Quotes & Sayings About Failures

Journalism is a low trade and a habit worse than heroin, a strange seedy world of misfits and drunkards and failures. — Hunter S. Thompson

Glorious failures are often much more wonderful than easy victories. — Jonathan Friesen

No one can reach the pinnacle of success without crossing the treacherous valleys of failures. — Debasish Mridha

Here you can easily understand the futility of ambitions and achievements, futility of success and failures, futility of wealth and possessions. — Girdhar Joshi

I think the fact that people are even talking about the prospect of the Tories coming second is less about anything the Tories have done and more about the failures of Labour to set out, in any kind of coherent sense, what it's for anymore. — Nicola Sturgeon

We are in this world for one goal and one goal only: to achieve Heaven. It is the only measure of success there is. Merit Heaven and your life has been a success, regardless of whatever failures you experienced during your earthly life. Be damned, and your life has been a failure, regardless of what heights you rose to or successes you enjoyed on earth. — Michael Voris

It's important to celebrate your failures as much as your successes. If you celebrate your failures really well, and if you get to the motto and say, 'Wow, I failed, I tried, I was wrong, I learned something,' then you realize you have no fear, and when your fear goes away, you can move the world. — Sebastian Thrun

Those who broadcast your messy failures are the same people who will telecast your mass fortunes. But this can only happen when you accept your responsibility to turn your life around! — Israelmore Ayivor

In submission we are at last free to value other people. Their dreams and plans become important to us. We have entered into a new, wonderful, glorious freedom, the freedom to give up our own rights for the good of others. For the first time we can love people unconditionally. We have given up the right for them to return our love. No longer do we feel we have to be treated in a certain way. We can rejoice with their successes. We feel genuine sorrow at their failures. It is of little consequence that our plans are frustrated, if their plans succeed. We discover that it is far better to serve our neighbor than to have our own way. — Richard J. Foster

I, myself, have had many failures and I've learned that if you are not failing a lot, you are probably not being as creative as you could be -you aren't stretching your imagination. — John Backus

Here I come to one of the memoir writer's difficulties
one of the reasons why, though I read so many, so many are failures. They leave out the person to whom things happened. The reason is that it is so difficult to describe any human being. So they say: 'This is what happened'; but they do not say what the person was like to whom it happened. And the events mean very little unless we know first to whom they happened. — Virginia Woolf

[...]avoiding mistakes, looking for a way to make life perfect isn't reality. Reality is mistakes, failures, and heartache. — Kristen Kehoe

Steve [sports psychiatrist] had already taught me to try and stop worrying so much about pleasing everyone. We knew that this was one of my most draining flaws and he again used three groups to clarify my thinking. There would always be some people, Steve said, who would care about me and love me. In contrast there would also be a select group of people who would never warm to me - no matter what I did. And in the middle came the overwhelming mass who were largely indifferent to any of my failures or triumphs. I needed to understand that most people didn't really care what I did or said. All my anguish about how they might perceive me was redundant. Steve helped me realize that I spent too much time trying to please those oblivious people in the middle or, more problematically, the small group who would never change their critical opinion of me. I should concentrate on the people who really did show concern for me. — Victoria Pendleton

No comets crashing, nothing you could really call a nuclear war. Just everything else, tangled in the changing climate: droughts, water shortages, crop failures, honeybees gone like they almost were now, collapse of other keystone species, every last alpha predator gone, antibiotics doing even less than they already did, diseases that were never quite the one big pandemic but big enough to be historic events in themselves. And all of it around people: how people were, how many of them there were, how they'd changed things just by being there. — William Gibson

Not everyone understands what a completely rational process this is, this maintenance of a motorcycle. They think it's some kind of "knack" or some kind of "affinity for machines" in operation. They are right, but the knack is almost purely a process of reason, and most of the troubles are caused by what old time radio men called a "short between the earphones," failures to use the head properly. A motorcycle functions entirely in accordance with the laws of reason, and a study of the art of motorcycle maintenance is really a miniature study of the art of rationality itself. — Robert M. Pirsig

Children who have the freedom to explore a variety of things and discard them when they no longer make sense do not feel like failures when they choose to drop something. Instead they see it as another experience from which to learn a bit about something and a lot about themselves. This is a much better attitude than the child who is forced to stay, being told to suck it up and stick it out, who begins to feel powerless and resentful. As an adult this child is more likely, for example, to stay in an unhappy career so as not to look or feel like a failure, though he will definitely feel trapped. — Pam Laricchia

