Quotes About Failure

All enterprises that are entered into with indiscreet zeal may be pursued with great vigor at first, but are sure to collapse in the end.

I know exactly what I'm doing when I'm doing a trick. I really hate it when I fail.

Some people are trying to create hatred among Hindus, Muslims, Christians, and Parsis by following the divide and rule trick adopted by British rulers, but they have been failed miserably.

Because 'Gob' was a terrible magician, he was always, in great comedic moments, messing up his magic act. We used to have magicians come in to work on these tricks to actually get them wrong. But they still had to work. We had to bring magicians on to make magic not work.

I took the California Highway Patrol exam and didn't pass, so I tried to be a cop and failed.

When I came to the U.S., I tried to take shortcuts to make money - but everything crashed.

Cynicism stems from disappointment. Cynical and faithless people were not always like that. They were filled with possibilities and hope as kids. But they tried and perhaps failed.

And in Iraq we tried to implement the same policy that was so successful in Saudi Arabia, but Saddam Hussein didn't buy. When the economic hit men fail in this scenario, the next step is what we call the jackals.

Kids have been let down by adults - we've tried to give them too much, we've tried not to impose discipline. We've tried to make their lives easier and, in doing so, we've taken something away from them. Kids like boundaries, they also like to be pushed, need to learn what failure is all about, need guidance.

When someone takes their existing business and tries to transform it into something else - they fail. In technology that is often the case. Look at Kodak: it was the dominant imaging company in the world. They did fabulously during the great depression, but then wiped out the shareholders because of technological change.

One definition of noir is where a not-so-good man or woman tries to touch something good - and fails.

A thing may fail as a poem because it tries to do what a poem cannot do: it tries to become a treatise on cosmic truth... We can best be exact about the cosmic things - God and truth, beauty, eternity and love - by not talking directly about them.

When a writer tries to copy another writer, it's doomed to fail.

Our inner beliefs trigger failure before it happens. They sabotage lasting change by canceling its possibility. We employ these beliefs as articles of faith to justify our inaction and then wish away the result. I call them belief triggers.

I think, in storytelling, people want to see triumph, and so it's usually nice to start with failure and see someone somehow rise above it. People like to see people try. And they like to see people fail for comedy, and they like to see people succeed for the drama and emotion.

I would rather lose in a cause that I know some day will triumph than to triumph in a cause that I know some day will fail.

My books have occasionally been of mixed success. It's not like I have gone from triumph to triumph. I have had a couple of books do very, very well and a couple do very, very badly.

Why do we capital-N Nerds love Mars so much? Because it's beautiful, it's tough, it's buried in our mythic, childhood memories. It's covered with human triumphs but also with sad stories of failure.

We are raising a generation of kids where everyone gets a trophy. But in real life, everyone don't get a trophy.

If you don't fix latent failures in your system, you're asking for trouble.

I'm troubled by what I see as a sort of rooting for Trump's failure, because that is rooting for our own failure.

Losing your capital is like losing your trousers. It is a real humiliation, and one not to be soon repeated.

Any sort of major change we want to make in our life is hard. Change is not easy and true change takes time and takes thousands, millions probably, of failures along that path and that's the interesting thing.

Like all alchemists, Trump seeks to convert dross into gold, to toss a broth of his incompetence, denial, delay, deception, and failure into some supernatural alembic and extract political advantage.