Selected failure quotes

1. Nothing fails like success.

2. When you lose, don't lose the lesson.

3. If the only significant history of human thought were to be written, it would have to be the history of its successive regrets and its impotences.

4. Allied air power was the greatest single reason for the German defeat.

5. How can I fail when I have no purpose?

6. Doing it wrong fast is at least better than doing it wrong slowly.

7. I've learned so much from my failures that I'm thinking of having some more.

8. My success lies in having achieved a record numbers of failures.

9. We can all learn from our failures. What I've learned is how much it hurts to fail.

10. Victory is for them, not for us. We have not made profit out of our country's misfortune. Victory does not bring us luck.

11. Every strike brings me closer to the next home run.

12. Never let the fear of striking out get in your way.

13. I have always grown from my problems and challenges, from the things that don't work out, that's when I've really learned.

14. Charlie Brown is the one person I identify with. C.B. is such a loser. He wasn't even the star of his own Halloween special.

15. Theories that go counter to the facts of human nature are foredoomed.

16. All men that are ruined, are ruined on the side of their natural propensities.

17. Failure in the management of practical affairs seems to be a qualification for success in the management of public affairs.

18. There can be no real freedom without the freedom to fail.

19. There is hardly any activity, any enterprise, which is started out with such tremendous hopes and expectations, and yet which fails so regularly, as love.

20. He who has failed three times sets up as an instructor.

21. Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.

22. A beaten general is disgraced forever.

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

24. We still have many shortcomings and failures to fulfill the Party's demands, especially as regards the liquidation in some of our people of survivals of the accursed past in consciousness and conduct and the fulfillment of the demands of our Soviet ethics and military discipline.

25. Natural heart's ivy, Patience masks Our ruins of wrecked past purpose.

26. A real failure does not need an excuse. It is an end in itself.

27. It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.

28. Nothing is more humiliating than to see idiots succeed in enterprises we have failed in.

29. Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.

30. No matter how vast, how total, the failure of man here on earth, the work of man will be resumed elsewhere. War leaders talk of resuming operations on this front and that, but man's front embraces the whole universe.

31. Capitalism has always been a failure for the lower classes. It is now beginning to fail for the middle classes.

32. The second half of the twentieth century is a complete flop.

33. Infelicity is an ill to which all acts are heir which have the general character of ritual or ceremonial, all conventional acts.

34. Deadly nightshade is the only plant I have ever been able to get to grow for me.

35. Not failure, but low aim, is crime.

36. Myrmecophaga jubata: The anteater. The existence of this predator demonstrates that thinking 71 percent of the time, as ants do, won't prevent you from being eaten. Thinking less than that, as humans do, will almost guarantee it.

37. Risks, I like to say, always pay off. You learn what to do, or what not to do.

38. Those who promise us paradise on earth never produced anything but a hell.

39. Good tests kill flawed theories; we remain alive to guess again.

40. I hope I never need to believe in God. It would be an awful confession of failure.

41. Well, I could have been a famous singer If I had someone else's voice But failure's always sounded better Let's fuck it up, boys, make some noise!

42. I would rather be beaten and be a man than to be elected and be a little puppy dog. I have always supported measures and principles and not men. I have acted fearless and independent and I never will regret my course. I would rather be politically buried than to be hypocritically immortalized.

43. Heaven knows that I have done all that a mortal could do, to save the people, and the failure was not my fault, but the fault of others.

44. Josh, I think you were a very, very ineffective leader; your decision-making was absolutely terrible. James, you built a batting cage; you took up all the space. Mark, this was a sales task; you didn't sell a single thing. And again, in this boardroom, we've never had a team lose so badly...you're all fired-all four are fired! Go home. Go home.

45. 'Losing is (series of naughty words).'

46. It can be really fun to go down with the ship.

47. Men since the beginning of time have sought peace. Various methods through the ages have been attempted to devise an international process to prevent or settle disputes between nations. From the very start workable methods were found in so far as individual citizens were concerned, but the mechanics of an instrumentality of larger international scope have never been successful. Military alliances, balances of power, Leagues of Nations, all in turn failed, leaving the only path to be by way of the crucible of war. The utter destructiveness of war now blocks out this alternative. We have had our last chance. If we will not devise some greater and more equitable system, Armageddon will be at our door.

48. The average mind is slow in grasping a truth, but when the most thoroughly organized, centralized institution, maintained at an excessive national expense, has proven a complete social failure, the dullest must begin to question its right to exist. The time is past when we can be content with our social fabric merely because it is 'ordained by divine right,' or by the majesty of the law.

49. But History was against me. History is right, objectively speaking. I'm just a historical dead end. I hope at least that my fate will serve as an example to you all and to posterity.

50. I take with me the conscience of defeat as a victory banner.

51. You are never beaten until you admit it.

52. He (Otto Skorzeny) also saved Mussolini...and Hitler hoped that Skorzeny would do the same in Tehran, but he didn't succeed at it.

