384 Failure Quotes

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.

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

Every strike brings me closer to the next home run.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.

A beaten general is disgraced forever.

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

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.

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

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

It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Not failure, but low aim, is crime.

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.

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

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

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

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

Action: 'Do not let your ambitions become a sanctuary for your failures.'

He was a great influence on me. I don't know what happened to him. I think he failed and went to America.

I constructed a machine that I imagined was capable of taking me as high as I wanted to go. I launched myself into the air from the edge of a cliff. But I had miscalculated, and I crashed into the valley below. I returned to my room, quite rumpled but not discouraged. I took some beef marrow and slathered it all over my body, which was bruised from head to toe. I fortified my courage with a bottle of cordial and went back for my machine.

'If we do not succeed, then we run the risk of failure.'

The Rock says, they didn't keep you at the bottom of the barrel just because you wanted to say goodbye to your roody poo friends in Madison Square Garden, no. The Rock says, they kept you at the bottom of the barrel because you absolutely suck.

I believe in the paradox of success through failure.

And yet in a way I would rather fail point blank. Things one can do have no value. I don't mind feeling small myself, but I dread finding the world is.

The German Navy managed mostly to show that they knew how to die gallantly, especially the surface fleet.

The one-legged never stumble.

Anyone can have a bad century!!!

(While playing solitaire and sipping cognac) It's all a lot of crap. The game is up.

The first war had ruined him. He had volunteered, though he was over military age and was fighting a country he loved; his health was broken, and he came back to a new literary world which had carefully eliminated him. For some of his later work he could not even find a publisher in England. No wonder he preferred to live abroad - in Provence or New York. But I don't suppose failure disturbed him much: he had never really believed in human happiness, his middle life had been made miserable by passion, and he had come through - with his humour intact, his stock of unreliable anecdotes, the kind of enemies a man ought to have, and a half-belief in a posterity which would care for good writing.

You are talking to dead men here.

I committed suicide and all I got was this stupid fucking T-shirt!

On Opening Day, the President doesn't throw out the first ball. He throws it in. If he threw it out, it would land in the parking lot and someone would have to go get it.

Who will demand accountability for the failure of our national political leadership involved in the management of this war? They have unquestionably been derelict in the performance of their duty. In my profession, these types of leaders would immediately be relieved or court martialed.

A solemn scene it was indeed... He seemed to enjoy a triumph over me. Methought I heard him think, 'Ay! I am fairly out and you are fairly in! See which of us will be the happiest!'

Three factors defeated us in the West where I was in command. First, the unheard-of superiority of your air force, which made all movement in daytime impossible. Second, the lack of motor fuel - oil and gas - so that the Panzers and even the Luftwaffe were unable to move. Third, the systematic destruction of all railway communications so that it was impossible to bring one single railroad train across the Rhine.

Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.

I found myself projected against an obstacle which I could not penetrate. It was like the others, yet incalculably denser; a sticky clammy mass, if such terms can be applied to analogous qualities in a non-material sphere. I had, I felt, been halted by a barrier which my friend and leader had successfully passed. Struggling anew, I came to the end of the drug-dream...

'Je reussirai!' Le mot du joueur, du grand capitaine, mot fataliste qui perd plus d'hommes qu'il n'en sauve.

Sedit qui timuit ne non succederet.

The ugly fallout from the American Dream has been coming down on us at a pretty consistent rate since Sitting Bull's time-and the only real difference now, with Election Day '72 only a few weeks away, is that we seem to be on the verge of ratifying the fallout and forgetting the Dream itself.

Richard Nixon could tell us a lot about peaking too early. He was a master of it, because it beat him every time. He never learned and neither did Bush the Elder.

But wow! This goofy child president we have on our hands now. He is demonstrably a fool and a failure, and this is only the summer of '03. By the summer of 2004, he might not even be living in the White House. Gone, gone, like the snows of yesteryear.

The Rumsfeld-Cheney axis has self-destructed right in front of our eyes, along with the once-proud Perle-Wolfowitz bund that is turning to wax. They somehow managed to blow it all, like a gang of kids on a looting spree, between January and July, or even less. It is genuinely incredible. The U.S. Treasury is empty, we are losing that stupid, fraudulent chickencrap War in Iraq, and every country in the world except a handful of Corrupt Brits despises us. We are losers, and that is the one unforgiveable sin in America.

What we are looking at on all our TV sets is a man who finally, after 24 years of frenzied effort, became the President of the United States with a personal salary of $200,000 a year and an unlimited expense account including a fleet of private helicopters, jetliners, armored cars, personal mansions and estates on both coasts and control over a budget beyond the wildest dream of King Midas . . . and all the dumb bastard can show us, after five years of total freedom to do anything he wants with all this power, is a shattered national economy, disastrous defeat in a war we could have ended four years ago on far better terms than he finally came around to, and a hand-picked personal staff put together through five years of screening, whose collective criminal record will blow the minds of high-school American History students for the next 100 years.

