Quotes About Failure

Developing expendable rockets is always going to be painful and expensive. Throwing the whole rocket away on each attempt not only costs a lot, it also hampers figuring out just what went wrong because you don't get the rocket back for inspection.

When I was 22 years old, I thought girls would like me if I wrote a novel. I spent so much time writing that I was thrown out of graduate school.

When I was 22, I was thrown out of graduate school and then fired from three jobs in a row at higher and higher salaries where I saved nothing.

I've thrown many picks in my life, man.

It's kind of a rule of thumb for me to self-doubt going into any kind of project. I always think that I shouldn't be doing it and I don't know how to do it and I'm going to fail and that I fooled them. I always try to find a way out.

I am, it is safe to say, not a practical man. The few attempts I've made to hammer in a nail have ended in broken thumbs, burst pipes, and water spraying everywhere with the house on fire.

If I failed in acting, I wanted to have a backup, thus I chose architecture. I learnt painting as well.

Today I bought two lottery tickets, because I had a feeling that it would be now or never - they were both blanks. So I am not going to be rich after all. Nothing at all to be done about it.

I felt like a failure, like somehow my self-worth was tied to my ability to procreate. I didn't feel like I could talk about it. I did not want other people's pity, so I mostly kept my story and my feelings to myself.

The big thing was realizing for myself that I had tied my ego to the outcomes and to startups.

For diabetes in particular, we know there's a relationship between lack of glucose regulation and complications like blindness and kidney failure. So if you were diabetic and you knew that you could get your glucose in a tight, normal range just by adjusting your lifestyle, wouldn't that be great?

My worst fashion failure was when I wore tight PVC pants, and I had a show in Eugene, Oregon... my pants split down the center.

It is wishful thinking to expect change without factoring in a few failures along the way.

God is not what you imagine or what you think you understand. If you understand you have failed.

The most hopeful people in the world are the young and the drunk. The first because they have little experience of failure, and the second because they have succeeded in drowning theirs.

Great Socialist statesmen aren't made, they're still-born.

When it was time to make breakfast, I moved into my Martha mode. I got irritated that I was the only one working while everyone else stumbled slowly into the kitchen. Before I knew it, I'd had a small explosion. I threw a wet blanket over the moods of everyone, and my good intentions were spoiled by my failure to control my spirit.

Overconfidence leads to carelessness, which leads just as surely to disaster.

Rocket science is tough, and rockets have a way of failing.

If the film is a hit then everyone shares the success. If it is going to be a disaster then it might as well be because of me, not because of somebody else.

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.

There's no thief like a bad movie.

The to-read pile is more than just a physical stack of books: it's a tower of ambitions failed, hopes unrealised, good intentions unfulfilled. Worse still, it's a cold hard reminder of mortality. Already, I have intentions to read more books than I can hope to manage in a normal lifetime. How will this pile of books taunt me when I'm 64?

The fall of Circuit City and another famous failure, the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management, illustrate why business, when practised in the absence of wealth secrets, produces fire sales more often than fortunes.