Quotes About Failure

Woody Allen would go for seven years without a movie and then make one that makes no money.

Ambition has become a dirty word, and I believe it is a great evolutionary force for the positive. If people fail or go astray in their ambition I can live with it but not with people lowering their expectations, wasting time, slacking off and glorifying failure and stupidity.

For the longest time, I was horrified to hear the word 'failure,' but I've come to realize that we all fail. It's just a part of life. We all fall. It's how you rebound that shows the type of person you are.

The biggest job we have is to teach a newly hired employee how to fail intelligently. We have to train him to experiment over and over and to keep on trying and failing until he learns what will work.

The most fundamental fact about the ideas of the political left is that they do not work. Therefore we should not be surprised to find the left concentrated in institutions where ideas do not have to work in order to survive.

The entrepreneurial life is one of challenge, work, dedication, perseverance, exhilaration, agony, accomplishment, failure, sacrifice, control, powerlessness... but ultimately, extraordinary satisfaction.

Sometimes hard work doesn't pay off.

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

If I write a book where all I've ever experienced is success, people won't take a positive lesson from it. In being candid, I have to own up to my own failures, both in my marriage and in my work environment.

I actually believed if you work hard enough it was inevitable you'd succeed. Then I lived the 'Social Network' movie, but only the first half. The hardest part is the grueling work of constantly being wrong.

Capitalists work hard to produce what consumers want. Artists who work too hard to produce what consumers want are often accused of selling out. Thus, even the languages of capitalism and art conflict: a firm that has 'sold out' has succeeded, but an artist that has 'sold out' has failed.

I don't know many people, if any, who have had some straight line toward success. I mean, they start here, they work hard, they've got what it takes, and they just go straight to the top over some number of years. Most people get a little failure.

Our educational system is not preparing people for the 21st Century. Failure is an essential part of entrepreneurship. If you work hard, you can get an 'A' pretty much guaranteed, but in entrepreneurship, that's not how it works.

We all hoped in 2001 that we could put in place an Afghan government under President Karzai that would be able to control the country, make sure al-Qaeda didn't come back, and make sure the Taliban wasn't resurging. It didn't work out.

I don't get embarrassed by the same things that other people do. I would say that probably the biggest thing that holds people back is, 'If I do this, I'm going to look like an idiot if it doesn't work out.'

Like most comics, I tried to come up with a sitcom idea that was based around my life. And it didn't work out. But maybe because it didn't work out, that's why I ended up on 'Breaking Bad;' I don't know.

The one who intimidates me is myself. I'm scared to fail. That is the thing that makes me the most afraid, to fail. Just to think that I can do a mistake and lose the fight scares me, so that is why I work out a lot: to bring more chance to my size and less chance to my opponent.

There's always been a lot of pressure and tension on the line. If 'Pi' didn't work out, I have no idea what my career would be. I don't think I would have gotten another shot at it. If 'Requiem for a Dream' didn't work out, they would have called me a 'one-hit wonder with a sophomore slump'.

I am big on - even with our whole team - it's always about, well, what were the lessons learned? Something didn't work out? What are the lessons learned? What are the lessons learned?

You know, making a movie is a collaborative effort and sometimes all the ingredients don't work out. I know that every now and again I am going to make a movie that won't work.

Business and growing jobs is about taking risk, sometimes failing, sometimes succeeding, but always striving. It is about dreams. Usually, it doesn't work out exactly as you might have imagined. Steve Jobs was fired at Apple. He came back and changed the world.

Great companies have been reduced by hiring executives that don't work out.

I guess I say this for younger actors out there: you have to be brave, and you have to be ready to fail, and that's the only way you can be unique. So when a director is confident enough in what they're doing, and they allow their actors to be brave and bring in stuff, the more likely it's going to work out okay.

Before 'Dilbert,' I tried to become a computer programmer. In the early days of computing, I bought this big, heavy, portable computer for my house. I spent two years nights and weekends trying to write games that I thought I would sell. Turns out I'm not that good a programmer, so that was two years that didn't work out.