failure quotes

Anais Nin: 

Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.

Ashley Montagu: 

The deepest human defeat suffered by human beings is constituted by the difference between what one was capable of becoming and what one has in fact become.

Corita Kent: 

Love the moment. Flowers grow out of dark moments. Therefore, each moment is vital. It affects the whole. Life is a succession of such moments and to live each, is to succeed.

Edward de Bono: 

It is better to have enough ideas for some of them to be wrong, than to be always right by having no ideas at all.

Elaine Maxwell: 

My will shall shape the future. Whether I fail or succeed shall be no man's doing but my own. I am the force; I can clear any obstacle before me or I can be lost in the maze. My choice; my responsibility; win or lose, only I hold the key to my destiny.

Elbert Hubbard: 

A failure is a man who has blundered but is not capable of cashing in on the experience.

Elizabeth Drew: 

The torment of human frustration, whatever its immediate cause, is the knowledge that the self is in prison, its vital force and "mangled mind" leaking away in lonely, wasteful self-conflict.

George Bernard Shaw: 

A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable but more useful than a life spent in doing nothing.

George Bernard Shaw: 

My reputation grows with every failure.

Havelock Ellis: 

It is on our failures that we base a new and different and better success.

Herbert B. Swope: 

I cannot give you the formula for success, but I can give you the formula for failure: which is: Try to please everybody.

It's a Wonderful Life: 

Remember, no man is a failure who has friends.

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis: 

If you bungle raising your children, I don't think whatever else you do well matters very much.

James Russell Lowell: 

Mishaps are like knives, that either serve us or cut us, as we grasp them by the blade or the handle.

Jessamyn West: 

It is very easy to forgive others their mistakes; it takes more grit and gumption to forgive them for having witnessed your own.

John Dewey: 

Failure is instructive. The person who really thinks learns quite as much from his failures as from his successes.

Kin Hubbard: 

You won't skid if you stay in a rut.

Laurence J. Peter: 

There are two kinds of failures: those who thought and never did, and those who did and never thought.

Lloyd Jones: 

Those who try to do something and fail are infinitely better than those who try nothing and succeed. (adapted)

Madame de Stael: 

The mystery of existence is the connection between our faults and our misfortunes.

May Sarton: 

A garden is always a series of losses set against a few triumphs, like life itself.

Mohandas K. Gandhi: 

Freedom is not worth having if it does not connote freedom to err.

Oscar Wilde: 

Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes.

Paulo Coelho: 

But there is suffering in life, and there are defeats. No one can avoid them. But it's better to lose some of the battles in the struggles for your dreams than to be defeated without ever knowing what you're fighting for.

Pearl S. Buck: 

Every great mistake has a halfway moment, a split second when it can be recalled and perhaps remedied.

Peter Drucker: 

There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.

Rabindranath Tagore: 

We read the world wrong and say that it deceives us.

Ralph Ellison: 

Life is to be lived, not controlled, and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.

Ralph Waldo Emerson: 

Do not waste yourself in rejection, nor bark against the bad, but chant the beauty of the good.

Robert F. Kennedy: 

Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.

Robert Frost: 

The best way out is always through.

Samuel Goldwyn: 

You've got to take the bitter with the sour.

Samuel Smiles: 

It is a mistake to suppose that men succeed through success; they much oftener succeed through failures. Precept, study, advice, and example could never have taught them so well as failure has done.

Samuel Smiles : 

We learn wisdom from failure much more than from success. We often discover what will do, by finding out what will not do; and probably he who never made a mistake never made a discovery.

Theodore Roosevelt: 

It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes short again and again, who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spends himself in a worthy cause, who at best knows achievement and who at the worst if he fails at least fails while daring greatly so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.
From a speech given in Paris at the Sorbonne in 1910


Thomas Alva Edison: 

Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.

Thomas Alva Edison: 

I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.

Thomas Fuller: 

No garden is without its weeds.

Wallace Stegner: 

Most things break, including hearts. The lessons of life amount not to wisdom, but to scar tissue and callus.

William M. Winans: 

Not doing more than the average is what keeps the average down.

William Saroyan: 

Good people are good because they've come to wisdom through failure. We get very little wisdom from success, you know.

Winston Churchill: 

Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.

Winston Churchill: 

Courage is going from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm.