Top 590 Failure Quotes

The young think that failure is the Siberian end of the line, banishment from all the living, and tend to do what I then did – which was to hide.
James Baldwin
If you accept failure, then you can improve on it. It’s funny though, because, on the flip side of the coin, I’d say that if you don’t accept failure, there is no failure.
Subhash Chandra
I think he Oswald felt he was a failure and for the United States and for President Kennedy and all of us. He knew he was a failure at everything he tried, frustrated, with a very sad life, but he was a Marxist.
John Sherman Cooper
The history of the outbreak of war 100 years ago and of the collapse of the fragile balance of power in Europe in the summer of 1914 is a disturbing tale of the failure of the governing elites and the military, but also of diplomacy.
Frank-Walter Steinmeier
If we don’t succeed, we run the risk of failure.
Al Gore
Defeat may serve as well as victory to shake the soul and let the glory out.
Edwin Markham
Do not blame anybody for your mistakes and failures.
Bernard Baruch
‘Pressure’ is a word that is misused in our vocabulary. When you start thinking of pressure, it’s because you’ve started to think of failure.
Tommy Lasorda
For diabetes in particular, we know there’s a relationship between lack of glucose regulation and complications like blindness and kidney failure. So if you were diabetic and you knew that you could get your glucose in a tight, normal range just by adjusting your lifestyle, wouldn’t that be great?
Eric Topol
Adam Smith’s huge failure was the fact that he did not foresee the industrial revolution.
P. J. O’Rourke
Rather than viewing a brief relapse back to inactivity as a failure, treat it as a challenge and try to get back on track as soon as possible.
Jimmy Connors
Well, I think that there’s a very thin dividing line between success and failure. And I think if you start a business without financial backing, you’re likely to go the wrong side of that dividing line.
Richard Branson
War is tragedy. The great war stories are tragedies. It’s the failure of diplomacy. ‘War and Peace,’ ‘A Farewell to Arms,’ ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls.’ Those are some of the greatest tragedies.
David Mamet
A lot of problems stem from a desire to avoid discomfort. For example, people who fear failure often avoid new challenges in an effort to keep anxiety at bay. Avoiding emotional discomfort, however, is usually a short-term solution that leads to long-term problems.
Amy Morin
Show me a thoroughly satisfied man and I will show you a failure.
Thomas A. Edison
I expect either total success or total failure. That’s my lot in life.
Varg Vikernes
Success breeds success, and failure leads to a sort of fallow period.
Felicity Kendal
My father was a dreamer – my hero. He was a smart, tough guy from Poland, a cutter of lady’s handbags, an old socialist-unionist who always considered himself a failure. His big line was: ‘Don’t end up like me.’
Alan King
Think like a queen. A queen is not afraid to fail. Failure is another steppingstone to greatness.
Oprah Winfrey
One of the reasons people stop learning is that they become less and less willing to risk failure.
John W. Gardner
Most great people have attained their greatest success just one step beyond their greatest failure.
Napoleon Hill
Failure isn’t an option. I’ve erased the word ‘fear’ from my vocabulary, and I think when you erase fear, you can’t fail.
Alicia Keys
One should accept failure, and be willing to learn, unlearn and relearn again.
Ritesh Agarwal
There is not a fiercer hell than the failure in a great object.
John Keats
I have a lack of fear, whereas in the past the fear of failure was a powerful motivator. Anyway, I have great expectations for the future, but I just don’t know if I’m the monarch of all I survey.
Sylvester Stallone
The only failure is not to try.
George Clooney
If a debt crisis results from government profligacy and

