Quotes About Failure

With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed.

With the time and energy we spend in making failure a certainty we might have certain success.

Then why do we fail? Especially, why do we work hard at failure? Because, beside being creatures subject to the Will to Live and the Will to Power, we are driven by another will, the Will to Fail, or Die.

As Dorothy Canfield Fisher says in her excellent little book for parents and teachers, Self-Reliance, "Success or failure in adult life depends largely on the energy, courage and self-reliance with which one attacks the problem of making his dreams come true. Self-confidence in any enterprise comes as a rule from remembrance of past success.

Whatever the ostensible purpose may be, it is plain that one motive is at work in all these cases: the intention, often unconscious, to fill life so full of secondary activities or substitute activities that there will be no time in which to perform the best work of which one is capable. The intention, in short, is to fail.

Today,' said Lymond, 'if you must know, I don't like living at all. But that's just immaturity boggling at the sad face of failure. Tomorrow I'll be bright as a bedbug again.

It matters to ourselves, of course, but it matters terribly to other people. Moral failure or spiritual failure or whatever you call it, makes such a vicious circle... It seems as if when we love people and they fall short, we retaliate by falling shorter ourselves. Children are like that. Adults have a fearful responsibility. When they fail to live up to what children expect of them, the children give up themselves. So each generation keeps failing the next.

If a building looks better under construction than it does when finished, then it's a failure.

Big companies are like marching bands. Even if half the band is playing random notes, it still sounds kind of like music. The concealment of failure is built into them.

Failure is authentic, and because it's authentic, it's real and genuine, and because of that, it's a pure state of being.

The trouble with learning from experience is that you never graduate.

This was Special Forces' rule number one: let men experience failure so they never fail again. And by failing, they will learn how to be successful soldiers.

In 1996, Eastman Kodak was a hundred-year-old powerhouse with one hundred forty thousand employees and a valuation of twenty-eight billion dollars. Yet a mere sixteen years later, the company was filing for bankruptcy, a T. Rex dinosaur that had failed to fathom the disruptive power and game-changing impact of the digital photography revolution. In

I've taken such a giant step onto that slope that I've slid straight down to the cesspool at its bottom.

Luck is the last refuge of the incompetent,

In most jobs, one learned from one's mistakes. Unfortunately, in our job, a single mistake usually led to a swift death, and corpses were notoriously stubborn when it came to learning from bad experiences.

I had taken German in high school, and I was truly horrible at it.

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 much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.

Looking stupid is part of learning, let it happen.

Most of us proceed with good intentions. We try our best. Yet so often we fail ourselves and others. What else can we do but try again? It's the only option open to us. Trying is the way we get through the day.

The history of the failure of war can almost be summed up in two words: too late.

Such visible failure and a sense of lost moorings can be – for the individual as for society – not only a cause for concern but an exhausting emotional process. Where once there was an overriding explanation (however many troubles that brought), now there is only an overriding uncertainty and question. And we cannot unlearn our knowledge.

Public opinion surveys suggest that a failure to do anything about immigration even while talking about it is one of the key causes of the breakdown in trust between the electorate and their political representatives.

Secular conservatism is like trying to use your pocket handkerchief to slow you down after the main chute has failed. This