Quotes & Sayings About Success And Failure

Many of the familiar little things that we use every day have typically evolved over a period of time to a state of familiarity. They balance form and function, elegance and economy, success and failure in ways that are not only acceptable, but also admirable. — Henry Petroski

Don't let any emotional thought concerning success or failure, fame or gain, overtake you, and don't dwell upon them. Give up your personal shortcomings, such as foolish talk, distracting activities, and absentmindedness. Train in being totally gentle in all physical, verbal, or mental activities. Don't ponder the flaws of others; think instead of their good sides. — Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche

Everything has a price, including both success and failure. Choose either one and be prepared to pay the price. — Larry Winget

Focus only on your successes and you will never know failure ... — Stephen Richards

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

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

Was it always my nature to take a bad time and block out the good times, until any success became an accident and failure seemed the only truth? — Lillian Hellman

In technology, failure is often a precondition to future successes, while prosperity can be the beginning of the end, — Jacquie McNish

The greatest happiness of life was to stand at the difficult border between success and failure. — Eiji Yoshikawa

What's the difference between people who feel successful and people who feel they've failed? The answer is mindset: If you learn and grow from failure, suddenly it becomes a personal asset. People who are successful don't want instant gratification. They don't think about hitting a point of success and never working again. Instead they ask, How do I improve myself and continue to do that consistently over time? — Eben Pagan

When Hamish and I loved each other for a whole year without making love, I did not realize that I had set the mould of my whole life. One could find endless reasons for our abstinence
fear, virtue, ignorance, perversion
but the fact remains that the Hamish pattern was to be endlessly repeated, and with increasing velocity and lack of depth, so that eventually the idea of love ended in me almost the day that it began. Nothing succeeds, they say, life success, and certainly nothing fails like failure. I was successful in my work, so I suppose other successes were too much to hope for. — Margaret Drabble

So when someone would love to see you fail, forgive them, and draw upon that motivation to succeed. — Donald L. Hicks

I find no foeman in the road but fear; to doubt is failure and to dare success. — Frederic Lawrence Knowles

Anger is the agro-chemical that makes the weeds of failure to germinate and compete with your crops of success. Don't apply it. — Israelmore Ayivor

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

I believe the way to write a good play is to convince yourself it is easy to do
then go ahead and do it with ease. Don't maul, don't suffer, don't groan till the first draft is finished. A play is a pheonix and it dies a thousand deaths. Usually at night. In the morning it springs up again from its ashes and crows like a happy rooster. It is never as bad as you think, it is never as good. It is somewhere in between, and success or failure depends on which end of your emotional gamut concerning its value it approaches more closely. But it is much more likely to be good if you think it is wonderful while you are writing the first draft. An artist must believe in himself. Your belief is contagious. Others may say he is vain, but they are affected. — Tennessee Williams

The definition of brilliance is redoing failures different each time and expecting successful results. — Carl Henegan

Success is not forever and failure isn't fatal. — Don Shula

Success or failure in your work and relationships is dependent on how you manage your feelings. — Deborah Sandella

With the right attitude, a failure can be converted into a lesson and a stepping-stone for future success. — Jack Canfield

Lord, look down on Thy Servant!
Bad things have come to pass.
There is no heat in the midday sun, nor health in the wayside grass.
His bones are full of an old disease - his torments run and increase.
Lord, make haste with Thy Lightning and grant him a quick release! — Cherise Sinclair

The character of greatness must be measured in two ways, else the measurement is flawed. First, and by far most popular of all, is by one's ability to succeed in times of trial where others may fail. But of no less importance, and perhaps foundational to any form of greatness, is one's willingness to start over in spite of failure, when success seems farthest away. — Guy Finley

Enjoy failure and learn from it. You can never learn from success. — James Dyson

On the roads of failure, it is not uncommon to see the tears of the talented; and in the land of success, to hear the victorious screams of the incompetent! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

It was frankly sort of confusing, the way everyone stared at our bodies exactly as they tried to erase the ideas of our bodies from our minds. We were supposed to get over ourselves but no one was supposed to get over us. The female body was our worst handicap and our best advantage
the surest means to success, the surest course to failure. (p. 72) — Hilary Thayer Hamann

