Quotes About Failure

Failure's relative. I've always felt, even early on, if I lose the freedom to fail, something's not right about that. It's how you treat failure, too. There's something to learn from it. I've had movies that have failed colossally, so you kind of analyze your failures: What kind of failure was it? A failure because it's misunderstood by others? A failure because you misunderstood it yourself?

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.

Think of it this way: There are two kinds of failure. The first comes from never trying out your ideas because you are afraid, or because you are waiting for the perfect time. This kind of failure you can never learn from, and such timidity will destroy you. The second kind comes from a bold and venturesome spirit. If you fail in this way, the hit that you take to your reputation is greatly outweighed by what you learn. Repeated failure will toughen your spirit and show you with absolute clarity how things must be done.

Don't let the fear of failure or failure as a whole stop you from becoming an entrepreneur. Failure doesn't define you or your business unless you allow it to.

When we think of failure; failure will be ours. If we remain undecided nothing will ever change. All we need to do is want to achieve something great and then simply to do it. Never think of failure, for what we think, will come about.

My brain . . . it cannot process failure. It will not process failure. Because if I sit there and have to face myself and tell myself, 'You're a failure' . . . I think that's almost worse than death.

Success is always an easier motivator, because you want more of it. But I've also been motivated by failure. Had I medaled in London, I don't think I would be one of the few that have gone to a Summer and Winter. I would have been content with that medal. Instead, I used that failure to go to the Winter Olympics. I always tell people that failure can be one of your biggest motivators if you just have an attitude adjustment about it.

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.

In truth, it's usually failure, disappointment, and frustration that motivate people to reexamine that which they've taken for granted. It's rare to find big change without significant bad news. ... In that sense, the pain of failure creates the largest opportunities for progress.

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.

If you bound the arms and legs of gold-medal swimmer Michael Phelps, weighed him down with chains, threw him in a pool and he sank, you wouldn't call it a 'failure of swimming.' So, when markets have been weighted down by inept and excessive regulation, why call this a 'failure of capitalism'?

This, then, is my choice: I can allow the events of my life to happen to me. Or I can take those very same actions and make them my own. I can live in my own present, risk failure, be assured of failure.

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

The fact that we are here today to debate raising America's debt limit is a sign of leadership failure. America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership. Americans deserve better. I, therefore, intend to oppose the effort to increase America's debt.

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 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.

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.

Failure doesn't mean you are a failure it just means you haven't succeeded yet.

Envy not success, nor pity failure, for you know not what is success or failure in the soul's reckoning.

What we face is a comprehensive contraction of our activities, due to declining fossil fuel resources and other growing scarcities. Our failure is the failure to manage contraction. It requires a thoroughgoing reorganization of daily life. No political faction currently operating in the USA gets this. Hence, it is liable to be settled by a contest for dwindling resources and there are many ways in which this won't be pretty.

The failure of the past philosophers is largely the failure to see the self-evident.

The true confessors have been aware that not only is life mostly failure, but that in one's failure or pettiness or wrongness exists the living drama of the self.

Failure does not exist. Failure is simply someone else's opinion of how a certain act should have been completed. Once you believe that no act must be performed in any specific other-directed way, then failing becomes impossible.

Testing leads to failure, and failure leads to understanding

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.

You become what you think about most. When you continually focus on the fear of failure, failure will become real for you. Look instead at the possibilities. Look at what could happen if only you would attempt it. Sure, it might not succeed completely. Yet even then you will learn something.

Oh and I thought, as i was dressing, how interesting it would be to describe the approach of age, and the gradual coming of death. As people describe love. To note every symptom of failure: but why failure? To treat age as an experience that is different from the others; and to detect every one of the gradual stages towards death which is a tremendous experience, an not as unconscious, at least in its approaches, as death is.

Failure is not the absence of success. Failure is the neglect of trying.

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 antidote for fear of failure is not success but small doses of failure.

According to the spirit of this age, the ultimate sin is no longer the failure to honor and thank God but the failure to esteem oneself. Self-abasement, not God-abasement, is the evil. And the cry of deliverance is not "O wretched man that I am, who will deliver me?" but "O worthy man that I am, would that I could only see it better"!

People who are optimistic see a failure as due to something that can be changed so that they can succeed next time around, while pessimists take the blame for the failure, ascribing it to some characteristic they are helpless to change.

Failure is an event, not a person. Think of failure as 'it' and not 'me'.

African Americans make up about 13 percent of the U.S. population but comprise 32 percent of patients treated for kidney failure, giving them a kidney failure rate that is 4.2 times greater than that of white Americans.

Failure is a part of success. There is no such thing as a bed of roses all your life. But failure will never stand in the way of success if you learn from it.

Growth is a greater mystery than death. All of us can understand failure, we all contain failure and death within us, but not even the successful man can begin to describe the impalpable elations and apprehensions of growth.

Failure is just part of the process, and it's not just okay; it's better than okay. God doesn't want failure to shut us down. God didn't make it a three-strikes-and-you're-out sort of thing. It's more about how God helps us dust ourselves off so we can swing for the fences again. And all of this without keeping a meticulous record of our screw-ups.

The patient person accepts a certain amount of failure knowing that it is as important a thread in the fabric of life as is success. Great individuals make great successes out of failure.

How important is failure - yes, failure - to the health of a thriving, innovative business? So important that Ratan Tata, chairman of India's largest corporation, gives an annual award to the employee who comes up with the best idea that failed.

Failure is not tied to money; it is a mindset. Failure is when we accept the lot we are given.

In the thirty years of my career I learned everything about success, but I did not learn, really, about failure. In Bar Rescue I got exposed to failure at a very deep level.

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.

When I see a kid in a movie theater texting, I think it's a failure of the movie. It's not a triumph of the Apple iPhone. It's a failure of Warner Bros. and Sony, and all that, because they haven't kept their attention and challenged them. They're smart little kids that are bored, and I wanted to challenge them.

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.

What we've also got to think about is the limitations of military power. Maybe it's time to focus on the economic issues, and most of all the political issues, because the political failure in Iraq right now is almost worse than the military failure. And the two are intertwined.

One who fears failure limits his activities. Failure is only the opportunity to more intelligently begin again.

It is not the failure of others to appreciate your abilities that should trouble you, but rather your failure to appreciate theirs.