If a debt crisis results from government profligacy and mismanagement, rather than from a market failure, it is true that the central bank should not intervene.
Gita Gopinath
Yes, I’ve heard of the ‘Mad Men’ comparisons, but I like to think ‘The Hour’ has its own distinctive voice. Although it is set in 1956, I have tried to give it a contemporary edge, and its themes of love, passion, romance, fury, professional jealousy, and personal failure are universal, I think.
Abi Morgan
I hate failure and that divorce was a Number One failure in my eyes. It was the worst period of my life. Neither Desi nor I have been the same since, physically or mentally.
Lucille Ball
Foreign aid is neither a failure nor a panacea. It is, instead, an important tool of American policy that can serve the interests of the United States and the world if wisely administered.
Lee H. Hamilton
Thoughtless risks are destructive, of course, but perhaps even more wasteful is thoughtless caution which prompts inaction and promotes failure to seize opportunity.
Gary Ryan Blair
The failure of Christianity in the areas west from Sicily was even greater, and was increased by the spread of Arab outlooks and influence to that area, and especially to Spain.
Carroll Quigley
The fact that The Bridge contains folk lore and other material suitable to the epic form need not therefore prove its failure as a long lyric poem, with interrelated sections.
Hart Crane
If you quit every time you face a new challenge, giving up can change how you view yourself. You may begin to think you’re weak or that you’re a failure because you can’t seem to stick with things long enough to see positive results.
Amy Morin
Success is never final, failure is never fatal. It’s courage that counts.
John Wooden
There is only one failure in life possible, and that is not to be true to the best one knows.
George Eliot
E! has just become a sad, sad place to live. They don’t know what they’re doing; they have no ideas… everything they do just is a failure.
Chelsea Handler
Failure is unimportant. It takes courage to make a fool of yourself.
Charlie Chaplin
I have learnt the hard way that neither success nor failure last forever.
Abhimanyu Singh
It’s only when you risk failure that you discover things. When you play it safe, you’re not expressing the utmost of your human experience.
Lupita Nyong’o
My failure to lay aside the sin that so easily entangles is the direct result of my refusal to die to my natural proclivity toward attaining my own freedom, meaning, value, worth, and righteousness – not believing that, by virtue of my Spirit – wrought union with Christ, everything I need, I already possess.
Tullian Tchividjian
I think I’ve always been somebody, since the deaths of my father and brother, who was afraid to hope. So, I was more prepared for failure and for rejection than for success.
Amy Tan
We know there is no such thing as freedom without the risk of failure.
Rick Perry
Not failure, but low aim is sin.
Benjamin E. Mays
It’s not about the failure, it’s about learning from the failures. Failure itself cannot be celebrated.
Satya Nadella
One’s only rival is one’s own potentialities. One’s only failure is failing to live up to one’s own possibilities. In this sense, every man can be a king, and must therefore be treated like a king.
Abraham Maslow
The biggest problem in my life is trying to be the kind of man that I want to be, the father that I want to be, and how to process the failure of my marriage.
Ethan Hawke
Success is transient and so is failure.
Mandira Bedi
In God’s world, for those who are in earnest, there is no failure. No work truly done, no word earnestly spoken, no sacrifice freely made, was ever made in vain.
Frederick William Robertson
When you accept that failure is a good thing, it can actually be a huge propeller toward success.
Whitney Wolfe Herd
The thing I always say to people is this: ‘If you avoid failure, you also avoid success.’
Robert Kiyosaki
People who try to tackle failure attract failure. The more you indulge in analysis, it gets tougher. So just keep making mistakes and learn.
Sushmita Sen
I find fault with my children because I like them and I want them to go places – uprightness and strength and courage and civil respect and anything that affects the probabilities of failure on the part of those that are closest to me, that concerns me – I find fault.
Branch Rickey
I’m proof against that word failure. I’ve seen behind it. The only failure a man ought to fear is failure of cleaving to the purpose he sees to be best.
George Eliot
With the NDAA, his failure to close Guantanamo Bay and the ramping use of drones, President Obama looks suspiciously like President Bush, a man on a quest for American Empire.
Justin Sane
Keep in mind that neither success nor failure is ever final.
Roger Babson
I simply don’t believe in failure. In itself, it doesn’t exist. We create it. We make ourselves fail.
Alice Foote MacDougall
As an outside; don't worry about failure, because failu

As an outside; don’t worry about failure, because failure will take care of itself. Focus on success.
Henry Cavill
You accept failure as a possible outcome of some of the experiments. If you don’t get failures, you’re not pushing hard enough on the objectives.
John Poindexter
I cannot give you the formula for success, but I can give you the formula for failure – which is: Try to please everybody.
Herbert Bayard Swope
The things that will destroy America are prosperity-at-any-price, peace-at-any-price, safety-first instead of duty-first, the love of soft living, and the get-rich-quick theory of life.
Theodore Roosevelt
To establish true self-esteem we must concentrate on our successes and forget about the failures and the negatives in our lives.
Denis Waitley
Failure is a part of success.
Hank Aaron
Three months at Oxford persuaded me that it was not my home. I’m not English and I never will be. The life I have lived is one of partial displacement. I came to England as a means of escape, and it was a failure.
Stuart Hall
Nixon’s grand mistake was his failure to understand that Americans are forgiving, and if he had admitted error early and apologized to the country, he would have escaped.
Bob Woodward