Failure is a part of life. Success teaches you nothing, but failure teaches you resilience. It teaches you to pick yourself up and try again. — Sarah Morgan

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

Not many people are willing to give failure a second opportunity. They fail once and it is all over. The bitter pill of failure is often more than most people can handle. If you are willing to accept failure and learn from it, if you are willing to consider failure as a blessing in disguise and bounce back, you have got the essential of harnessing one of the most powerful success forces. — Joseph Sugarman

Like what? The things Literature was all about: love, sex, morality, friendship, happiness, suffering, betrayal, adultery, good and evil, heroes and villains, guilt and innocence, ambition, power, justice, revolution, war, fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, the individual against society, success and failure, murder, suicide, death, God. And barn owls. — Julian Barnes

It's my job to lead you to success, and, if you fail, it's because I failed, not you.' (Spoken by Bracke, told by Eric) — Shannon A. Thompson

I've known a lot of alleged failures in my time and many of them, in losing what the world has always considered success, have achieved in facing up to failure, more than they ever achieved when they were considered successful. — Faith Baldwin

Pound was silly, bumptious, extravagantly generous, annoying, exhibitionistic; Eliot was sensible, cautious, retiring, soothing, shy. Though Pound wrote some brilliant passages, on the whole he was a failure as a poet (sometimes even in his own estimation); Eliot went from success to success and is still quoted
and misquoted
by thousands of people who have never read him. Both men were expatriates by choice, but Eliot renounced his American citizenship and did his best to become assimilated with his fellow British subjects, while Pound always remained an American in exile. — T.S. Mathews

Nine times out of ten, failure is resorting to Plan B when Plan A gets too risky, too costly, or too difficult. That's why most people are living their Plan B. They didn't burn the ships. Plan A people don't have a Plan B...

There are moments in life when we need to burn the ships to our past. We do so by making a defining decision that will eliminate the possibility of sailing back to the old world we left behind. You burn the ships named Past Failure and Past Success. You burn the ship named Bad Habit. You burn the ship named Regret. You burn the ship named Guilt. You burn the ship named My Old Way of Life. — Mark Batterson

Life itself is a race, marked by a start, and a finish. It is what we learn during the race, and how we apply it, that determines whether our participation has had particular value. If we learn from each success, and each failure, and improve ourselves through this process, then at the end, we have fulfilled our potential and performed well. — Ferdinand Porsche

Do anything that you want to do other than what you are required to do ... success will surely go to others. — Amit Abraham

Go out and do your thing knowing that rejection and failure is an inevitable and integral part of the process to achieving your dreams. — Miya Yamanouchi

Preferring steady progress, slow and imperfect, is a good philosophy for the defeated. — Fred Lowe Soper

Success or failure is not a one day event, but continuous life process. Each day you succeed and each day you fail with life, and most of the time, success follows the failure. — Roshan Sharma

For hitter or pitcher, rookie or veteran, baseball has long been defined by failure rather than success, the old a-.300-hitter-gets-out-7-times-in-10-at-bats truism. Dealing with and managing failure is an essential - some would say the essential - part of the job description. — Barry Svrluga

They talk about the failure of socialism but where is the success of capitalism in Africa, Asia and Latin America? — Fidel Castro

We might sometimes reflect and recall that the purpose of all our science, technology, industry, manufacturing, commerce, and finance is celebration, planetary celebration. This is what moves the stars through the heavens and the earth through its seasons. The final norm of judgment concerning the success or failure of our technologies is the extent to which they enable us to participate more fully in this grand festival. — Thomas Berry

Perform all thy actions with mind concentrated on the Divine, renouncing attachment and looking upon success and failure with an equal eye. Spirituality implies equanimity.
[Trans. Purohit Swami] — Anonymous

Success or failure depends more upon attitude than upon capacity successful men act as though they have accomplished or are enjoying something. Soon it becomes a reality. Act, look, feel successful, conduct yourself accordingly, and you will be amazed at the positive results. — William James

In my memoir, I admit that I've been as fearful of success as of failure. In fact, when 'Passages' was published, I so dreaded bad reviews that I ran away to Italy with a girlfriend and our children to hide out. — Gail Sheehy

Achieve the success they truly desire because they get impatient. They want easy success or none at all. They see the path to success as a frustration, an impediment. Each day spent short of the ultimate goal is viewed as a time of failure and as an annoyance. As such, they get distracted by hundreds of little things that each day try to get us off our course. Yet the successful among us know the truth: — Earl Nightingale

You learn more from your mistakes and failures than from any degree of success. Success can only be grasped for a moment before it becomes a distant oasis not to be found again unless you thirst for the knowledge found in the well fed by your mistakes and failures. — Brian Michael Good

thinker sees in his own actions attempts and questionings to obtain information about something or other; success and failure are answers to him first and foremost. — Friedrich Nietzsche

You cannot achieve success without the risk of failure. And I learned a long time ago, you cannot achieve success, if you fear failure. If you're not afraid to fail, man, you have a chance to succeed. But you're never gonna get there unless you risk it, all the way. I'll risk failure. Sometimes, half the fun is failing. Learning from your mistakes, waking up the next morning, and saying 'Okay. Watch out. Here I come again. A little bit smarter, licking my wounds, and really not looking forward to getting my ass kicked the way I just did yesterday.' So now, I'm just a little more dangerous. — Paul Heyman

The elements of trial and error, similar to earth and sky, and fire and water, delineates the constituent modules of our lives. Living robustly includes more failures than successes. We achieve adeptness to living by exhibiting a willingness to make good faith mistakes and learn from each misadventure. Every effort that fails to achieve our expected result is understandably frustrating. The fact is that without ideas and dreams and devoid of occasional crash landings, a person can never hope to achieve any worthy acts to temper resounding personal disappointment. Meaningful success is ultimately defined when a person dies, when an entire life's work devoted to performing passionate and compassionate enterprises can be judge as a whole unit. — Kilroy J. Oldster

Most successful people move from fear to failure; to faith and then to fruitfulness. That's the trend. — Israelmore Ayivor

When you take risks you learn that there will be times when you succeed and there will be times when you fail, and both are equally important. — Ellen DeGeneres

If a society has no moral foundations then success is a threat. Every successful person thinks everyone else is a failure, and this is the proof of failure. Conquering the world and dying empty-handed on foreign shores is a paradox of such success. — Wasif Ali Wasif

This is true enough, but success is the next best thing to happiness, and if you can't be happy as a success, it's very unlikely that you would find a deeper, truer happiness in failure. — Michael Korda

I've experienced tons of failure. I've been making music for 30 years, and I'd say failure and success have happened in equal measure. — Moby

A critical point: Is an inter-phase between crisis and normalcy, life and death, danger and safety, failure and success — Ikechukwu Joseph

Whether or not Enochian represents a valid system for causing "magical" change in consciousness, there is no question that Enochian is at the very heart of the 20th century occult and neopagan revival - Dee and Kelley's work is still detonating long past their deaths. It is possible, in fact, that we completely lack the ability to gauge their otherworldly work as a success or failure - as it seems to be unfolding on a millennial timespan, "outside the circles of time. — Jason Louv

Lack of confidence, sometimes alternating with unrealistic dreams of heroic success, often leads to procrastination, and many studies suggest that procrastinators are self-handicappers: rather than risk failure, they prefer to create conditions that make success impossible, a reflex that of course creates a vicious cycle. — James Surowiecki

Theatre remains the only thing I understand. It is in the community of theatre that I have my being. In spite of jealousies and fears, emotional conflicts and human tensions; in spite of the penalty of success and the dread of failure; in spite of tears and feverish gaiety this is the only life I know. It is the life I love. — Robert Helpmann

The leading cause of failure is mismanaged success. And the leading cause of success is well-managed failure. — Mark Batterson

Like success, failure is many things to many people. With a positive mental attitude, failure is a learning experience, a rung on the ladder, a plateau at which to get your thoughts in order and prepare to try again. — W. Clement Stone

Always hold your sales meetings in rooms too small for the audience, even if it means holding them in the WC. 'Standing room only' creates an atmosphere of success, as in theatres and restaurants, while a half-empty auditorium smells of failure. — David Ogilvy

