Failure Quotes
Failure is an uncomfortable subject, which is probably why so many sharp minds have had something to say about it. These quotes reframe setbacks not as endings but as information, fuel, and sometimes the only honest path to something better.
They work well in motivational talks, school assemblies, blog posts about resilience, or as reminders on your desk when things get tough. Take a look through them all.
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“I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.”
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“But man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated.”
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“I can accept failure, everyone fails at something. But I can't accept not trying.”
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“Far better is it to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure… than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much, because they live in a gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.”
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“Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not: nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not: the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.”
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“Every adversity, every failure, every heartache carries with it the seed of an equal or greater benefit.”
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“It's fine to celebrate success but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure.”
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“A failure is not always a mistake, it may simply be the best one can do under the circumstances. The real mistake is to stop trying.”
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“Failures, repeated failures, are finger posts on the road to achievement. One fails forward toward success.”
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“The greatest glory in living lies not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.”
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“A man can fail many times, but he isn't a failure until he begins to blame somebody else.”
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“Mistakes are the portals of discovery.”
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“Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive.”
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“Ambition is the last refuge of the failure.”
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“Remember that failure is an event, not a person.”
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“Success is not built on success. It's built on failure. It's built on frustration. Sometimes its built on catastrophe.”
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“There is no such thing as failure. There are only results.”
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“Winning is great, sure, but if you are really going to do something in life, the secret is learning how to lose. Nobody goes undefeated all the time. If you can pick up after a crushing defeat, and go on to win again, you are going to be a champion someday.”
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“My great concern is not whether you have failed, but whether you are content with your failure.”
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“Do not be embarrassed by your failures, learn from them and start again.”
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“It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all, in which case you have failed by default.”
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“Failure after long perseverance is much grander than never to have a striving good enough to be called a failure.”
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“You are capable of more than you know. Choose a goal that seems right for you and strive to be the best, however hard the path. Aim high. Behave honorably. Prepare to be alone at times, and to endure failure. Persist! The world needs all you can give.”
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“Do not brood over your past mistakes and failures as this will only fill your mind with grief, regret and depression. Do not repeat them in the future.”
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“Failure is the key to success; each mistake teaches us something.”
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“Every failure is a step to success.”
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“Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor.”
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“Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything - all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.”
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“An essential aspect of creativity is not being afraid to fail.”
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“If at first you don't succeed, failure may be your style.”
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“The season of failure is the best time for sowing the seeds of success.”
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“Failure is always an option.”
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“Success is often achieved by those who don't know that failure is inevitable.”
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“Failure should be our teacher, not our undertaker. Failure is delay, not defeat. It is a temporary detour, not a dead end. Failure is something we can avoid only by saying nothing, doing nothing, and being nothing.”
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“Failure is impossible.”
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“We may be personally defeated, but our principles never!”
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“If you're not failing every now and again, it's a sign you're not doing anything very innovative.”
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“Do not fear mistakes. You will know failure. Continue to reach out.”
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“The guns and the bombs, the rockets and the warships, are all symbols of human failure.”
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“Indecision and delays are the parents of failure.”
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“Failure is a word unknown to me.”
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“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.”
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“You always pass failure on your way to success.”
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“Success represents the 1% of your work which results from the 99% that is called failure.”
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“I think and think for months and years. Ninety-nine times, the conclusion is false. The hundredth time I am right.”
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“For every failure, there's an alternative course of action. You just have to find it. When you come to a roadblock, take a detour.”
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“You make mistakes. Mistakes don't make you.”
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“Failure happens all the time. It happens every day in practice. What makes you better is how you react to it.”
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“Show me a good and gracious loser and I'll show you a failure.”
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“There are some defeats more triumphant than victories.”
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“It's best to have failure happen early in life. It wakes up the Phoenix bird in you so you rise from the ashes.”
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“It is not because the truth is too difficult to see that we make mistakes… we make mistakes because the easiest and most comfortable course for us is to seek insight where it accords with our emotions - especially selfish ones.”
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“We failed, but in the good providence of God apparent failure often proves a blessing.”
