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.

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.

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

Failure should be our teacher, not our undertaker. Failure is delay, not defeat. It is a temporary detour, not a dead end. Failure is something we can avoid only by saying nothing, doing nothing, and being nothing.

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.

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 George W. Bush universe of threats is a constantly expanding universe as he moves to politically higher ground, escaping from failure after failure. He's not only radical, but the consequences of his radicalism have been catastrophic.

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

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'?

To make a muscle grow, you must force it to go beyond its capabilities. The most potent way to apply that force is to train to failure. Training to failure means...the muscles are forced to grow stronger and bigger

There are systems that use failure as fuel for improvement, where the cost of failure is small.

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.

Failure is not to be feared. It is from failure that most growth comes.

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 is not a single, cataclysmic event. You don't fail overnight. Instead, failure is a few errors in judgement, repeated every day.

It doesn't matter what your probability of failure is. If there's a 90% chance of failure, there's a 10% chance of changing the world.

Failure is an option. It's what you do with the failure that makes you who you are. Our failures mold us. I have failed at several things in my life. What sets some of us apart, is that when we fail, we can't sleep at night. It haunts us until we have our time at redemption.

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

Don't be afraid of failure. That's not an easy lesson for teenagers - especially teenage girls - to learn. Our society sends us a lot of messages that imply we're supposed to be ashamed when we fall short. But I think we should be throwing each other failure parties!

There is no possibility of failure because you only control your actions and they only influence the probable evolution of your life over stochastic future paths. There is no failure, only feedback.

The more congenial page of some tenth-rate poeticule worn out with failure after failure and now squat in his hole like the tailless fox, he is curled up to snarl and whimper beneath the inaccessible vine of song.

Failure is a prerequisite for great success. If you want to succeed faster, double your rate of failure.

Success and happiness spring from facing failure after failure with enthusiasm.

Failure, then, failure! so the world stamps us at every turn. We strew it with our blunders, our misdeeds, our lost opportunities, with all the memorials of our inadequacy to our vocation. And with what a damning emphasis does it then blot us out! No easy fine, no mere apology or formal expiation, will satisfy the world's demands, but every pound of flesh exacted is soaked with all its blood. The subtlest forms of suffering known to man are connected with the poisonous humiliations incidental to these results.

Failure is built into creativity... the creative act involves this element of 'newness' and 'experimentalism,' then one must expect and accept the possibility of failure.

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.

I feel as if things are falling apart within me, like so many glass partitions shattering. I walk from place to place in the grip of a fury, needing to act, yet can do nothing about it because any attempt seems doomed in advance. Failure, everywhere failure. Only suicide hovers above me, gleaming and inaccessible.

I emphasize that virtually every engineering calculation is ultimately a failure calculation, because without a failure criterion against which to measure the calculated result, it is a meaningless number.

the spiritual meaning of every situation [is] not what happens to us, but what we do with what happens to us and who we decide to become because of what happens to us. The only real failure is the failure to grow from what we go through.

Trust is equal parts character and competence... You can look at any leadership failure, and it's always a failure of one or the other.

Only people who want to be somewhere, somebody, have to suffer the sadness of failure. But a person who never wants to be anybody, never wants to be anywhere else, cannot suffer the sadness of failure - he is always successful, just like me.

Rock bottom is an inability to cope with the commonplace that is so extreme it makes even the grandest and loveliest things unbearable...Rock bottom is everything out of focus. It's a failure of vision, a failure to see the world as it is, to see the good in what it is, and only to wonder why the hell things look the way they do and not some other way.

Life is an endless, truly endless struggle. There's no time when we're going to arrive at a plateau where the whole thing gets sorted. It's a struggle in the way every plant has to find it's own way to stand up straight. A lot of the time it's a failure. And yet it's not a failure if some enlightenment comes from it.

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

I will work day and night to avoid failure, but if I can't, I'll pick myself up the next day. The most important thing for entrepreneurs is not to be put off by failure.

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.

Falling down is not a failure. Failure comes when you stay where you have fallen.

Success and failure are greatly overrated. But failure gives you a whole lot more to talk about.

Losing does not make you a failure; it is when you blame someone for losing when you become a failure

I won't call myself a failure. Failure is not getting knocked down. It's not getting up.

Failure is information-we label it failure, but it's more like, 'This didn't work, I'm a problem solver, and I'll try something else.'

When preparing your return, you should be sure to avoid common mistakes. The two most common taxpayer mistakes, states the IRS booklet, are (1) "failure to include a current address," and (2) "failure to be a large industry that gives humongous contributions to key tax-law-writing congresspersons."

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

Failure is easy to measure. Failure is an event.Harder to measure is insignificance. A nonevent. Insignificance creeps, it dawns, it gives you hope, then delusion, then one day, when you’re not looking, it’s there, at your front door, on your desk, in the mirror, or not, not any of that, it’s the lack of all that. One day, when you are looking, it’s not looking, no one is. You lie in your bed and realize that if you don’t get out of bed and into the world today, it is very likely no one will even notice.