Never play the Devil's Advocate. Your words could be the difference between success and failure in someone else. — Ingrid Weir

To possess and exercise omniscience is to never have sensed temperature, experienced a single emotion, or practiced a single vice. It is to have never been amazed, concerned, analytical, or sympathetic. By exercising omniscience, an Omni-maximum being could not move, be moved, or inspired. Such a being could not interfere, empathise, interject, alter, adjust, or give advice. Ever. Such a being could not devise a plan, hear music, imagine a story, or recognise art or deviancy in any guise, for it could never differentiate creativity from cold reality. Such a being could not know doubt, desire, success, or failure. It could not, therefore, know itself, and if it is incapable of that, then it is incapable of experiencing pleasure. — John Zande

Indecisiveness is the number one reason for failure. Lack of ability to make a decision in a timely manner causes most people to fail with their projects and plans. Identify this challenge and decide to no longer let it be a setback from your success. — Farshad Asl

Despite the voices of the culture that would scream otherwise, victory is irreparably tied to the surrender of self. And that explains why so few are truly victorious. — Craig D. Lounsbrough

Scott Adams is not only a world-famous cartoonist, he's also a world-class failure. And he's the first to admit it. In his new book, 'How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big,' the Dilbert creator explains how failure can lead to success if you develop the right skills to make the most of your mistakes. — Mark Frauenfelder

The question is not how can I overcome fear? The question is: how can I use it creatively? If you have problems (and we all do), how are you going to deal with them? To be is to be imperfect. Contentment is resiliency, the willingness and the ability to see the opportunities presented by mistakes. Take what you like and pay for it - failure is the price you pay for success. It is the wages of growth. Success is failing forwards, figuring out how to conduct suffering, and in its reconstruction to transform it into illumination. Eschew impatience. Let stillness teach you where your centre is, where your origins are. Be impeccable in all your dealings with the world. Integrity isn't a luxury - it's an essential. Remember the best advice of the I Ching: perseverance furthers. — Billy Marshall Stoneking

Failure is your friend. It is the raw material of success. Invite it in. Learn from it. And don't let it leave until you pick its pocket. That's a system. — Anonymous

Because of my intense hopes for the youth of China, I feel very keenly my responsibility for their future success or failure. The fate of China lies in their hands. The responsibility for organizing and training them to become worthy citizens of China, able to undertake the tasks of Resistance and Reconstruction, is mine; I cannot evade it. — Chiang Kai-shek

Improvising, I participated in the discussion, and questioned another woman in the group. I asked her how old she was and she answered, "Thirty." I replied, "No, you are not thirty but instead eighty and lying on your deathbed. And now you are looking back on your life, a life which was childless but full of financial success and social prestige." And then I invited her to imagine what she would feel in this situation. "What will you think of it? What will you say to yourself?" Let me quote what she actually said from a tape which was recorded during that session. "Oh, I married a millionaire, I had an easy life full of wealth, and I lived it up! I flirted with men; I teased them! But now I am eighty; I have no children of my own. Looking back as an old woman, I cannot see what all that was for; actually, I must say, my life was a failure! — Viktor E. Frankl

There is in fact a category of people who get unusually close to the truth about themselves and the world. Their self-perceptions are more balanced,they assign responsibility for success and failure more even-handedly, and their predictions for the future are more realistic. These people are living testimony to the dangers of self-knowledge. They are the clinically depressed. — Cordelia Fine

Don't let success go to your head and failure to your heart." - Will Smith. — Jennifer Hinsman

Indian enterprises seemed to work so well they produced disasters; success made them burst at the seams and the disruption of unprecedented orders led to shortages and finally failure. — Paul Theroux

Consider the core of the mind to be a wagon, with will-power to be carried about in it. Push it to a place where there can be failure, and there will be failure. Push it to a place where there can be success, and there will be success. But whether there is success or failure, if one entrusts himself to the straightness of this wagon of the core of the mind, he will attain right-mindedness in either case. Severing oneself from desire and being like a rock or tree, nothing will ever be achieved. Not departing from desire, but realizing a desireless right-mindedness - this is the Way. — Takuan Soho

