Quotes About Failure

Just once it might be instructive to pretend you're accepting an award for failure, just to see who you would thank.

The greater the success, the closer it verges on failure.

But what if I fail of my purpose here? It is but to keep the nerves at strain, to dry one's eyes and laugh at a fall, and, baffled, get up and begin again.

He ventured neck or nothing—heaven's successFound, or earth's failure.

Software is like a science. We show correctness by failing to prove incorrectness, despite our best efforts.

The proper use of comments is to compensate for our failure to express ourself in code. Note that I used the word failure. I meant it. Comments are always failures.

Architecting for the enterprise, when all you really need is a cute little desktop tool, is a recipe for failure.

Learning to write clean code is hard work. It requires more than just the knowledge of principles and patterns. You must sweat over it. You must practice it yourself, and watch yourself fail. You must watch others practice it and fail. You must see them stumble and retrace their steps. You must see them agonize over decisions and see the price they pay for making those decisions the wrong way.

If we tried to design the component dependency structure before we designed any classes, we would likely fail rather badly. We would not know much about common closure, we would be unaware of any reusable elements, and we would almost certainly create components that produced dependency cycles.

if simple extensions to the requirements force massive changes to the software, then the architects of that software system have engaged in a spectacular failure.

Every time you write a comment, you should grimace and feel the failure of your ability of expression.

A man who submits himself wholeheartedly to God might handle them and not be harmed. That was the faith my father had professed. Certainly he trusted God, in his own case, and believed God manifested Himself in the rolled eyes of his congregants and in their babble of incomprehensible tongues. Trust and be saved, was his philosophy. And yet in the end it was the snakes that killed him. I wondered which element of the calculation had ultimately failed him—human faith or divine patience.

So after that I had a new rule. If I'm hired by the plant engineer, I only go over his head if I'm in project failure mode. If the project is going to fail, then I'll go over his head. But as long as the project is going to come out, I never go over his head. Now, that's a rule I still follow today.

The bigger it bloats, the harder it falls.

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.

The Blame Bias I learn from my experience and mistakes. Mistakes and failures elicit the need to explain. We want to learn the lesson and not repeat the experience. But in truth, we do not like to look too closely at what we did; our introspection is limited. Our natural response is to blame others, circumstances, or a momentary lapse of judgment. The reason for this bias is that it is often too painful to look at our mistakes.

Piénsalo así: hay dos tipos de fracaso. El primero resulta de no poner nunca a prueba tus ideas, por miedo o a la espera del momento adecuado. De esta clase de fracaso jamás aprenderás nada, y tu pusilanimidad te destruirá. El segundo tipo resulta de un espíritu intrépido y osado. Si tropiezas por esta razón, el daño que hagas a tu fama será muy inferior a tu aprendizaje.

Two Kinds of Failure A thinker sees his own actions as experiments and questions—as attempts to find out something. Success and failure are for him answers above all. — FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, THE GAY SCIENCE

In fact, it is a curse to have everything go right on your first attempt. You will fail to question the element of luck, making you think that you have the golden touch. When you do inevitably fail, it will confuse and demoralize you past the point of learning.

Cuanto menos intentemos, menos riesgo tendremos de fracasar.

Repeated failure will toughen your spirit and show you with absolute clarity how things must be done. In fact, it is a curse to have everything go right on your first attempt. You will fail to question the element of luck, making you think that you have the golden touch. When you do inevitably fail, it will confuse and demoralize you past the point of learning.

The strategies that succeed in war, whether conventional or unconventional, are based on timeless psychology, and great military failures have much to teach us about human stupidity and the limits of force in any arena.

If we limit our circle of action, we can give ourselves the illusion of control. The less we attempt, the less chances of failure.

What a heap of ash most political careers amount to, when one really stops to consider them!