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“Through perseverance many people win success out of what seemed destined to be certain failure.”
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“Our best successes often come after our greatest disappointments.”
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“Age wrinkles the body. Quitting wrinkles the soul.”
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“Failure is not a single, cataclysmic event. You don't fail overnight. Instead, failure is a few errors in judgement, repeated every day.”
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“My fault, my failure, is not in the passions I have, but in my lack of control of them.”
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“A person who doubts himself is like a man who would enlist in the ranks of his enemies and bear arms against himself. He makes his failure certain by himself being the first person to be convinced of it.”
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“We have forty million reasons for failure, but not a single excuse.”
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“Success comes when people act together; failure tends to happen alone.”
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“They who have conquered doubt and fear have conquered failure.”
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“Don't be afraid of missing opportunities. Behind every failure is an opportunity somebody wishes they had missed.”
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“I hate to be a failure. I hate and regret the failure of my marriages. I would gladly give all my millions for just one lasting marital success.”
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“Defeat may serve as well as victory to shake the soul and let the glory out.”
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“My life has been nothing but a failure.”
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“Before you can win a game, you have to not lose it.”
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“The surest way to fail is not to determine to succeed.”
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“If you're doing your best, you won't have any time to worry about failure.”
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“Any fact facing us is not as important as our attitude toward it, for that determines our success or failure. The way you think about a fact may defeat you before you ever do anything about it. You are overcome by the fact because you think you are.”
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“Do not blame anybody for your mistakes and failures.”
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“Sometimes the best gain is to lose.”
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“The great question is not whether you have failed, but whether you are content with failure.”
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“There is no failure except in no longer trying.”
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“Failure to prepare is preparing to fail.”
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“I fell off my pink cloud with a thud.”
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“Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.”
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“It is not a disgrace to fail. Failing is one of the greatest arts in the world.”
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“When I was young, I observed that nine out of ten things I did were failures. So I did ten times more work.”
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“A life which does not go into action is a failure.”
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“It is wise to keep in mind that neither success nor failure is ever final.”
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“You cannot climb the ladder of success dressed in the costume of failure.”
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“Often the difference between a successful person and a failure is not one has better abilities or ideas, but the courage that one has to bet on one's ideas, to take a calculated risk - and to act.”
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“There is only one failure in life possible, and that is not to be true to the best one knows.”
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“Do not let your ambitions become a sanctuary for your failures.”
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“Failure is not fatal, but failure to change might be.”
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“Success and failure are equally disastrous.”
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“All that is necessary to break the spell of inertia and frustration is this: Act as if it were impossible to fail. That is the talisman, the formula, the command of right about face which turns us from failure to success.”
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“Before success comes in any man's life, he's sure to meet with much temporary defeat and, perhaps some failures. When defeat overtakes a man, the easiest and the most logical thing to do is to quit. That's exactly what the majority of men do.”
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“To establish true self-esteem we must concentrate on our successes and forget about the failures and the negatives in our lives.”
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“There are many victories worse than a defeat.”
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“Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.”
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“Restlessness is discontent and discontent is the first necessity of progress. Show me a thoroughly satisfied man and I will show you a failure.”
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“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.”
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“My reputation grows with every failure.”
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“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.”
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“Failure is a detour, not a dead-end street.”
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“I think you can have 10,000 explanations for failure, but no good explanation for success.”
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“I don't believe in failure. It is not failure if you enjoyed the process.”
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“One of the common failings among honorable people is a failure to appreciate how thoroughly dishonorable some other people can be, and how dangerous it is to trust them.”
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“There could be no honor in a sure success, but much might be wrested from a sure defeat.”
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“I wasn't afraid to fail. Something good always comes out of failure.”
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“The world is divided into two categories: failures and unknowns.”
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“At least I have the modesty to admit that lack of modesty is one of my failings.”
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“Achievement is not always success, while reputed failure often is. It is honest endeavor, persistent effort to do the best possible under any and all circumstances.”
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“I've come to believe that all my past failure and frustration were actually laying the foundation for the understandings that have created the new level of living I now enjoy.”