I was lucky in that I had a mother that was full of this colloquial wisdom and she used to say to me 'You know, failure is not the opposite of success, it's the stepping stone to success. There is nobody who has not failed along the way.' So I think its very important for young women, especially as they are starting in life, to recognize that because otherwise, they only see people's success. So, when I speak, I speak of my failures. — Arianna Huffington

Chase your dreams and see how far you can reach. — Lailah Gifty Akita

What is it in humans that makes us so eager to believe ill of one another? ... What makes us so hungry for it? Failed idealism, he suspected. We disappoint ourselves and then look around for other failures to convince ourselves: it's not just me. (15) — Mary Doria Russell

If the age of the Earth were a calendar year and today were a breath before midnight on New Year's Eve, we showed up a scant fifteen minutes ago, and all of recorded history has blinked by in the last sixty seconds. Luckily for us, our planet-mates
the fantastic meshwork of plants, animals, and microbes
have been patiently perfecting their wares since March, an incredible 3.8 billion years since the first bacteria ... After 3.8 billion years of research and development, failures are fossils, and what surrounds us is the secret to survival. — Janine Benyus

Some of the more industrious ones were washing the windshields of cars that had been trapped by the red light. I used to see them from inside cars and think they brought it on themselves, and they probably did but now it didn't make a difference. I went over to the fire and warmed my hands with the group. I looked at their faces: idiots, criminals, retards, schizophrenics, paranoids, rejects, fuck-ups, broken-down failures. Alone, once children, never asked to be put on this earth, they ended up as jurors. Their lives were the verdict: the system, the man, something had failed. — Arthur Nersesian

The nation was cracking under the weight of bloated modernity and all the patches pasted onto its excessive and malfunctioning hypercomplexity, and people were bewildered by the strange glitches, failures and shortages. Going forward, nothing would really work anymore as it was designed to, yet the hope and expectation that it would all magically recover dominated the chatter in the rare moments when people could step back from their frantic lives and share a meal or a drink. — James Howard Kunstler

The older we get, the bigger the catalog of failures Satan can throw in our faces. You may think, 'I don't have anything to offer.' But you can teach out of your failures as well as your successes (p. 223). — Nancy Leigh DeMoss

I've often felt there might be more to be gained by studying business failures than business successes. — Warren Buffett

The acting director of the Secret Service, Joseph Clancy, said they may make the fence around the White House taller because of the recent security failures. When asked if he had any other ideas, he said, 'Uh, make the sidewalk lower?' — Jimmy Fallon

The first 'Wii Fit' games I tried were the slalom and ski jumping. I believe my spectacular failures here had more to do with the board resting on thick carpet than my shoddy balance. — Jen Lancaster

All of us fail, but this doesn't mean we are failures. — Robert McGee

Incredibly, just one mosquito species, Aedes aegypti is responsible for the spread of four known different deadly viral diseases to human beings, yet this mosquito has been allowed to infest densely-populated urban centers. — T.K. Naliaka

A look at the past reminds us of how great is the distance, and how short, over which we have come. The past makes us ask what we have done with us. It makes us ask whether our very achievements are not ironical counterpoint and contrast to our fundamental failures. — Robert Penn Warren

I believe in market economics. But to paraphrase Churchill - who said this about democracy and political regimes - a market economy might be the worst economic regime available, apart from the alternatives. I believe that people react to incentives, that incentives matter, and that prices reflect the way things should be allocated. But I also believe that market economies sometimes have market failures, and when these occur, there's a role for prudential - not excessive - regulation of the financial system. — Nouriel Roubini

It is axiomatic: When there is no penalty for failure, failures proliferate. — George Will

Ninety-nine percent of leadership failures are failures of character. — Norman Schwarzkopf

The world tells us that our children's success depends upon our success. The world knows nothing of God's ability to use our failures as means to bless. "What is impossible with men is possible with God" (Luke 18:27). — Elyse M. Fitzpatrick

The black middle-class in America is a prosperous community that is now larger in absolute terms than the black underclass. Does its existence not suggest that economic adversity is the result of failures of individual character rather than the lingering after-effects of racial discrimination and a slave system that ceased to exist well over a century ago? — David Horowitz

