Quotes About Failure

Trying to rely on the sheer good luck of avoiding bad outcomes indefinitely would simply guarantee that we would eventually fail without the means of recovering.

Whenever we try to improve things and fail, it is not because the spiteful (or unfathomably benevolent) gods are thwarting us or punishing us for trying, or because we have reached a limit on the capacity of reason to make improvements, or because it is best that we fail, but always because we did not know enough, in time.

One of the consequences of optimism is that one expects to learn from failure – one's own and others'.

You become tyrannized by this notion that women must not only be treated equally, but they must never fail.

The history of invention is not the history of a necessary future to which we must adapt or die, but rather of failed futures, and of futures firmly fixed in the past.

The mutual-fund industry sits at the center of a massive market failure. The asymmetry between sophisticated institutional providers of investment management services and unsophisticated individual consumers results in a monumental transfer of wealth from individual to institution.

Reginald Wingate… wrote that "Moslems in general have hitherto regarded the Hejaz revolt, and our share in it, with suspicion or dislike"; an that it was important to make Hussein look as though he had not been a failure in order to keep Britain from looking bad.

Our failures to live up to even our own expectations and ideals are massive. Our failures to live up to God's expectations are profound. Jesus knew this. This is why his call to leave everything, follow him and experience true life is so striking. It puts us in touch with the reality of our inner world, and it makes us aware of the depth of our longing for real change.

Discouragement is a moral state, a failure of heart; you treat it by taking courage, not Prozac.

His failure to adapt to new techniques, to pander (his own word), probably made his supporters love him all the more, and probably also narrowed his political base.

Lincoln could not help making a painful comparison of their careers: "With me, the race of ambition has been a failure—a flat failure;

Never literary attempt was more unfortunate than my Treatise of Human Nature. It fell deadborn from the press.

The Atonement allows us to grow, change, make mistakes, and recover. Consider this: Without practice, we could never grow to be more like Jesus. Practice requires that we make mistakes. The Atonement, therefore, provides the conditions for us to practice without fear of permanent failure since it can heal all things as we strive to become more like Jesus.

Sometimes things go wrong, no matter how careful you are.

I would never find a bank launched for worse reasons by more inept men.

He seemed a man whose youthful promise had yielded nothing but the feelings of failure that come with the advance of age. It is this moment in life, when the bounty of the future becomes the drudgery of the present, that all men fear, myself included, and for that reason I immediately felt a sympathy for this man.

I think, Sir, my potential got a hell of a thumping when I happened to be born where I was born with the parents I got'. Your potential boy, is what you achieve regardless of unavoidable disadvantages, what what you can conveniently call upon as an excuse for intellectual lethary, or the lesser, and in most cases forgivable, crime of failure.

It's so freeing, it's beautiful in a way, to have a great failure, there's nowhere to go but up.

First prize is a Cadillac Eldorado…. Second prize is a set of steak knives. Third prize is you're fired.

There's nothing in the world more silent than the telephone the morning after everybody pans your play. It won't ring from room service your mother won't be calling you. If the phone has not rung by 8 in the morning, you're dead.

God's acceptance of us cannot be gained by our successes nor forfeited by our failures.

God is not what you imagine or what you think you understand. If you understand you have failed.

Man's sin is in his failure to live what he is. Being the master of the earth, man forgets that he is the servant of God.

The failure of modern evangelicalism is the failure to understand the holiness of God.