Quotes About Failure

There's only one thing you can count on, Mr. President," he said. "On any given moment in any given day, somebody somewhere is screwing up.

As much as Tim blamed himself during the next morning's postmortem, I recognized it as a systems failure

As far as I was concerned, the election didn't prove that our agenda had been wrong. It just proved that—whether for lack of talent, cunning, charm, or good fortune—I'd failed to rally the nation, as FDR had once done, behind what I knew to be right. Which to me was just as damning.

If you are living life to its fullest, you will fail.

Given the strong odor of imminent failure

As much as Tim blamed himself during the next morning's postmortem, I recognized it as a systems failure—and a failure on my part to put those who worked under me in a position to succeed.

Still, as time went by, I couldn't help but fume (sometimes I'd actually picture myself with steam puffing out of my ears, as in a cartoon) at how Solyndra's failure stood to overshadow the Recovery Act's remarkable success in galvanizing the renewable energy sector.

Wisdom is not gained by knowing what is right. Wisdom is gained by practicing what is right, and noticing what happens when that practice succeeds and when it fails.

The flip side of positivity is thus a harsh insistence on personal responsibility: if your business fails or your job is eliminated, it must because you didn't try hard enough, didn't believe firmly enough in the inevitability of your success.

el colapso económico debería haber convertido en historia esa idea de que la pobreza es un fracaso del individuo, o el fruto de una disfunción interna. En las colas del paro y las de la beneficencia hay tantas hormigas como cigarras, tantos optimistas habituales como depresivos crónicos.

Feminine' was a test like some witch trial she was preordained to fail.

A person can succeed and fail at the same time. Maybe letting me down was your way of getting me to be me.

Do you have children? I have five. Three girls, two boys, all scoundrels. But not an anarchist in the brood. I've failed completely.

some secrets kept themselves, out of a failure to stand up to the competing rumors. She

Somehow it had come to pass that this man was her whole world, and she had failed to take his measure.

Loser is a cliff. Once you've gone over, you're over.

I'm hurt, okay, but in this game, pain is not the enemy. Failure is your enemy. Being too slow, missing an opening, miscalculating a pass, these things you control. Doing it right is your only friend, messing up is your foe, and the distance between them is all you are here to care about. The rest is landscape. Pain is the turf under your cleats. Pain is weather.

The shock settled on Willa like a personal failure, as if she'd invited the disaster by failing to see it coming.

This marriage has failed to warm her.

can't say what this other way of looking at these situations is, how a huge domed space like the daylit ocean, a space almost entirely free of objects and offering a different sense of time passing, might provide a perspective to make banal human failure seem less enduring, less threatening; but taking in this view, I always sense that more room for us to maneuver exists. That what halts us is simply a failure of imagination.

find a way to build with language a bridge between a failure to believe and a witness to what is incomprehensible.

What Seligman and his colleagues proposed was that when people are looking for causes for failure, they display a variety of predispositions to accept one type of cause or another, quite apart from what the actual cause of the failure might be. There are three key dimensions to these predispositions, based on whether we view causes as being global or specific, chronic or transient, personal or universal.

As a result, individuals with "nonreversible" marriages might be more satisfied than individuals with "reversible" ones. As we see reversible marriages come apart, we may think to ourselves, how fortunate the couple was to have a flexible attitude toward marital commitment, given that it didn't work out. It might not occur to us that the flexible attitude might have played a causal role in the marriage's failure.

If the experience of disappointment is relentless, if virtually every choice you make fails to live up to expectations and aspirations, and if you consistently take personal responsibility for the disappointments, then the trivial looms larger and larger, and the conclusion that you can't do anything right becomes devastating.