Confusion and clutter are failures of design, not attributes of information. And so the point is to find design strategies that reveal detail and complexity - rather than to fault the data for an excess of complication. Or, worse, to fault viewers for a lack of understanding. — Edward Tufte

There is something living deep within us all that welcomes, even relishes, the role of victimhood for ourselves. There is no cause in the world more righteously embraced than our own when we feel someone has wronged us. Perhaps it is a psychological leftover from early childhood, when we felt the primeval terror of the world around us and yearned for the intervention of a mother/protector to keep us safe. Perhaps it makes it easier to explain away our personal failures when the work of an enemy can be blamed. Perhaps we just get tired of long explanations and like the cleanliness of an easy solution. It is for wiser people than me to say. Whatever its allure, this primitive ideology of Hutu Power swept through Rwanda in 1993 and early 1994 with the speed of flame through dry grass. — Paul Rusesabagina

For years, many public health campaigns that aimed at changing habits have been failures. — Charles Duhigg

Don't bury your failures, let them inspire you. — Robert Kiyosaki

It is most often not our strengths, our courage or our successes that bring two human hearts together, but it is often our shared vulnerability, our fears and our common failures that make us one. — Stefanie Schneider

When Steinbeck was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962, only five Americans had previously been so honored. Accepting the prize in Stockholm, he gave an impassioned speech in which he argued that "the ancient commission of the writer has not changed. He is charged with exposing our many grievous faults and failures, with dredging up to the light our dark and dangerous dreams for the purpose of improvement. — John Steinbeck

We should not fail to hide our love for the one who fails to hide hatred — Munia Khan

It can take years of tears to melt the hardness that develops in this world, covering our tender, gentler inner selves. Tears for every devastating loss, tears for every humiliating failure, tears for every repeated mistake. Those who honor those tears, and even honor them, are not failures at love but rather its true initiates. First the pain and then the power. First the heart breaks and then it soars. — Marianne Williamson

Faith, perseverance, and learning from one's failures is essential to becoming successful... — Roy McElroy

Progress won't be a straight line but if you keep learning you will have more successes than failures, and the mistakes you make along the way will help you get to where you want to go. — Scott Berkun

We spend a lot of energy remembering failures God spent a lot of love saying we could forget. — Bob Goff

The only way to security for Israel and a humane life for Palestinians in their own land is political. No matter where the fault for past negotiating failures lies, there is no other path. — Anthony Lewis

Although I have lived through much darkness, I have seen enough evidence to be unshakably convinced that no difficulty, no fear is so great that it can completely suffocate the hope that springs eternal in the hearts of the young ... Do not let that hope die! Stake your lives on it! We are not the sum of our weaknesses and failures; we are the sum of the Father's love for us and our real capacity to become the image of his Son. — Pope John Paul II

The news may encourage us to imagine that the roots of a nation's problems have their fundamental origins in criminality at the top and yet, though there is clearly a role for targeting individual rotten apples, there is an equally vital task in directing attention to the colourless yet far larger institutional failures that lie concealed within our political and social arrangements. — Alain De Botton

....The wife is the heartbeat of the home. She serves as the thermometer--if she's warm, so is the rest of the family; if she's cold, so is the rest of the family. And if she's an extreme temp--boiling or frigid--the family will follow suit. Calm or chaos comes from her.

I've resisted this responsibility often. It's much easier to point to my husband, the biblically appointed leader of the household, and to examine what I perceive are his flaws, his failures, his lack of whatever. But ultimately, I'm just denying what I really know--that I have a great role to honor and live up to in my marriage and in our home. The questions is, do I embrace it? Or do I run from it? My fear is that I've run from it for a while now. But I'm not running any more. — Sara Horn

We need to be much more far thinking in this new 21st century era of - of nation state failures and conflict. It's not just about getting rid of a single dictator. It is about understanding the secondary and third consequences that fall next. — Martin O'Malley

Never mind those failures till yesterday. Each new day is a sequel of a wonderful life; gifted with hopes to succeed. — Aniruddha Sastikar

Every day God patiently bears with us, and every day we are tempted to become impatient with our friends, neighbors, and loved ones. And our faults and failures before God are so much more serious than the petty actions of others that tend to irritate us! God calls us to graciously bear with the weaknesses of others, tolerating them and forgiving them even as He has forgiven us. — Jerry Bridges

Instead of dwelling on the failures of today focus on the victories of tomorrow. — Matshona Dhliwayo