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“You will be a failure, until you impress the subconscious with the conviction you are a success. This is done by making an affirmation which 'clicks.'”
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“Success isn't permanent and failure isn't fatal.”
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“Success is the result of perfection, hard work, learning from failure, loyalty, and persistence.”
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“The only failure one should fear, is not hugging to the purpose they see as best.”
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“You gotta lose 'em some of the time. When you do, lose 'em right.”
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“All the world loves a good loser.”
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“Show me a thoroughly satisfied man and I will show you a failure.”
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“If you learn from defeat, you haven't really lost.”
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“The wisest of the wise may err.”
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“Never walk away from failure. On the contrary, study it carefully and imaginatively for its hidden assets.”
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“I really don't think life is about the I-could-have-beens. Life is only about the I-tried-to-do. I don't mind the failure but I can't imagine that I'd forgive myself if I didn't try.”
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“The only risk of failure is promotion.”
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“The most important of my discoveries have been suggested to me by my failures.”
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“The person interested in success has to learn to view failure as a healthy, inevitable part of the process of getting to the top.”
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“Man is not made for defeat.”
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“All human actions are equivalent… and all are on principle doomed to failure.”
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“Losing is no disgrace if you've given your best.”
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“Failure sometimes enlarges the spirit. You have to fall back upon humanity and God.”
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“Success is never final, but failure can be.”
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“A hatred of failure has always been part of my nature.”
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“The way most people fail is in not keeping up the heart.”
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“To err is human, but it feels divine.”
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“In the business world today, failure is apparently not an option. We need to change this attitude toward failure - and celebrate the idea that only by falling on our collective business faces do we learn enough to succeed down the road.”
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“Remember the two benefits of failure. First, if you do fail, you learn what doesn't work; and second, the failure gives you the opportunity to try a new approach.”
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“Failure is a word that I simply don't accept.”
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“Don't be afraid of failure; be afraid of petty success.”
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“Sometimes by losing a battle you find a new way to win the war.”
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“I have probably purchased fifty 'hot tips' in my career, maybe even more. When I put them all together, I know I am a net loser.”
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“Notice the difference between what happens when a man says to himself, I have failed three times, and what happens when he says, I am a failure.”
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“We climb to heaven most often on the ruins of our cherished plans, finding our failures were successes.”
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“Our failings sometimes bind us to one another as closely as could virtue itself.”
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“It would be great to be able to pass on to someone all of the successes, the failures, and the knowledge that one has had. To help someone, avoid all the fire, pain and anxiety would be wonderful.”
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“Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.”
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“There are no secrets to success. It is the result of preparation, hard work, and learning from failure.”
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“Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.”
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“Failure at some point in your life is inevitable, but giving up is unforgivable.”
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“Success depends upon previous preparation, and without such preparation there is sure to be failure.”
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“Failure will never overtake me if my determination to succeed is strong enough.”
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“Think like a queen. A queen is not afraid to fail. Failure is another steppingstone to greatness.”
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“A little more persistence, a little more effort, and what seemed hopeless failure may turn to glorious success.”
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“Success is never final, failure is never fatal. It's courage that counts.”
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“If something's important enough, you should try. Even if - the probable outcome is failure.”
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“You have to be able to accept failure to get better.”
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“Women, like men, should try to do the impossible. And when they fail, their failure should be a challenge to others.”
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“I have self-doubt. I have insecurity. I have fear of failure. I have nights when I show up at the arena and I'm like, 'My back hurts, my feet hurt, my knees hurt. I don't have it. I just want to chill.' We all have self-doubt. You don't deny it, but you also don't capitulate to it. You embrace it.”
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“You build on failure. You use it as a stepping stone. Close the door on the past. You don't try to forget the mistakes, but you don't dwell on it. You don't let it have any of your energy, or any of your time, or any of your space.”
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“Develop success from failures. Discouragement and failure are two of the surest stepping stones to success.”
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“Success is not the absence of failure; it's the persistence through failure.”
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“There can be no failure to a man who has not lost his courage, his character, his self respect, or his self-confidence. He is still a King.”
