Quotes About Failure

Queerness offers the promise of failure as a way of life...but it is up to us whether we choose to make good on that promise in a way that makes a detour around the usual markers of accomplishment and satisfaction.

It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all – in which case, you fail by default.

Why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me.

We are all failures -- at least, all the best of us are.

The historian James Anthony Froude wrote: "The worth of a man must be measured by his life, not by his failure under a singular and peculiar trial. Peter the apostle, though forewarned, three times denied his Master on the first alarm of danger; yet that Master, who knew his nature in its strength and in its weakness, chose him.

Successful leaders have learned that no failure is final, whether his own failure or someone else's. No one is perfect, and we cannot be right all the time. Failures and even feelings of inadequacy can provoke humility and serve to remind a leader who is really in charge.

I hate to be a failure. I hate and regret the failure of my marriages. I would gladly give all my millions for just one lasting marital success.

The life of a healthy individual is characterized by fears, conflicting feelings, doubts, frustrations, as much as by the positive features. The main thing is that the man or woman feels he or she is living his or her own life, taking responsibility for action or inaction, and able to take credit for success and blame for failure. In one language it can be said that the individual has emerged from dependence to independence, or to autonomy.

The aim of argument is differing in order to agree; the failure of argument is when you agree to differ.

Develop success from failures. Discouragement and failure are two of the surest stepping stones to success.

Spend enough time around success and failure, and you learn a reverence for possibility.

Second Place is just the first place loser.

Climate change is occurring and is effectively irreversible on timescales that are meaningful to us. Our failure to prevent or even to respond significantly reflects the impoverishment of our systems of practical reason, the paralysis of our politics, and the limits of our cognitive and affective capacities.

Suppose our failures occur, not in spite of what we are doing, but precisely because of it.

It was hard to understand how his father could be such a big failure when you stopped to think about the thing. He was a good man and an honest man. He kept his children together and they ate good food fine food rich food better food than people ate in the cities.

Something in him has changed, he can't seem to connect properly with the world. He feels this not as a failure of the world but as a massive failing in himself, he would like to change it but doesn't know how. In his clearest moments he thinks that he has lost the ability to love, people or places or things, most of all the person and place and thing that he is. Without love nothing has value, nothing can be made to matter very much.

I like the moment of failure that finds us on that line, abandoned of intent, caught in an experience of a different order, stalking the line between two different worlds and imperfectly taking

Why can't a musician try to make a cinematic "state of the nation" poem told through dream imagery and pop music? They may fail miserably or they may fluke a masterpiece, but at least they tried to push their creativity. As Howard Devoto, of the bands Buzzcocks and Magazine, put it: "Pretentiousness is interesting. At least you're making an effort. Your ambition has to outstrip your ability at some point.

Perfectionism is not as much the desire for excellence as it is the fear of failure couched in procrastination." —Dan Miller

Hill once said: "Failure seems to be nature's plan for preparing us for great responsibilities."4

So part of the issue is—do you want to do something great—in any area? If you are content with mediocrity in your life, then you will try to protect yourself from any failure. Just recognize the trade-off.

I've heard that Richard Branson will not invest in any company unless the person in charge has failed at least twice.

If you're not prepared to be wrong you'll never come up with something original." —Sir Ken Robinson4

buried somewhere deep inside their souls. When God found them hiding in the garden, they were clutching clumps of leaves against their groins and blaming everyone but themselves for their failure. God's sovereign grace blossomed in that new-fallen garden for the same reason grace fills people's lives today. The untamed God gives undeserved mercy to unresponsive sinners. God shows grace, not due to any human deed or desire, but