Success is not something you own; it's something you rent, and the rent is due every day. When you stop paying rent on success, you start paying the rent on failure. — Tom Black

Books proliferate, and occasionally sell in very large numbers, which claim to have found the rule, or small set of rules, which will guarantee business success. But business is far too complicated, far too difficult an activity to distil into a few simple commands ... It is failure rather than success which is the distinguishing feature of corporate life. — Paul Ormerod

I started to see it Eunice's way. We now had obligations to each other. Our families had failed us, and now we had to form an equally strong and enduring connection to each other. Any gap between us was a failure. Success would come when neither of us knew where one ended and the other began. — Gary Shteyngart

Failure in and of itself is not a bad thing. But failing to learn from it is inexcusable. — Alison Levine

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

The down cycle is absolutely essential for spiritual realization. You must have failed deeply on some level or experienced some deep loss or pain to be drawn to the spiritual dimension. Or perhaps your very success became empty and meaningless and so turned out to be failure. Failure lies concealed in every success, and success in every failure. In this world, which is to say on the level of form, everybody "fails" sooner or later, of course, and every achievement eventually comes to naught. All forms are impermanent. — Eckhart Tolle

You didn't fail ... You just didn't use the right method. It's neither hail nor storm ... It's just a stir that precedes the settlement of your destiny. Believe that you will not remain on the ground. Wake up and try again! — Israelmore Ayivor

Success and failure, triumph and disaster. That is the rhythm of life in the garden. — Patience Strong

With every effort, I learned a lot. With every mistake and failure, not only mine, but of those around me, I learned what not to do. I also got to study the success of those I did business with as well. I had more than a healthy dose of fear, and an unlimited amount of hope, and more importantly, no limit on time and effort. — Mark Cuban

I think the two most difficult things to deal with in life are failure and success — David Lee Roth

It is so important for me to try, and having tried I look back on failure and success as if it were all the same. — Tom T. Hall

You learn nothing form your successes except to think too much of yourself. It is from failure that all growth comes, provided you can recognize it, admit it, learn from it, rise above it, and then try again. — Dee Hock

Strength and success - they are above morality, above criticism. It seems, then, that it is not what you do, but how you do it and what you call it. Is there a check in men, deep in them, that stops or punishes? There doesn't seem to be. The only punishment is for failure. In effect no crime is committed unless a criminal is caught. — John Steinbeck

If success or failure of this planet and of human beings depended on how I am and what I do ... HOW WOULD I BE? WHAT WOULD I DO? — R. Buckminster Fuller

Success and happiness spring from facing failure after failure with enthusiasm. — Winston Churchill

Your imagination can focus on ugliness, distress and failure, or it can picture beauty, success, desired results. You decide how you want your imagination to server you. — Philip Mallory Conley

The number of poor, and poorly prepared, students who succeed in college and beyond undercuts the simplistic notion that economic or educational disadvantage is an excuse for failure, violent behavior, or indulgence in drugs. — Roland Merullo

I made a very conscious effort to finish 'The Cypress House' before 'So Cold the River' launched, because I thought that would help build a buffer between my writing and any impact that came from either the success or the failure of that first book. — Michael Koryta

I settled on a game called I am a contribution. Unlike success and failure, contribution has no other side. It is not arrived at by comparison. — Benjamin Zander

If you have an approach that makes money, then money management can make the difference between success and failure ... I try to be conservative in my risk management. I want to make sure I'll be around to play tomorrow. Risk control is essential. — Monroe Trout

The only difference between the failure of a great idea and the success of a medocre idea was the way in which the idea was communicated. — Nancy Duarte

It is true that success is the most boring thing, it is tinny and brittle, failure runs deeper. Success is dangerous. I have a very complicated relationship with that word. — Arundhati Roy

Once the vision of the fulfillment of your dream has been planted in your mind, bring it in to your prayer life. Each time you pray the picture to mind and meditate on it. Pray over it. See it happening. Destroy all the images of failure. Replace them with the image of success. — Phil Pringle

The time I had waited probably made the difference between success and failure. — Anna Neagle

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

It's good to fail now and again - you learn a lot more out of failure than you do out of success. — Ian Hunter