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“The tragedy of life is often not in our failure, but rather in our complacency; not in our doing too much, but rather in our doing too little; not in our living above our ability, but rather in our living below our capacities.”
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“True leaders don't invest in buildings. Jesus never built a building. They invest in people. Why? Because success without a successor is failure. So your legacy should not be in buildings, programs, or projects; your legacy must be in people.”
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“Success is not a good teacher, failure makes you humble.”
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“They talk about the failure of socialism but where is the success of capitalism in Africa, Asia and Latin America?”
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“There is no innovation and creativity without failure. Period.”
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“Honesty is the fastest way to prevent a mistake from turning into a failure.”
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“Failure is a great teacher, and I think when you make mistakes and you recover from them and you treat them as valuable learning experiences, then you've got something to share.”
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“I believe in never giving up, no matter what the odds. My mantra is, 'Failure is temporary. Giving up is permanent.'”
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“Not failure, but low aim, is crime.”
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“The only real failure in life is not to be true to the best one knows.”
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“Remember your dreams and fight for them. You must know what you want from life. There is just one thing that makes your dream become impossible: the fear of failure.”
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“We all learn lessons in life. Some stick, some don't. I have always learned more from rejection and failure than from acceptance and success.”
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“Success is due to our stretching to the challenges of life. Failure comes when we shrink from them.”
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“Philanthropic colonization is a failure. National colonization will succeed.”
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“Winners are just people who have gone through failure and have responded better than the rest.”
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“No man is a failure who is enjoying life.”
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“Once you start a working on something, don't be afraid of failure and don't abandon it. People who work sincerely are the happiest.”
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“If you want to increase your success rate, double your failure rate.”
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“You cannot learn anything from success, you only learn from failure.”
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“Failure saves lives. In the airline industry, every time a plane crashes the probability of the next crash is lowered by that. The Titanic saved lives because we're building bigger and bigger ships. So these people died, but we have effectively improved the safety of the system, and nothing failed in vain.”
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“You may have a fresh start any moment you choose, for this thing that we call 'failure' is not the falling down, but the staying down.”
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“The road to success and the road to failure are almost exactly the same.”
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“Progress requires setbacks; the only sure way to avoid failure is not to try.”
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“When we tackle obstacles, we find hidden reserves of courage and resilience we did not know we had. And it is only when we are faced with failure do we realise that these resources were always there within us. We only need to find them and move on with our lives.”
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“The thing I always say to people is this: 'If you avoid failure, you also avoid success.'”
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“If you set your goals ridiculously high and it's a failure, you will fail above everyone else's success.”
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“The only failure is not to try.”
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“Success or failure in business is caused more by the mental attitude even than by mental capacities.”
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“Failure is not an option. Everyone has to succeed.”
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“Success is usually the culmination of controlling failure.”
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“A minute's success pays the failure of years.”
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“At the end of the day, you are solely responsible for your success and your failure. And the sooner you realize that, you accept that, and integrate that into your work ethic, you will start being successful. As long as you blame others for the reason you aren't where you want to be, you will always be a failure.”
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“Be greedy for social change, and your life will be endlessly enriched. The only failure lies in not trying, or giving up.”
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“Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it.”
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“They say baseball's a game of failure. Well, that's only true on the offensive side.”
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“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.”
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“There is but one cause of human failure. And that is man's lack of faith in his true Self.”
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“War is failure of diplomacy.”
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“Discipline is based on pride, on meticulous attention to details, and on mutual respect and confidence. Discipline must be a habit so ingrained that it is stronger than the excitement of the goal or the fear of failure.”
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“Laziness is a secret ingredient that goes into failure. But it's only kept a secret from the person who fails.”
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“I'd rather be a failure at something I love than a success at something I hate.”
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“The failure to invest in youth reflects a lack of compassion and a colossal failure of common sense.”
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“Failure is unimportant. It takes courage to make a fool of yourself.”
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“I cannot give you the formula for success, but I can give you the formula for failure - which is: Try to please everybody.”
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“Failure is instructive. The person who really thinks learns quite as much from his failures as from his successes.”