Lifelong dissent has more than acclimated me cheerfully to defeat. It has made me suspicious of victory. I feel uneasy at the very idea of a Movement. I see every insight degenerating into a dogma, and fresh thoughts freezing into lifeless party line.

You show me a winner and I'll show you someone who's lost a lot, You show me someone who's never lost and you show me a loser - someone who's never tried. The more a person wants to succeed in life and the bigger they dream, the more likely they are to fail.

Faraday, Maxwell, Larmor and a great number of others tried to explain electromagnetic action on these lines, but all attempts failed, and it began to seem impossible that any properties of ether could explain the observed pattern of events.

'A great many smashes by brilliant men can be traced directly to the swelled head - an expensive disease everywhere to everybody, but particularly in Wall Street to a speculator.'

O fol of alle foles, Thou farst as he betwen tuo stoles That wolde sitte and goth to grounde.

The conclusion drawn by ... most of our elites ... is that the population constitutes a deep and dangerous well of ignorance and irrationality; if our civilization is in crisis the fault must lie with the populace which is not rising to the inescapable challenges. And yet civilizations do not collapse because the citizenry are corrupt or lazy or anti-intellectual. These people do not have the power and influence to either lead or destroy. Civilizations collapse when those who have power fail to do their jobs.

I have always believed no matter how many shots I miss, I'm going to make the next one.

'Die Grunen durfen nicht nach jeder Niederlage den Kopf noch tiefer in den Sandhaufen der Lebenslugen stecken.'

'Wer das Wunschbare mit dem Machbaren verwechselt, wird scheitern.' ('Who mixes up the wishable and the doable will fail')

He Can't even do that right.

Oh, Jesus Christ, he wasn't to know, Like a chicken with a fox, He couldn't win the war with ego. Give the kid the pick of pips, And give him all your stripes and ribbons. Now he's sitting in his hole, He might as well have buttons and bows.

I thought for a minute there I saw her whipped. Maybe I did. But I see now that it don't make any difference.... To beat her you don't have to whip her two out of three or three out of five, but every time you meet. As soon as you let down your guard, as soon as you lose once, she's won for good. And eventually we all got to lose. Nobody can help that.

'Born to Lose, Out to Lunch' - Written on the front of Lemmy's bass.

But the principal failing occurred in the sailing, And the Bellman, perplexed and distressed, Said he had hoped, at least, when the wind blew due East That the ship would not travel due West!

Vanquished in life, his death By beauty made amends: The passing of his breath Won his defeated ends.

I have no right to risk. No, that's not quite correct. I have no right to failure. And I don't trust myself anymore. I don't know what's happened to my edge. Lost it in a strange land.

There is no safety. Only varying states of risk. And failure.

And what goes on in the head of a walking dead man? What personal failure could he possibly fear more than death itself?

'It didn't work, so let's do it some more'? In my line of work, they call that military stupidity. I don't know what they call it in civilian life.

Better to err with Pope, than shine with Pye.

And lovelier things have mercy shown To every failing but their own, And every woe a tear can claim Except an erring sister's shame.

A pity she did not understand them!

Charge once more, then, and be dumb! Let the victors, when they come, When the forts of folly fall, Find thy body by the wall.

The plans of mice, men and Maureen gang aft a cock-up.

Max Bialystock (Zero Mostel): 'How could this happen? I was so careful. I picked the wrong play, the wrong director, the wrong cast. Where did I go right?'

The Bank [of Canada] gave it a college try, it really did. It just doesn't work that way.

Poor old Spotty Muldoon. He thought of splitting the atom the other day. If only he could have had the idea about thirty years ago, he'd have made a bloody fortune.

Ces deux ducs dessusdits estoient sages apres le coup (comme l'on dit des Bretons).

To have your poems criticized by Jarrell - when they didn't please him - was like meeting your fate, like a foretaste of death. To go with his daunting judgement, he had an unlimited stock of images for catching exactly each poet's inadequacies, so that their predicaments were far more vividly expressed than anything they themselves had written. Jarrell made literature out of their failure to make it.

With hindsight, one can perhaps see that unachievable projects were the right monuments to an ideal. Because they were not built, they could not be destroyed.

I think that one may contribute (ever so slightly) to the beauty of things by making one's own life and environment beautiful, as far as one's power reaches.This includes moral beauty, one of the qualities of humanity, though it seems not to appear elsewhere in the universe. But I would have each person realize that his contribution is not important, its success not really a matter for exultation nor its failure for mourning; the beauty of things is sufficient without him. (An office of tragic poetry is to show that there is beauty in pain and failure as much as in success and happiness.)

To Robinson Jeffers the earth was hopelessly prostrate.

Boat Trip arrives preceded by publicity saying many homosexuals have been outraged by the film. Now that it's in theaters, everybody else has a chance to join them. Not that the film is outrageous. That would be asking too much. It is dim-witted, unfunny, too shallow to be offensive, and way too conventional to use all of those people standing around in the background wearing leather and chains and waiting hopefully for their cues. This is a movie made for nobody, about nothing.