53. We mustn't complain too much of being comedians-it's an honourable profession. If only we could be good ones the world might gain at least a sense of style. We have failed-that's all. We are bad comedians, we aren't bad men.

54. Failure too is a form of death.

55. It is better to have loft and lost than never to have loft at all.

56. It is better to be defeated standing for a high principle than to run by committing subterfuge.

57. In spite of intense efforts, the moment has drawn near when this front, already so heavily strained, will break. I consider it my duty to bring these conclusions to your notice...my Fuhrer.

58. Well, gentlemen, this matter has been a fiasco.

59. Now she's on a diet. Coconuts and bananas. She hasn't lost any weight. But she can climb a tree!

60. It is better to have loafed and lost, than never to have loafed at all.

61. See your disappointments as good fortune. One plan's deflation is another's inflation.

62. Dieu des Juifs, tu l'emportes!

63. One says a lot in vain, refusing; The other mainly hears the 'No.'

64. I've kind of been able to glide through this weird little thing they call a career in terms of the business world and in terms of the industry in many movies that were considered absolute failures, flops. So I've kind of made a career of: failing. (2004)

65. My life, my career has been like a roller coaster. I've either been an enormous success or just a down-and-out failure.

66. In Hollywood, you just kind of fail upwards.

67. God will not forgive us if we fail.

68. You get tragedy where the tree, instead of bending, breaks.

69. There are some defeats more triumphant than victories.

70. From the sublime to the ridiculous is but a step.

71. Death is nothing, but to live defeated and inglorious is to die daily.

72. He who fears being conquered is certain of defeat.

73. I accept I might be defeated, but caught in surprise, never.

74. In victory, you deserve Champagne; in defeat, you need it.

75. People accustomed to great victories, know not how to support a day of reverse.

76. Lack of loyalty is one of the major causes of failure in every walk in life.

77. Perseverance: The majority of men meet with failure because of their lack of persistence in creating new plans to take the place of those that fail.

78. The majority of men meet with failure because of their lack of persistence in creating new plans to take the place of those which fail.

79. Through some strange and powerful principle of 'mental chemistry' which she has never divulged, nature wraps up in the impulse of strong desire, 'that something' which recognizes no such word as 'impossible,' and accepts no such reality as failure.

80. He who blinded by ambition, raises himself to a position whence he cannot mount higher, must thereafter fall with the greatest loss.

81. If they know nothing of victory, they are at least spared the knowledge of defeat.

82. In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.

83. Ambition is the last refuge of the failure.

84. At five minutes to eleven on the morning named he was at the station, a false beard and spectacles shielding his identity from the public eye. If you had asked him he would have said that he was a Scotch business man. As a matter a fact, he looked far more like a motor-car coming through a haystack.

85. when you have been just told that the girl you love is definitely betrothed to another, you begin to understand how Anarchists must feel when the bomb goes off too soon.

86. I consider that of all the dashed silly, drivelling ideas I ever heard in my puff this is the most blithering and futile. It won't work. Not a chance.

87. Breakfast had been prepared by the kitchen maid, an indifferent performer who had used the scorched earth policy on the bacon again.

88. It has been well said that an author who expects results from a first novel is in a position similar to that of a man who drops a rose petal down the Grand Canyon of Arizona and listens for the echo.

89. A politics that is not sensitive to the concerns and circumstances of people's lives, a politics that does not speak to and include people, is an intellectually arrogant politics that deserves to fail.

90. The road to hell is paved with works-in-progress.

91. If at first you don't succeed, failure may be your style.

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

93. What happens when bosses ignore memos from subordinates? The country is now learning the answer to that question in a most painful way. On July 10, 2001, an FBI agent in Phoenix [Arizona] wrote a memo raising serious concerns about Middle Eastern men attending U.S. flight schools. The memo never made its way up the chain of command, and no action was taken. --Richard Behar, introd. to 'FBI's 'Phoenix' memo Unmasked', Fortune [date?], [date accessed?]. (See (incomplete) list of Behar's Fortune articles in his section of his Publications [some defunct links].)

94. About George W. Bush: 'He came ill-equipped for the job and has failed to master it.'

95. Fail I alone, in words and deeds? Why, all men strive and who succeeds?

96. A minute's success pays the failure of years.

97. All those who try to go it sole alone, Too proud to be beholden for relief, Are absolutely sure to come to grief.

98. The greatest test of courage on earth is to bear defeat without losing heart.

99. Our business in this world is not to succeed, but to continue to fail, in good spirits.

100. To be honest, to be kind - to earn a little and to spend a little less, to make upon the whole a family happier for his presence, to renounce when that shall be necessary and not be embittered, to keep a few friends, but these without capitulation - above all, on the same grim condition, to keep friends with himself - here is a task for all that a man has of fortitude and delicacy. He has an ambitious soul who would ask more; he has a hopeful spirit who should look in such an enterprise to be successful. There is indeed one element in human destiny that not blindness itself can controvert: whatever else we are intended to do, we are not intended to succeed; failure is the fate allotted.