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“To a certain extent, I enjoy failure. It's part of the game. There's always room to grow; there's room to improve.”
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“Every great work, every big accomplishment, has been brought into manifestation through holding to the vision, and often just before the big achievement, comes apparent failure and discouragement.”
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“If you're so afraid of failure, you will never succeed. You have to take chances.”
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“No experience is a cause of success or failure. We do not suffer from the shock of our experiences, so-called trauma - but we make out of them just what suits our purposes.”
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“Elegance is not a dispensable luxury but a factor that decides between success and failure.”
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“Never be afraid to fail. Failure is only a stepping stone to improvement. Never be overconfident because that will block your improvement.”
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“I don't want the fear of failure to stop me from doing what I really care about.”
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“We need to accept that we won't always make the right decisions, that we'll screw up royally sometimes - understanding that failure is not the opposite of success, it's part of success.”
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“We learn wisdom from failure much more than from success. We often discover what will do, by finding out what will not do; and probably he who never made a mistake never made a discovery.”
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“If I were not African, I wonder whether it would be clear to me that Africa is a place where the people do not need limp gifts of fish but sturdy fishing rods and fair access to the pond. I wonder whether I would realize that while African nations have a failure of leadership, they also have dynamic people with agency and voices.”
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“Testing leads to failure, and failure leads to understanding.”
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“An investment said to have an 80% chance of success sounds far more attractive than one with a 20% chance of failure. The mind can't easily recognize that they are the same.”
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“Michael Jordan taught me after our game of one-on-one: A loss is not a failure until you make an excuse. When excuses are no longer an option, you can focus your attention on the job you have to do, and not why it didn't get done.”
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“If we don't succeed we run the risk of failure.”
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“Failure doesn't mean you are a failure it just means you haven't succeeded yet.”
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“Failure is a part of success.”
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“Failure is success if we learn from it.”
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“I've had a lot of success; I've had failures, so I learn from the failure.”
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“Defeat is not the worst of failures. Not to have tried is the true failure.”
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“Fear stifles our thinking and actions. It creates indecisiveness that results in stagnation. I have known talented people who procrastinate indefinitely rather than risk failure. Lost opportunities cause erosion of confidence, and the downward spiral begins.”
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“Success has many fathers and failure is an orphan.”
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“Enjoy failure and learn from it. You can never learn from success.”
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“My father was not a failure. After all, he was the father of a president of the United States.”
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“As an outside; don't worry about failure, because failure will take care of itself. Focus on success.”
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“Children love and want to be loved and they very much prefer the joy of accomplishment to the triumph of hateful failure. Do not mistake a child for his symptom.”
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“In a crowded marketplace, fitting in is a failure. In a busy marketplace, not standing out is the same as being invisible.”
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“Don't fear failure so much that you refuse to try new things. The saddest summary of a life contains three descriptions: could have, might have, and should have.”
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“There is a huge difference between failing and failure. Failing is trying something that you learn doesn't work. Failure is throwing in the towel and giving up. True success comes from failing repeatedly and as quickly as possible, before your cash or your willpower runs out.”
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“Like success, failure is many things to many people. With 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.”
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“People in their handlings of affairs often fail when they are about to succeed. If one remains as careful at the end as he was at the beginning, there will be no failure.”
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“A man who has never made a woman angry is a failure in life.”
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“Who I am as a guitarist is defined by my failure to become Jimi Hendrix.”
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“Without intellectual honesty, you can't have a culture that's willing to tolerate failure because people cling too much to an idea that likely will be bad or isn't working and they feel like their reputation is tied up in it. They can't admit failure.”
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“Failure doesn't kill you… it increases your desire to make something happen.”
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“Any man who has $10,000 left when he dies is a failure.”
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“Failure comes only when we forget our ideals and objectives and principles.”
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“I have never feared failure.”
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“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.”
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“He who risks and fails can be forgiven. He who never risks and never fails is a failure in his whole being.”
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“Success is simply a matter of luck. Ask any failure.”
