Quotes About Failure

I love the story behind the Vasa Museum: in the 17th century, the Swedish king was trying to make a statement by building a huge ship that would sail around Europe carrying the Swedish flag and proving that we were a force to be reckoned with, and basically, the ship was top-heavy, and so it went 300 or so yards and sank.

The basketball coach cut me within two days, so I was back in the pool. I was the first one in the wall after the first 25 yards, but the last one out because I didn't have a flip turn.

Yeah, we shot ourselves in the foot right out of the gate. The guy who ran it at first misled pretty much everybody about how much capital we had. He said we had enough to go three years without making money, and we had enough to go three weeks.

I started to do a study on how not to do stand-up comedy. Yeah, it's lonely work. You die, you die alone. It's you, the light, and the audience. If you win, you win big. If you lose, you lose big time.

Yeah, a few of the films I made were so bad they didn't get released - they escaped.

It is important for investors to understand what they do and don't know. Learn to recognize that you cannot possibly know what is going to happen in the future, and any investment plan that is dependent on accurately forecasting where markets will be next year is doomed to failure.

You cannot win every year.

At last, after completing year 12, I failed the great final examination, repeated the following year and failed again even more dismally than before. This was not an easy thing to do. My mates did the simple thing in the first place and mainly passed with honours and went on to have remarkably successful lives.

The great thing about a pilot is you can make your mistakes and no-one sees them... Or they see them on iPlayer and it gets taken off a year later, to be disposed of or whatever's happened to it.

Most people have the opportunity of a lifetime flash right in front of them, and they fail to see it. A year later, they find out about it, after everyone else got rich.

I failed my exams and my driving test. I failed to get into the Foreign Office and drama school. The big F was dominant in my early years.

I grew up in a house where my father went on auditions, and he got some and he lost some, and there were good years and lean years. I didn't expect anything from the business, and that's often a danger in Hollywood, the notion that if you're pretty and have white teeth and just show up for the game then you'll win.

Prior to 'Pirates of the Caribbean' - the first one in 2003 - I had been essentially known within the confines of Hollywood as box office poison, you know what I'm saying? You know, I basically had built a career on 20 years of failures.

I guess the big thing to say about 'Pig Farm' is that none of us knows if it works, and we're going in blind. It's in the tradition of 'Urinetown,' kind of - but that's a pretty small tradition. It's possible that it can fail.

Most governments in Latin America have failed to recognize the rights of indigenous people and their right to their own traditional territories.

Alas, all traditions lose their primal purity and we all fail our founders.

I got much acclaim with 'Traffic Signal' but 'Superstar' didn't do well.

The tragedy of life is often not in our failure, but rather in our complacency; not in our doing too much, but rather in our doing too little; not in our living above our ability, but rather in our living below our capacities.

There is no tragedy in missing a putt, no matter how short. All have erred in this respect.

It is easy to lay the blame on successive governments for failing to address health as a fundamental right for the Indian people. But the real tragedy is that we, the people of India, have not taken our government to task for this catastrophic failure.

The tragedy is that political leaders failed so badly at delivering what Iraqis clearly wanted - and for that, a great deal of responsibility lies with Prime Minister Maliki.

When the systems we expect to help us actually hurt us, we have tragedy.

It is a tragedy indeed that new generations, taking office, attribute failures in governance to insufficient power, and seek more of it.

All the ills of mankind, all the tragic misfortunes that fill the history books, all the political blunders, all the failures of the great leaders have arisen merely from a lack of skill at dancing.