energy, unanswerable resolution, your best efforts, your persistent industry to your task or the best will not come out of you. You must back up your ambition by your whole nature, by unbounded enthusiasm and a determination to win which knows no failure.

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.

I don't think you can create anything interesting from a comfort zone. You have to work from a place of fear and failure.

The hopeful man sees success where others see failure, sunshine where others see shadows and storm.

Perhaps down in his heart Okonkwo was not a cruel man. But his whole life was dominated by fear, the fear of failure and of weakness. It was deeper and more intimate that the fear of evil and capricious gods and of magic, the fear of the forest, and of the forces of nature, malevolent, red in tooth and claw. Okonkwo’s fear was greater than these. It was not external but lay deep within himself.

Most criminals are not born; they are made.... What the State really punishes in a criminal is often its own neglect, its own failure to do its duty to the citizen.

Often the difference between a successful man and a failure is not one's better abilities or ideas, but the courage that one has to bet on his ideas, to take a calculated risk — and to act.