Quotes & Sayings About Failure Sports

In all of the history of professional sports, the Cubs are the ultimate symbol of complete failure. — John Scalzi

The burn is my girlfriend, failure is my ex. I'm married to the track and engaged to success. — Andre Bramble

True, we can learn much from observation of the failure of others without having to personally suffer the same pain, but the character and memory of the wisdom gained may be more acute and long-lasting from our own personal failures. Even worse is the generational fear of failure prevalent in our culture, resulting from parents carefully programming their offspring as young as three to participate in activities intended to cultivate intellectual and sports prowess which in their design do not allow for failure. Before children can feel the pain of their mistakes, the parents intervene and deflect the taking of personal responsibility by the child. We pay for it so they do not have to. This is the most dangerous thing we can do for them. — Kevin R. Anderson

Failure is the foundation of success: success is the lurking place of failure. — Laozi

Everyone is really afraid of getting out there and not being good. That's the challenge: To be afraid and know people are staring at you and know you might not do all that well, but you do it anyway. What singles out the successful athlete from the ones who never make it past a plateau, it that successful athletes risk failure, even though they are terrified. — Aimee Mullins

The biggest failure of man is that he gives up before he realizes how close he was to success. — Thomas A. Edison

When there is good news, and it is news , we do report it, but usually news is a record of human failure. Those wanting to celebrate human accomplishment are, as someone said, advised to go to the sports section. — Linda Ellerbee

Success is failure with the dirt brushed off. — Mamie McCullough

Fishing largely consists of not catching fish; failure is as much a part of the sport as knee injuries are of football. — Robert Hughes

The question then was not what other countries were doing, but why. Why did these countries have this consensus around rigor? In the education superpowers, every child knew the importance of an education. These countries had experienced national failure in recent memory; they knew what an existential crisis felt like. In many U.S. schools, however, the priorities were muddled beyond recognition. Sports were central to American students' lives and school cultures in a way in which they were not in most education superpowers. Exchange students agreed almost universally on this point. Nine out of ten international students I surveyed said that U.S. kids placed a higher priority on sports, and six out of ten American exchange students agreed with them. Even in middle school, other researchers had found, American students spent double the amount of time playing sports as Koreans. — Amanda Ripley

A pitcher never gets me out. I get myself out. That's no disrespect to the pitcher, but there should be no excuse for failure. You can't have an excuse to fail. — Mike Piazza

I grew up playing sports. There is a clear line between success and failure. — Tiki Barber

I have failed many times, and that's why I am a success. — Michael Jordan

This is the very structure of sports journalism: deification and damnation, death and resurrection, failure and redemption. You succeed so you can falter so you can succeed again. We need a rise and a fall. We need hubris and retribution and recovery. — Will Leitch

Side note: Down here, you're either an Amundsen guy, a Shackleton guy, or a Scott guy. Amundsen was the first to reach the Pole, but he did it by feeding dogs to dogs, which makes Amundsen the Michael Vick of polar explorers: you can like him, but keep it to yourself, or you'll end up getting into arguments with a bunch of fanatics. Shackleton is the Charles Barkley of the bunch: he's a legend, all-star personality, but there's the asterisk that he never reached the Pole, i.e. won a championship. How this turned into a sports analogy, I don't know. Finally, there's Captain Scott, canonized for his failure, and to this day never fully embraced because he was terrible with people. He has my vote, you understand. — Maria Semple

Failure I can live with. Not trying is what I can't handle! — Sanya Richards-Ross

Sports can unite a group of people from different backgrounds, all working together to achieve a common goal. And even if they fall short, sharing that journey is an experience they'll never forget. It can teach some of the most fundamental and important human values: dedication, perseverance, hard work, and teamwork. It also teaches us how to handle our success and cope with our failure. So, perhaps the greatest glory of sport is that is teaches us so much about life itself. — Ahmad Rashad

One of the most basic factors in sports is that winning becomes a habit, and losing is the same way. When failure starts to feel normal in your life or your work or even your darkest vices, you won't have to go looking for trouble, because trouble will find you. Count on it. — Hunter S. Thompson

I later discovered that in order to be a good athlete one must care intensely what is happening with a ball, even if one doesn't have possession of it. This was ultimately my failure: my inability to work up a passion for the location of balls. — Haven Kimmel

In high school, in sport, I had a coach who told me I was much better than I thought I was, and would make me do more in a positive sense. He was the first person who taught me not to be afraid of failure. — Mike Krzyzewski

Play with no fear of failure. — Max Seibald

I don't look at football as a violent, barbaric sport. It's a very spiritual sport, especially for someone facing the challenges during a game: the fear of failure, the fear of getting too big an ego, of making a mistake and everybody criticizing you. — Troy Polamalu