Identify with failures in others by listing yours. — Johnny Hunt

I think I am at that stage of Life now where Success or Failure, nothing Bothers me. If I get little success then I get lots of rejections and failures on a regular basis too. But none of that bothers me at all. I can take failure as sportingly without getting bothered as I take success. And this is how my life has drastically changed in last one year or something. I don't do things anymore to please people around me and all I care about is If I am happy being where I am and I am enjoying doing what I am doing or not. I may not be where I want to be yet but I am Happy.This is what matters in Life. Isn't it? Find what you love. Sooner or Later but you need to find one day, and once you find, give your everything to it. There may be many failures and rejections on the way but you will reach where you want to be some day and most importantly, you will be happy and in Peace with where you are. — Shivam Singh

Don't walk headfirst into sin when you know better. But when you fail, as you most surely will, let God use those failures for His glory. — Tony Evans

Stop rehearsing life's failures. Use your beautiful imagination to visualize success. — Cheryl Richardson

You think a man doesn't fall down, son? A real man falls down nine times and gets up ten. You think real men don't get scared? We do, all the time, especially when the people we love can be taken away from us. The key to manhood is being there, every morning when she wakes up, every night before she goes to bed. That's what a man does. It has nothing to do with how good you are with some shiny knives. And if you let her do this thing alone, then by God - — Ann Aguirre

Chasing your tale? Sometimes we relive past accomplishments, failures and or past relationships to the point of exhaustion. When we do this, I liken it to a dog chasing its tail, just spinning round and round and going nowhere fast. Constantly chasing our own tales has the same effect on us. It leaves us in a state of dizzying immobility. When we wrap our arms so firmly around our past we leave little room to embrace our present future and that, my friends, is a sad tale to tell. ~Jason Versey — Jason Versey

An interesting life," Yingling told me, "is one filled with controversial successes punctuated by occasional and spectacular failures. — Craig M. Mullaney

Character refers to dispositions and habits that determine the way that person normally responds to desires, fears, challenges, opportunities, failures and successes. — Michael Josephson

You create your reality. You will find this freedom by learning
to look inward, and by realizing that you create the reality that
you know. There are no exceptions to this rule. Your successes
and your failures alike, you have yourselves created. If you
would but understand, this is the truth that would make you free. — Seth

Life is a mixture of successes and failures. May you be encouraged by the successes and strengthened by the failures. As long as you never lose faith in God, you will be victorious over any situation you may face. — Peace Pilgrim

Many great failures lead to the ultimate success — Miguel El Portugues

Our Founding Fathers crafted a constitutional Republic for the first time in the history of the world because they were shaping a form of government that would not have the failures of a democracy in it, but had the representation of democracy in it. — Steve King

We can develop a social vaccine (Self-esteem). We can outgrow our past failures - our lives of crime and violence, alcohol and drug abuse, premature pregnancy, child abuse, chronic dependency on welfare, and education failure. — John Vasconcellos

The only religion that can satisfy today's ideal is a religion that will give consecration to life, and direction to human endeavor, inspire men with faith in themselves, dedicate them to high moral purpose, and give them the strength to live through their failures, and to face with high courage their supreme tragedies. — Sterling M. McMurrin

Three failures denote uncommon strength. A weakling has not enough grit to fail thrice. — Minna Thomas Antrim

All failures are so because they lack social interest. — Alfred Adler

Do not take yourself too seriously. You have to learn not to be dismayed at making mistakes. No human being can avoid failures. — Lawrence G. Lovasik

Delegation requires the willingness to pay for short term failures in order to gain long term competency. — Dave Ramsey

The psychotherapist learns little or nothing from his successes. They mainly confirm him in his mistakes, while his failures, on the other hand, are priceless experiences in that they not only open up the way to a deeper truth, but force him to change his views and methods. — Carl Jung

Mistakes are stepping stones for great achievement. — Lailah Gifty Akita

India is known for much development that has happened since our independence, but at the same time, we have also failed on many levels. It is the responsibility of the future generation to ensure that all these failures are corrected and help create a civilised society with equal opportunities for one and all. — N. R. Narayana Murthy

The strength of character and emotional intelligence to face your failures and learn from them are at the core of success. — Robert Kiyosaki

Knowledge can be a subtle curse. When we learn about the world, we also learn all the reasons why the world cannot be changed. We get used to our failures and imperfections. We become numb to the possibilities of something new — Jonah Lehrer

