Quotes About Failure

Food, sex, drug, or alcohol addictions • Relationship failures • Abuse of any kind • Religious frustration and/or anger • Emotional detachment

The possibility of paradise hovers on the cusp of coming into being, so much so that it takes powerful forces to keep such a paradise at bay. If paradise now arises in hell, it's because in the suspension of the usual order and the failure of most systems, we are free to live and act another way.

You are making something, a life, a self, and it is an intensely creative task as well as one at which it is more than possible to fail, a little, a lot, miserably, fatally.

You are in your youth walking down a long road that will branch and branch again, and your life is full of choices with huge and unpredictable consequences, and you rarely get to come back to choose the other route. You are making something, a life, a self, and it is an intensely creative task as well as one at which it is more than possible to fail, a little, a lot, miserably, fatally.

Their grumpiness is often the grumpiness of perfectionists who hold that anything less than total victory is failure, a premise that makes it easy to give up at the start or to disparage the victories that are possible. This is Earth. It will never be heaven. There will always be cruelty, always be violence, always be destruction.

Secrecy and silence are the perpetrator's first line of defense. If secrecy fails, the perpetrator attacks the credibility of his victim. If he cannot silence her absolutely, he tries to make sure that no one listens.

Ultimately the destruction of the Earth is due in part, perhaps in large part, to a failure of the imagination or to its eclipse by systems of accounting that can't count what matters.

Cooking is likewise a mode of transformation and a pleasure to which I often repair, and it sometimes seems so pleasurable because it is the opposite of writing; it engages all the senses; it's immediate and unreproduceable and then it's complete and eaten and over. The tasks are simple, messy, fragrant, and brief, and success and failure are easy to determine.

We are constantly given one-size-fits-all formulas, but those formulas fail, often and hard. Nevertheless, we are given them again. And again and again. They become prisons and punishments; the prison of the imagination traps many in the prison of a life that is correctly aligned with the recipes and yet is entirely miserable.

Like the Fat Man said, it wasn't your collars kept you awake, it was the ones that got away

Through my failures I have learned how to live - and the more I failed, the more I learned. In my search for the limits, I have failed more than most, and it is this that has made me successful, over and over again.

Después Tardewski volvió a hablar de esa cualidad destructiva, de esa rara lucidez que se adquiere cuando se ha conseguido fracasar lo suficiente. Porque otra de las virtudes del fracaso, dijo, es que nos enseña que nunca nada deja su huella en el mundo. Todo lo que hemos vivido se borra y eso quizás, dijo, es lo que había comprendido esa mujer en el cuento de Marconi.

Companies respect conformity and uniformity, but they fail to see how limiting both are. Without change and innovation, companies cannot adapt to new realities. At one time, Singer was one of the biggest companies in the United States. Today, we're not using Singer cell phones because the company was unable to adapt.

Organizations rarely believe they're to blame when an employee underperforms, but if the organization doesn't provide the opportunity for success, it's their fault when people falter.

I don't teach writing. I teach patience. Toughness. Stubbornness. The willingness to fail. I teach the life. The odd thing is most of the things that stop an inexperienced writer are so far from the truth as to be nearly beside the point. When you feel glosbal doubt about your talent, that is your talent. People who have no talent don't have any doubt.

A DNA molecule in the germ-line of an individual who happens to die young, or who otherwise fails to reproduce, should not be called a dead-end replicator. Such germ-lines are, as it turns out, terminal. They fail in what may metaphorically be called their aspiration to immortality. Differential failure of this kind is what we mean by natural selection.

But whether it succeeds in practice or not, any germ-line replicator is potentially immortal. It 'aspires' to immortality but in practice is in danger of failing.

Why is God considered an explanation for anything? It's not—it's a failure to explain, a shrug of the shoulders, an 'I dunno' dressed up in spirituality and ritual. If someone credits something to God, generally what it means is that they haven't a clue, so they're attributing it to an unreachable, unknowable sky-fairy

We can't prove anything in science. But the best that scientists can do is fail to disprove things while pointing to how hard they tried.

His fame seemed to him a failure of perception on the part of others.

Billy Gould has always felt if something was worth doing, it was worth doing badly. Worry about doing it too well, he believed, & you may well be crippled by your ambition

In their faces--plenty of them were handsome, but ruined--I've seen the remnants of who they almost succeeded in being but failed to be, before becoming themselves.

Worldly wisdom teaches that is it is better for reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally.

is a thin line between having enough self-confidence and being overconfident. I suppose the difference is whether you succeed or fail; when you win you are strong-willed, and when you lose you are stubborn!