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.

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

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

Ambition is the last refuge of the failure.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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].)

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

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

A minute's success pays the failure of years.

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

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

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

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.

Here lies one who meant well, tried a little, failed much: - surely that may be his epitaph of which he need not be ashamed.

The duty of a Christian is not to succeed, but to fail cheerfully.

Defeat should never be a source of discouragement, but rather a fresh stimulus.

If you can make one heap of all your winnings And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss, And lose, and start again at your beginnings And never breath a word about your loss.

It was our fault, and our very great fault - and now we must turn it to use. We have forty million reasons for failure, but not a single excuse.

Inanimate objects can be classified scientifically into three major categories: those that don't work, those that break down and those that get lost. The goal of all inanimate objects is to resist man and ultimately to defeat him, and the three major classifications are based on the method each object uses to achieve its purpose. As a general rule, any object capable of breaking down at the moment when it is most needed will do so.

'Sometimes you win by losing. Standard thinking said I was a loser; a man who couldn't make the grade at university; a quitter. (...) As it was, I had to open my eyes and look around; I had to be aware of what was going on around me.'

A conquest of this kind is never finished; the contingency remains, and, so that he may assert his will, man is even obliged to stir up in the world the outrage he does not want. But this element of failure is a very condition of his life; one can never dream of eliminating it without immediately dreaming of death. This does not mean that one should consent to failure, but rather one must consent to struggle against it without respite.

The event that came to be known as The Pulse began at 3:03 p.m., eastern standard time, on the afternoon of October 1. The term was a misnomer, of course, but within ten hours of the event, most of the scientists capable of pointing this out were either dead or insane. The name hardly mattered, in any case. What mattered was the effect.

'Your brush with greatness is over!'

Is that what he said? Is that what he said? He can talk! No, it's true. I'm terrible. Do you know what? I've got quite an easy job. I've just got to look at people, say lines and not laugh. And two of those I do okay-ish. But basically I'm just shit at quite an ordinary job, namely not laughing. It's not that hard not to laugh. The guy who sold me my travel card, he didn't wet himself laughing. You just don't do it.

Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.

Restlessness is discontent - and discontent is the first necessity of progress. Show me a thoroughly satisfied man - and I will show you a failure.

I have not failed, I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.

Just because something doesn't do what you planned it to do doesn't mean it's useless.

The most hopeful people in the world are the young and the drunk. The first because they have little experience of failure, and the second because they have succeeded in drowning theirs.

It's not hard to stand behind one's successes. But to accept responsibility for one's failures . . . that is devishly hard! But only thence does the road lead. . . to a radically new insight into the mysterious gravity of my existence as an uncertain enterprise and to its transcendental meaning.

We haven't quite accomplished what we intended to do in 1933, my Fuhrer.

I had long since insisted upon interpreting the things that Fate forced me to do as victories of my own will and intelligence, and now this bad habit had grown into a sort of frenzied arrogance. In the nature of what I was calling my intelligence there was a touch of something illegitimate, a touch of the sham pretender who has been placed on the throne by some freak chance. This dolt of a usurper could not foresee the revenge that would inevitably be wreaked upon his stupid despotism.

Success is 99% failure.

...a man who is never beaten. Every reverse, every defeat is to him only an admonition to wait and catch his opportunity of retrieving his position.

Before Paul and I started the company, we had been involved in some large-scale software projects that were real disasters. They just kept pouring people in, and nobody knew how they were going to stabilize the project. We swore to ourselves that we would do better

The failure described in Being and Nothingness is definitive, but it is also ambiguous. Man, Sartre tells us, is 'a being who makes himself a lack of being in order that there might be being.' That means, first of all, that his passion is not inflicted upon him from without. He chooses it. It is his very being and, as such, does not imply the idea of unhappiness. If this choice is considered as useless, it is because there exists no absolute value before the passion of man, outside of it, in relation to which one might distinguish the useless from the useful. The word 'useful' has not yet received a meaning on the level of description where Being and Nothingness is situated. It can be defined only in the human world established by man's projects and the ends he sets up. In the original helplessness from which man surges up, nothing is useful, nothing is useless. It must therefore be understood that the passion to which man has acquiesced finds no external justification. No outside appeal, no objective necessity permits of its being called useful. It has no reason to will itself. But this does not mean that it can not justify itself, that it can not give itself reasons for being that it does not have. And indeed Sartre tells us that man makes himself this lack of being in order that there might be being. The term in order that clearly indicates an intentionality. It is not in vain that man nullifies being. Thanks to him, being is disclosed and he desires this disclosure. There is an original type of attachment to being which is not the relationship 'wanting to be' but rather 'wanting to disclose being.' Now, here there is not failure, but rather success.

This will end in tears.