Failure Quotes

You can never get the smell of smoke out. Like the smell of failure in life.

John Updike, Rabbit Redux

Losers visualize the penalties of failure. Winners visualize the rewards of success.

William S. Gilbert

We are all failures - - At least, the best of us are.

James Barrie

The saddest life is that of a political aspirant under democracy. His failure is ignominious and his success is disgraceful.

Mary Catherine Bateson

It is better to succeed with success than failure.

George W. Bush Jan. 21, 2001, Inauguration speech

May every young scientist remember... and not fail to keep his eyes open for the possibility that an irritating failure of his apparatus to give consistent results may once or twice in a lifetime conceal an important discovery.

Baron Patrick Maynard Stuart Blackett

Make failure your teacher, not your undertaker.

Zig Zigla

Congealed thinking is the forerunner of failure... make sure you are always receptive to new ideas.

George Crane

Sometimes a noble failure serves the world as faithfully as a distinguished success.

Edward Dowden

Success and failure are equally disastrous.

Tennessee Williams

Yes, risk - Taking is inherently failure - Prone. Otherwise, it would be called sure - Thing taking.

Tim McMahon

People in their handling of affairs often fail when they are about to succeed. If one remains as careful at the end as he was at the beginning, there will be no failure.

Lao Tzu

Of course, our failures are a consequence of many factors, but possibly one of the most important is the fact that society operates on the theory that specialization is the key to success, not realizing that specialization precludes comprehensive thinking.

R. Buckminster Fuller, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, 1963

When a man comes to die, no matter what his talents and influence, and genius, if he dies unloved his life must be a failure to him and dying a cold horror. It seems to me that if you or I must choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure to the world.

John Steinbeck, East of Eden

Through perseverance many people win success out of what seemed destined to be certain failure.

Benjamin Disraeli

The failure of the mind in old age is often less the results of natural decay, than of disuse. Ambition has ceased to operate; contentment bring indolence, and indolence decay of mental power, ennui, and sometimes death. Men have been known to die, literally speaking, of disease induced by intellectual vacancy.

Sir B. Brodie

Failure is success if we learn from it.

Malcolm Stevenson Forbes

Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat.

Theodore Roosevelt

The quickest way to reach the point of success is to follow a straight line that carves through failure.

Josh Traege