Quotes About Failure

If peace was really within reach wasn't it immoral to fail?

A lot of people see it as a kind of failure to stay in the place where you're from, especially if you're from the Midwest. Like ambition is geographic.

They found out about him in July and stayed angry all through August. They tried to kill him in September. It was way too soon. They weren't ready. The attempt was a failure. It could have been a disaster, but it was actually a miracle. Because nobody noticed.

In order to win, you must be prepared to lose.

Wrong place," Reacher said. "Wrong time, wrong reasons, wrong methods, wrong approach, wrong leadership. No real backing, no real will to win, no coherent strategy.

And if the power is cut for any reason, even for an instant, the system fails safe and the doors automatically revert to locked.

You can't find him, can you?" I said. "You're useless, Kliner. You're a useless piece of shit. You think you're some kind of a smart guy, but you can't find Hubble. You couldn't find your asshole if I gave you a mirror on a stick.

It's something they teach you in the army. The only thing under your direct control is how hard you work. In other words, if you really, really buckle down today, and you get the intelligence, the planning, and the execution each a hundred percent exactly correct, then you are bound to prevail." "Sounds empowering." "It's the army. What they really mean is, if you fail today, it's completely your own fault.

This is an event horizon, colonel. This is where it all goes wrong. Possibly for nothing. Possibly for some little thing other guys have gotten away with. But you're going to crash and burn. Best case, you're going to stall. Best case, you're going to get an asterisk against your name forever. As in, we can't be sure about that guy.

Helmsworth said, "Ma'am, nothing was impossible. It was the Cold War. It was a kind of madness. One time they sewed a microphone and a transmitter in a cat's neck, with a thin antenna threaded through inside its spine and up its tail. They were going to train it to wander into the Russian Embassy compound and pick up loose talk. Its first day on the job it was run over by a car. Nothing was impossible and everything went wrong sooner or later." Neagley

I'm saying a scattergun approach will always look good, as long as you put the spotlight on the successes and sweep the failures under the rug.

Targeting individuals, while ignoring larger system failures, oversimplifies the problem and does little to prevent its recurrence.

Not anymore—not exactly." If I'd had more words, I'd have described Greenstone's last operational motel, the Voyageur, a peeling L-shaped heap with scraggy whirlwinds of litter roaming the parking lot. Though technically "open," the Voyageur is always full, its rooms permanently occupied by the owner's grown children who failed to rise on the outside.

Michael Jordan once said, "I've missed more than nine thousand shots in my career. I've lost almost three hundred games. Twenty-six times, I've been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed. I failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.

That is, if the winners (at the left of the graph) continued to do better than the others, and the losers (at the right) worse, this graph should be nearly identical to the last.

you want to succeed, double your failure rate." I

Or as the IBM pioneer Thomas Watson said, "If you want to succeed, double your failure rate.

IBM pioneer Thomas Watson said, "If you want to succeed, double your failure rate." I

The one elementary but elemental factor in all civilizations that collapsed into extinction is the failure to read the handwriting on the wall, the failure to respond to warning signs. Every extinct culture hurled signs high into the heavens for all to see. But every collapsing culture failed to read and heed these flares.52

You will never have a greater or lesser dominion than that over yourself...the height of a man's success is gauged by his self-mastery; the depth of his failure by his self-abandonment. ...And this law is the expression of eternal justice. He who cannot establish dominion over himself will have no dominion over others.

I have offended God and mankind because my work didn't reach the quality it should have.

Most people fail in life not because they aim too high and miss, but because they aim too low and hit.

Humpty Dumpty sat on the wall Humpty Dumpty had a great fall All the king's horses and all the king's men Couldn't put Humpty together again

Washington Irving once introduced Charles Dickens at a dinner given in the latter's honor. In the middle of his speech Irving hesitated, became embarrassed, and sat down awkwardly. Turning to a friend beside him he remarked, There, I told you I would fail, and I did. If you believe you will fail, there is no hope for you. You will.