To ensure longterm failure is not an option, one must learn from many short-term failures. — Orrin Woodward

Our failures don't forfeit God's faithfulness. — Alisa Hope Wagner

The copyright industry has managed to kill civil liberties for their own children, ushering in a dystopian surveillance machine, merely to avoid taking responsibility for their own business failures. I lack words to quantify my contempt for these utter parasites. — Rick Falkvinge

Self-esteem is mostly self-delusion, but it serves a purpose. You are biologically driven to think highly of yourself in order to avoid stagnation. If you were to stop and truly examine your faults and failures, you would become paralyzed by fear and doubt. — David McRaney

There is something distinguished about even his failures; they sink not trivially, but with a certain air of majesty, like a great ship, its flags flying, full of holes. — George Jean Nathan

All are failures makes us change our lives, but changes our will always be in our memories. — Jim Jensen

We'll all be failures?"
"Yes. I don't mean only money failures, but just sort of - of ineffectual and sad, and - oh, how can I tell you? — F Scott Fitzgerald

I'm not critical of the people who do psychotherapy. The therapists in the trenches have to face an awful lot of the social, political, and economic failures of capitalism. They have to take care of all the rejects and failures. They are sincere and work hard with very little credit, and the HMOs and the pharmaceutical companies and insurance companies are trying to wipe them out. So certainly I am not attacking them. I am attacking the theories of psychotherapy. — James Hillman

It is a common mistake to think of failure as the enemy of success. Failure is a teacher-a harsh one, but the best. Pull your failures to pieces looking for the reason. Put your failure to work for you. — Thomas J. Watson

You cannot measure a man by his failures. You must know what use he makes of them. What did they mean to him. What did he get out of them. — Orison Swett Marden

Typically, our love for our leaders is one-sided: their successes become our own, while their failures are theirs alone. — Marcia Whicker

There's nothing more unattractive than a man who blames predestination for his own failures and a woman who blames men for her own vulnerability ...
Blame thyself — Sanhita Baruah

His errors and failures have not traveled the same distance as his successes. — Rick Bass

Success comes in cans. Failures comes in can'ts. — Michael Josephson

I think this market space, this modern world we're living in, one of its greatest failures is that it can only seem to describe a collective in terms of consumers or clients. It never sees an audience or a community as part of the process. And that's something I'm quite proud of, even if the music is crap. — Herbert

I took the sleeper out of Glasgow, and as the smelly old train bumped out of Central Station and across the Jamaica Street Bridge, I stared out at the orange halogen streetlamps reflected in the black water of the river Clyde. I gazed at the crumbling Victorian buildings that would soon be sandblasted and renovated into yuppie hutches. I watched the revelers and rascals traverse the shiny wet streets. I thought of the thrill and danger of my youth and the fear and frustration of my adult life thus far. I thought of the failure of my marriage and my failures as a man. I saw all this through my reflection in the nighttime window.
Down the tracks I went, hardly aware that I was going further south with every passing second. — Craig Ferguson

Disappointments are part of life; we can't always have our own way, and we need to learn to separate what is significant from what is merely annoying. Only in heaven will we be free of all disappointments and failures. A friend of mine says, Oh well, a hundred years from now it won't make any difference! — Billy Graham

Organizations that learn from their failures forgive and remember, they don't forgive and forget. — Robert I. Sutton

I've had a lot of success; I've had failures, so I learn from the failure. — Gordon Ramsay

I have had unsuccessful films, but I learned a lot from those films. I give my failures as much importance as my success. — Aamir Khan

Every discoverer of a new truth, or inventor of the method which evolves it, makes a dozen, perhaps fifty, useless combinations, experiments, or trials for one successful one. In the realm of electricity or of mechanics there is no objection to this. But when such rejected failures involve a torture of animals, sometimes fearful in its character, there is a distinct objection to it. — Henry Jacob Bigelow

But our energy woes are in many ways the result of classic market failures that can only be addressed through collective action, and government is the vehicle for collective action in a democracy. — Sherwood Boehlert

An indispensable hypothesis, even though still far from being a guarantee of success, is however the pursuit of a specific aim, whose lighted beacon, even by initial failures, is not betrayed. — Max Planck

I don't think anyone who tries something they love is a failure. I think it's the people who don't try who are failures. — Kim Culbertson