Quotes About Failure

Failure is the foundation of truth. It teaches us what isn't true, and that is a great beginning. To fear failure is to fear the possibility of truth.

Man is certain of nothing but his ability to fail. It is the deepest faith we have, and the unbeliever- the blasphemer, the dissenter- will stimulate in us the most righteous of furies.

If you can't embrace both failure or the possibility of failure, or the tremendous fear of failure, you can't be wildly successful. It's just an axiomatic truth.

The truth is my development I hope is the same way as everything, which is, I succeed some, I fail some, and I keep slugging away at it. I really enjoy it. It's fun.

No matter how true I believe what I am writing to be, if the reader cannot also participate in that truth, then I have failed.

I wish I could blame my failure on my integrity & refusal to play bullshit games. But the truth is I just play them really badly.

She never asked for money, for gifts and priced ones, she always asked me for priceless love that was worth billions, where I failed.

At that darkest moment, while drowning in the Abyss of Emotional Bankruptcy, reflect on this universal truth: the difference between success and failure is one more time.

The Replacements, it seemed, secretly believed in themselves and yet adopted a loser persona to insulate themselves against failure.

Every Messiah fails, the moment he tries to redeem himself.

Success, however, does nothing to diminish the knowledge that failure stalks everything you do.

Knowing he had done wrong, prepared to make amends, settle his business. Determined to return to Brokeland, open the doors wide to the angel of retail death, and run the place into the ground all by himself, if that was what it took-but to fail calmly, to fail with style, to fail above all with that true dignity, unknown to his wife or his partner, which lay in never tripping out, never showing offense or hurt to those who had offended or hurt you.

I saw that I could write ten thousand more pages of shimmering prose and still be nothing but a blind minotaur stumbling along broken ground, an unsuccessful, overweight ex-wonder boy with a pot habit and a dead dog in the trunk of my car.

As I worked to rebuild the ghost town I had made, I felt keenly that my failure to help Timothy was really only the latest chapter in a lifelong history of inadequacy and powerlessness.

He and Dolores had been married thirty-one months before parting. There had been an extramarital kiss, entrepreneurial disaster, a miscarried baby, sexual malaise, and then very soon they had been forced to confront the failure of an expedition for which they had set out remarkably ill-equipped, like a couple of trans-Arctic travelers who through lack of preparation find themselves stranded and are forced to eat their dogs.

A father is a man who fails every day.

To apply general tools to specific problems is to fail.

On the video monitor, they saw Ted Fielding slap the polished sphere and shout, Open! Open Sesame! Open up, you son of a bitch! The sphere did not respond.

Expertise is no shield against failure to see ahead. Paul Erlich, a brilliant academic who has devoted his entire life to ecological issues, has been wrong in nearly all his major predictions. He was wrong about diminishing resources, he was wrong about the population explosion, and he was wrong that we would lose 50% of all species by the year 2000. His lifelong study of these issues did not prevent him from being wrong.

Her cake is a failure, but she is loved anyway. She is loved, she thinks, in more or less the way the gifts will be appreciated: because they have been given with good intentions , because they exist, because they are part of a world in which one wants what one gets.

Most of us can be counted on to manage our own undoings.

Peter glances out at the falling snow. Oh, little man. You have brought down your house not through passion but by neglect. You who dared to think of yourself as dangerous. You are guilty not of the epic transgressions but the tiny crimes. You have failed in the most base and human of ways - you have not imagined the lives of others.

She has failed. She wishes she didn't mind. Something, she thinks, is wrong with her.

It's an old chestnut to say that we need to keep challenging ourselves throughout life. Samuel Beckett memorably declared, Try again. Fail again. Fail better, while T.S. Eliot proclaimed that Old men ought to be explorers. More bluntly, Cyril Connolly maintained that we should cast aside whatever piece of iridescent mediocrity we are wasting our time with and get down to creating a masterpiece.