It's a game of failure [softball]. Everybody would play, that was easy and everyone's not playing because it is so tough. But it's a matter of keep plugging away, keep working hard, believing in yourself and it is a team sport and there is nothing better than being out there, having a ball in your hand, playing the game that you love and ultimately that's what it comes down is having fun and enjoying it. — Jennie Finch

I've tried to handle winning well, so that maybe we'll win again, but I've also tried to handle failure well. If those serve as good examples for teachers and kids, then I hope that would be a contribution I have made to sport. Not just basketball, but to sport. — Mike Krzyzewski

Comedy was my sport. It taught me how to roll with the punches. Failure is the exact same as success when it comes to comedy because it just keeps coming. It never stops. — Emma Stone

I don't like to lose, and that isn't so much because it is just a football game, but because defeat means the failure to reach your objective. I don't want a football player who doesn't take defeat to heart, who laughs it off with the thought, "Oh, well, there's another Saturday." The trouble in American life today, in business as well as in sports, is that too many people are afraid of competition. The result is that in some circles people have come to sneer at success if it costs hard work and training and sacrifice. — Knute Rockne

Here's a memonic device that I feel teaches how we can properly cope with failure. Forget about your failures; don't dwell on past mistakes Anticipate failure; realize that we all make mistakes. Intensity in everything you do; never be a failure for lack of effort. Learn from your mistakes; don't repeat previous errors. Understand why you failed; diagnose your mistakes so as to not repeat them. Respond, don't react to errors; responding corrects mistakes while reacting magnifies them. Elevate your self-concept. It's OK to fail, everyone does; now how are you going to deal with the failure — Steve Largent

If you are afraid of failure, you don't deserve success. — Nastia Liukin

If you gone come in second, you're just the first loser! — Tiger Woods

Persistence can change failure into extraordinary achievement. — Matt Biondi

I wouldn't have been what you'd call a champion if I had accepted failure when it first came, if I had looked at it and said, 'Well, that's it.' — Shirley Strickland

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

There must be a bad chromosome somewhere in man that urges him to wound that which he can't conquer, deface that which is more beautiful, misunderstand and befoul the work of another. — Bill Murray

Our sports [softball] is a game of failure already so my dad always says to parents who he is a pitching coach and he's been my pitching coach since I was 11 years old is if they can be the best kid on the team, let them experience that and then obviously the challenge has to come later on but you don't get that opportunity very often and confidence is such a huge part of this game and in life in general. — Jennie Finch

Some teachers feel that if they ask for emotional help, they're a failure. But teaching is a team sport. — Erin Gruwell

The war on drugs has been a social and political failure. We need to encourage sport and stop encouraging drugs. — Steven Machat

I am almost certain fishermen posess a peculiar bend to their makeup. Fisherman are optimists, and the fish in the future is always preferable to the fish at hand. Even the best fishermen catch fish only a small percentage of the time, which means we persevere in a sport that features failure as its main ingredient. Truly great days, when the fish hammer the fly as soon as it lands on the water are rare. — Joseph Monninger

Good things don't happen by coincidence. Every dream carries with it certain risks, especially the risk of failure. But I am not stopped by risks. Supposed a great person takes the risk and fails. Then the person must try again. You cannot fail forever. If you try ten times, you have a better chance of making it on the eleventh try than if you didn't try at all. — Arnold Schwarzenegger

A refined ability to learn from failure and to grow through losses is necessary to achieve excellence in any human endeavor. — Terry Orlick

Isn't post-modernism really one big cover-up for the failure of the French to write a truly interesting novel ever since a sports car ate Albert Camus? — John Leonard

Mountaineering is a complex and unique way of life, interweaving elements of sport, art and mysticism. Success or failure depends on the ebb and flow of immense inspiration. Detecting a single rule governing this energy is difficult - it arises and vanishes like the urge to dance and remains as mysterious as the phenomenon of life itself. — Wojciech Kurtyka

I'm playing; I'm here. I'm going to fight until they tell me they don't want me anymore. — Steve Nash

You expect success, you respect failure. — Greg Norman

There's no disgrace in failure, the disgrace is not to try. — Cathy Rigby

Listen, you have to understand something. In all of the history of professional sports, the Cubs are the ultimate symbol of complete failure. The championship of baseball is something called the World Series, and it's been so long since the Cubs have won it that no one who is alive could remember the last time they won it. It's so long that no one alive knew anyone who was alive when they won it. We're talking centuries of abject failure here. — John Scalzi