Failure Quotes

Failure is authentic, and because it's authentic, it's real and genuine, and because of that, it's a pure state of being.

~ Douglas Coupland

What was meaningful? What was meaningless? What did it mean, to amount to something? What type of life, was worth living? Was it better, to make a ton of money, and have a fucking goddamn Mercedes, or whatever the fuck kind of car it was, to be a lawyer with a ‘serious’ job, and to have ‘amounted to something,’ or was it better to just be a waiter, and work the evening shift, and have your days free to goof off with your roommates, your friends, to go to meditation, to take some time to reflect, and enjoy life, and to not always be in such a big goddamn rush to get somewhere?

~ T. Scott Mcleod

To look back upon the past year, and see how little we have striven and to what small purpose: and how often we have been cowardly and hung back, or temerarious and rushed unwisely in; and how every day and all day long we have transgressed the law of kindness; -it may seem a paradox, but in the bitterness of these discoveries, a certain consolation resides. Life is not designed to minister to a man's vanity. He goes upon his long business most of the time with a hanging head, and all the time like a blind child. Full of rewards and pleasures as it is - so that to see the day break or the moon rise, or to meet a friend, or to hear the dinner-call when he is hungry, fills him with surprising joys - this world is yet for him no abiding city. Friendships fall through, health fails, weariness assails him; year after year, he must thumb the hardly varying record of his own weakness and folly. It is a friendly process of detachment. When the time comes that he should go, there need be few illusions left about himself. Here lies one who meant well, tried a little, failed much: -surely that may be his epitaph, of which he need not be ashamed.

~ Robert Louis Stevenson

Failure is becoming someone who needs others to fail.

~ Alain De Botton

Success is often followed by failure. Yesterday's victory doesn't win today's battle.

~ Wayde Goodall

I am a man that knows of the possibility of failure. I have suffered defeat. I have created miscalculations. I have even abandoned victory, and fallen in shame. I can claim my arrogance. I can claim my ignorance. I can claim my naiveté. However, the creation of those possibilities were simply due to a lack of understanding of who I was. I have conquered my Id. I have conquered my Ego. I have conquered my Spirituality. I am a man that knows of the possibility of failure, but because I have mastered the principles of nothing, possibility, and uncertainty, failure simply tags along with me, unable to grasp my glory.

~ Lionel Suggs

The enemy doesn't warn its target. Emergencies do not make appointments, and the greatest battles of life are often surprises.

~ Wayde Goodall

I am facing the most difficult thing of my life, my own greatest failure.

~ Richard Paul Evans

The future vibrated with uncertainty. I had failed. I had ignorance. I had hope.

~ Sean Ferrell

The best defense is great offense. . .We fight through our mistakes and failures by maximizing our forward motion.

~ Wayde Goodall

Noble failure atones for the impossibility of resisting progress successfully.

~ Richard Appignanesi

Behind a great success, there was a great failure

~ Michael Hermanto

So we gave up. I'd finally had enough of chasing after a ghost who did not want to be seen. We'd failed, maybe, but some mysteries aren't meant to be solved.

~ John Green

Excuses are merely nails used to build a house of failure.

~ Habeeb Akande

It is the hardest thing of all, the one thing that will show if you have the one true courage. To know that you have failed, that your best efforts have been defeated, to not be able to stand it, to not be able to go on and yet to go on nonetheless.

~ Silvia Hartmann

Failure means nothing now, only that it taught me life.

~ Elisabeth Elliot

I got a rock.

~ Charlie Brown

We need days of failure because they help humble us, and through them we can see how God's grace is poured out on the humble.

~ Elyse M. Fitzpatrick

If I had feelings, I probably wouldn’t have even survived.

~ Richard M. Nixon

I don't want to fail, of course. But even though I didn't know how bad things really were, I still had a lot to think about before I said yes. I had to consider the implications for Pixar, for my family, for my reputation. I decided that I didn't really care, because this is what I want to do. If I try my best and fail, well, I've tried my best.

~ Steve Jobs

Never having been able to succeed in the world, he took his revenge by speaking ill of it.

~ Voltaire

From my boyhood I have had an intense and overwhelming conviction that my real vocation lay in the direction of literature. I have, however, had a most unaccountable difficulty in getting any responsible person to share my

~ Arthur Conan Doyle

The freedom to choose...means the freedom to make mistakes, to falter and fail, to come face-to-face with your own flaws and limitations and fears and secrets, to live with the terrible uncertainty that necessarily attends the construction of a self.

~ Caroline Knapp

For thirty minutes I sat back and felt the glimmer of pride that historically precedes the most catastrophic falls.

~ Antony John

There are many shortcuts to failure, but there are no shortcuts to true success.

~ Orrin Woodward

I'm all alone,fuming at myself,waving a great flagof failure.

~ Emma Cameron

Dealing with failure is easy: Work hard to improve. Success is also easy to handle: You've solved the wrong problem. Work hard to improve.

~ Alan J. Perlis

Failure is necessary to succeed and will become your biggest blessing.

~ Lynn Bardowski

Sometimes stories get on my nerves--especially the ones where unfair things keep happening to the hero over and over, for no reason at all, and he valiantly overcomes it all.Life isn't like that.Not every hero can stay valiant. Sometimes, they can't even stay a hero, so what does that make them? A failure? A pussy? A total failure jerkwad with no hope on the horizon save finding a cemetery and digging rectangles in the ground for the town drunk?

~ Susan Vaught

Sooner or later, the man who learnt lessons from his failures will be the one to be sought first for guidance, counsel and formula on how to be successful in life's endeavours.

~ Ogwo David Emenike

Do you know the opportunity you get when you fail? It is starting again - an opportunity to perform better.

~ Ogwo David Emenike

I realize that a writer's business is setting fire to Piggy Sneed-and trying to save him-again and again, forever.

~ John Irving

Failure gives the bald hairs; equips the novice with experience. The learner, sooner or later, becomes a teacher by it.

~ Ogwo David Emenike

I hate to be wrong. It makes me feel like a failure. Being wrong has the same affect on me as a lack of food or sleep. It lowers my entire mood. But, I need to be proved wrong sometimes, as it restores humility, and doesn't allow my ego to swell to stupidly big sizes.

~ Paul Kelly

Appeal. Guy's like you get all excited about the appeal. Don't you see that I view the very existence of an appeal as a disastrous failure? No much worse, a personal affront of the highest order for which I blame you.

~ Sergio De La Pava

A mistake of one man is not the mistake of mankind.

~ Kim Panti

It was very quiet at the hotel, as if there had been a death in the family. When you have quit the Tour, nobody really knows what to say or do. (...) Everything I'd previously achieved meant nothing; all I was now was a pro rider who couldn't finish the Tour de France.

~ David Millar

Alas, how easily things go wrong!A sigh too much, a kiss too longAnd there follows a mist and a weeping rainAnd life is never the same again

~ George Macdonald

What makes authentic disciples is not visions, ecstasies, biblical mastery of chapter and verse, or spectacular success in the ministry, but a capacity for faithfulness. Buffeted by the fickle winds of failure, battered by their own unruly emotions, and bruised by rejection and ridicule, authentic disciples may have stumbled and frequently fallen, endured lapses and relapses, gotten handcuffed to the fleshpots and wandered into a far county. Yet, they kept coming back to Jesus.

~ Brennan Manning

You can fail many times, but you're not a failure until you begin to blame somebody else.

~ John Burroughs