Quotes About Failure

What a shame to be so afraid of failure that you stop living. My wife has a great one-liner about failure: "Never consider yourself a failure-you can always serve as a bad example." She is right. Failure can be a better teacher than success.

Cultivate your desire for success to be greater than the fear of failure; Failure is merely a pitstop between where you stand and success. Failure allows you to learn the fastest; Failure inspires winners and defeats losers.

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

You know George W. Bush is a war-time president, he says - proudly. Guess what. War is failure! When you are at war, you have failed! When you have gone to a war of choice and lied about it, you're a double-triple, triple-quadruple failure! Or a warlord. It's called a warlord in other countries. A war time president here. One man's ceiling I guess is another man's floor. George Bush is a warlord. He's a failure!

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

If you can't embrace both failure or the possibility of failure, or the tremendous fear of failure, you can't be wildly successful. It's just an axiomatic truth.

Novels are routinely denigrated when characters are not found to be likable. Is Raskolnikov likable? Is King Lear? The plethora of such naive readers testifies to a failure of imagination - the capacity to see into unfamiliar lives, motives, feelings - and this failure must, at least in part, be the failure of the teaching of literature in the schools.

Ultimately, fear of failure generates a vicious circle that creates what is most feared. To break this cycle, you need to make peace with failure. It isn't enough to merely tolerate it; you need to appreciate the failure and use it.

So you think that you're a failure, do you? Well, you probably are. What's wrong with that? In the first place, if you've any sense at all you must have learned by now that we pay just as dearly for our triumphs as we do for our defeats. Go ahead and fail. But fail with wit, fail with grace, fail with style. 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.

It is not failure itself that holds you back; it is the fear of failure that paralyzes you.

The inner experience of fallure is totally different than failure. Going to fallure means 100% commitment - you leave nothing in reserve, no mental or physical resource untapped, you never give yourself a psychological out. Failure means making a decision to let go, to be less than 100% committed, when confronted by fear, pain and uncertainty.

Fact is, the desperate desire to be cool has skewed our culture toward nihilism, carelessness, and ineptitude. It is now cool to be an idiot. A jackass. It's cool to be a failure, as long as your failure is the basis for a reality show.

The only real failure is the failure to try, and the measure of success is how we cope with disappointment.

My brain cannot process failure... It WILL not process failure

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

Much of life is about failure, whether we acknowledge it or not, and your destiny is profoundly shaped by how effectively you learn from and adapt to failure.

I always assume that nothing that I make is going to be a success, that everything I make is going to be a failure - not a failure but not some huge box- office success. If something is an artistic success, I'll be happy, but I'll maybe be the only person that's happy.

A failure often does not have to be a failure at all. However, you have to be ready for it-will you admit when things go wrong? Will you take steps to set them right?-because the difference between triumph and defeat, you'll find, isn't about willingness to take risks. It's about mastery of rescue.

I think that failure is just as important as success. In a way, failure is a kind of success if you can look at it in the right way, if you can accept it and enjoy it in the right way.

I'm getting a little fed up with some of the pessimism that I'm hearing. I know some people who will not be convinced we've really won anything until the media changes. And that isn't gonna happen. They look at the media not liking Trump and they think it's failure. They look at the media ripping Trump and destroying him and they think it's gonna work and it means failure. And I get so fed up. I said, "Do you people not understand we're on the cusp here of one of the most exciting next four years?" The growth potential, the potential of putting America back together.

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.

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

I constantly experience failure in that my work is never as good as I want it to be. So I live with failure.

Remember that failure is part of the process of successful running. Performance is a roller coaster; to think otherwise is irrational and will cause you much stress and discouragement. Lighten up on yourself. Ups and downs can be expected. The performance of most serious runners fluctuates by the week. You win some, you lose some; some days you're hot, some days you're not. Don't fight with yourself when failure, the teacher, pays an unexpected visit. Open up to learning from it.

We have actually experienced in recent months a dramatic demonstration of an unprecedented intelligence failure, perhaps the most significant intelligence failure in the history of the United States.

The problem of the modern economy is not a failure of a knowledge of economics; it's a failure of a knowledge of history.

Your attitude towards failure determines your altitude after failure.

The only failure one man should fear, is the failure to do his best.

When amusement is necessary to get people to listen to the gospel there will be failure. This is not the method of Christ. To form an organization and provide all kinds of entertainment for young people, in order that they may come to the Bible classes, is to be foredoomed to failure.

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.

I try to have no plans the failure of which would greatly annoy me. Half the unhappiness in the world is due to the failure of plans which were never reasonable, and often impossible.

I was a failure in Boston...because they thought I was too fashionable to be intelligent, and a failure in New York because they were afraid I was too intelligent to be fashionable.

I don't believe in failure, because simply by saying you've failed, you've admitted you attempted. And anyone who attempts is not a failure. 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.

I knew I was not a failure in any way, and so did those close to me. It doesn't matter if you fall short; it is never a failure to go after your goals with everything you've got.

The tragedy of life is not found in failure but complacency. Not in you doing too much, but doing too little. Not in you living above your means, but below your capacity. It's not failure but aiming too low, that is life's greatest tragedy.

I find that goal setting, when done this way, leads to goal achieving. The chronic failure to achieve goals lowers self-esteem. Show me a failure to achieve a goal, and usually I can show you the violation of one or more of the above criteria. Imposed goals, vague goals, and unrealistic goals tend to produce only partial successes and outright failures.

Success attracts success and failure attracts failure because of the law of harmonious attraction.

The problems of a retired schoolteacher in Duluth are OUR problems. That the future of the child in Buffalo is OUR future. That the struggle of a disabled man in Boston to survive and live decently is OUR struggle. That The hunger of a woman in Little Rock is OUR hunger. That the failure anywhere to provide what reasonably we might to avoid pain is OUR failure.

If Steinitz continually took pains to discover combinations, the success or failure of his diligent search could not be explained by him as due to chance. Hence, he concluded that some characteristic, a quality of the given position, must exist that would indicate the success or the failure of the search before it was actually undertaken.

There is no such thing as failure for an artist, unless failure is the refusal to attempt, the unwillingness to dream.

[Failure is hard initially because] One knows what one has lost, but not what one may find [and learn from that failure]!

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

The failure of academic feminists to recognize difference as a crucial strength is a failure to reach beyond the first patriarchal lesson. In our world, divide and conquer must become define and empower.

With no attempt there can be no failure; with no failure no humiliation.

I think it's only failure if you put the word failure on it. I think it's part of the process of learning where you're going to go and what doesn't work.

Failure is a big part of a free market's success. People fail to live up to their potential, or to carry out all their good intentions, in all kinds of economic and political systems. Capitalism makes them pay a price for their failures, while socialism, feudalism, fascism and other systems enable personal failures, especially by those at the top, to be ignored.

Intent is guilt. Failure to successfully carry out the intent does not absolve the guilt.

"Failure" isn't a word I really use.