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“Failure is only postponed success as long as courage 'coaches' ambition. The habit of persistence is the habit of victory.”
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“It's a failure of imagination if you can only write what you know - we have to be able to imagine different worlds.”
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“Fear of failure, it's the greatest motivational tool. It drives me and drives me and drives me.”
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“Run toward the hardest problems. This approach has helped me to learn a tremendous amount from both success and failure.”
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“But by reframing the learning process and focusing on the cool end goal, the fear of failure is often taken off the table, and learning just comes more naturally.”
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“Success is not forever and failure isn't fatal.”
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“Ambition has become a dirty word, and I believe it is a great evolutionary force for the positive. If people fail or go astray in their ambition I can live with it but not with people lowering their expectations, wasting time, slacking off and glorifying failure and stupidity.”
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“The only real failure is giving up.”
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“War remains the decisive human failure.”
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“The only real failure in life is one not learned from.”
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“In our business, things look like a failure until they're not. It's pretty binary transitions.”
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“If you look at great human civilizations, from the Roman Empire to the Soviet Union, you will see that most do not fail simply due to external threats but because of internal weakness, corruption, or a failure to manifest the values and ideals they espouse.”
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“You're going to fail. It's how you respond to that failure that kind of defines you as a person, as an athlete.”
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“Whether in success or in failure, I'm proud of every single movie I've ever directed.”
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“Feminism is doomed to failure because it is based on an attempt to repeal and restructure human nature.”
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“Think twice before you speak, because your words and influence will plant the seed of either success or failure in the mind of another.”
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“The business of biomedical research is mostly about failure. Few projects we commission will ultimately result in success. But every study we do contributes to the body of knowledge that brings science and society closer to a solution.”
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“Failure is central to engineering. Every single calculation that an engineer makes is a failure calculation. Successful engineering is all about understanding how things break or fail.”
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“Tragedy in life normally comes with betrayal and compromise, and trading on your integrity and not having dignity in life. That's really where failure comes.”
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“Success is more dangerous than failure, the ripples break over a wider coastline.”
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“All political careers end in failure, but few did it so quickly as David Cameron's. He came to power promising not to 'bang on about Europe' and ended up having the continent's name chiselled into the lid of his political coffin.”
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“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.”
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“Be honest about how you approach failure. Don't just be critical of yourself, because that can be self-serving. Approach it honestly, assess your performance, and assess the areas where you have fallen short. Correct them and move on. Don't dwell on it. Don't hold on to it.”
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“Doubt kills more dreams than failure ever will.”
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“Failure is not our only punishment for laziness; there is also the success of others.”
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“Your ability to adapt to failure, and navigate your way out of it, absolutely 100 percent makes you who you are.”
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“I want you to know that focusing on someone else's failure or success is the wrong way to live.”
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“Crime and bad lives are the measure of a State's failure, all crime in the end is the crime of the community.”
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“How one handles success or failure is determined by their early childhood.”
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“The one phrase you can use is that success has a thousand fathers, and failure is an orphan.”
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“I don't lose any sleep at night over the potential for failure. I cannot even spell the word.”
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“I feel to invite women everywhere to rise to the great potential within you. I do not ask that you reach beyond your capacity. I hope you will not nag yourselves with thoughts of failure. I hope you will not try to set goals far beyond your capacity to achieve. I hope you will simply do what you can do in the best way you know.”
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“Failure is essential. Trial and error is necessary.”
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“It's the fear of failure that drives all of us at Red Bull.”
-
“I recognise life is like a magnet. Positive and negative are on the opposite sides of the magnet. You can try to cut the negative part off, but it's still there. When you accept both of them, it's like, 'You know what? Don't get too identified with success or too identified with failure - just be cool with them.'”
-
“Life is nothing but a bunch of experiences. There's no such thing as success or failure.”
-
“In America, there's a failure to appreciate Europe's leading role in the world.”
-
“We dissect failure a lot more than we dissect success.”
-
“As kids we're not taught how to deal with success; we're taught how to deal with failure. If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. If at first you succeed, then what?”
-
“At the end of the day, that's all that matters. Winning a championship. Everything else is failure.”
-
“No man can be a failure if he thinks he's a success; If he thinks he is a winner, then he is.”
-
“The failure of academic feminists to recognize difference as a crucial strength is a failure to reach beyond the first patriarchal lesson. In our world, divide and conquer must become define and empower.”
-
“I thank God for my failures. Maybe not at the time but after some reflection. I never feel like a failure just because something I tried has failed.”
-
“At first I wasn't sure that I had the talent, but I did know I had a fear of failure, and that fear compelled me to fight off anything that might abet it.”
-
“Failure is more frequently from want of energy than want of capital.”
-
“I am living on the razor's edge between success and failure, adulation and humiliation - between justifying my existence and revealing my unworthiness to be alive.”
-
“You can't please everyone, but I've always felt you cannot ultimately lose if you give everything you try 110%. You'll always learn something useful, even from a failure, that can be applied to the next challenge or project.”
-
“Failure teaches you a lot more than success.”
-
“I'm not going to get somewhere and say, 'OK, I'm done.' Success is never final; I'll just keep on going. The same way as failure never being fatal. Just keep going. I'm going to the stars and then past them.”
-
“When I served as prime minister last time, I failed to prioritize my agenda. I was eager to complete everything at once, and ended my administration in failure. After resigning, for six years I traveled across the nation simply to listen.”
-
“Failure is a better teacher than success. I am what I am today because of failures and successes.”
-
“My Chinese name is Man Shing which means 'ten thousand success.' It's a name that's sure to set me up for failure.”
-
“Success unshared is failure.”
-
“All human actions are equivalent and all are on principle doomed to failure.”
-
“Movies are not novels, and that's why, when filmmakers try to adapt novels, particularly long or complex novels, the result is almost always failure. It can't be done.”
-
“For some time, I thought Apollo 13 was a failure. I was disappointed I didn't get to land on the moon. But actually, it turned out to be the best thing that could have happened.”
-
“Part of being a man is learning to take responsibility for your successes and for your failures. You can't go blaming others or being jealous. Seeing somebody else's success as your failure is a cancerous way to live.”
-
“What strikes me is that there's a very fine line between success and failure. Just one ingredient can make the difference.”
-
“This game is obviously about failure. You're going to fail most of the time. It's how you handle it.”
-
“I used to think that divorce meant failure, but now I see it more as a step along the path of self-realization and growth.”
-
“Success and failure is temporary. So don't let them get to you.”
-
“In politics, what begins in fear usually ends in failure.”
-
“There are no mistakes, save one: the failure to learn from a mistake.”
-
“Our failure to properly deal with Germany and Japan early cost the world dearly later on. We dare not make the same mistake with China.”
-
“The failure of the United Nations - My failure is maybe, in retrospective, that I was not enough aggressive with the members of the Security Council.”
-
“Failure seldom stops you. What stops you is the fear of failure.”
-
“People who have a sense of self-efficacy bounce back from failure; they approach things in terms of how to handle them rather than worrying about what can go wrong.”
-
“In tennis, it is not the opponent you fear, it is the failure itself, knowing how near you were but just out of reach.”
-
“The woman is a gentle, loving bond who encourages, consoles, builds, reconciles, and makes all things new and vibrant. The woman is strength in time of suffering, courageous in failure, intuitive in time of danger. A woman is ingenuous when all fails, resourceful in times of want, and a true helpmate for man.”
-
“You must accept that you might fail; then, if you do your best and still don't win, at least you can be satisfied that you've tried. If you don't accept failure as a possibility, you don't set high goals, you don't branch out, you don't try - you don't take the risk.”
-
“Risk management systems and controls may discourage or limit certain revenue-generating opportunities. Failure to ensure the independence of these functions from the revenue generators and risk takers has been shown to be dangerous, and this is something for which the board is accountable.”
-
“Fear seems to have many causes. Fear of loss, fear of failure, fear of being hurt, and so on, but ultimately all fear is the ego's fear of death, of annihilation. To the ego, death is always just around the corner. In this mind-identified state, fear of death affects every aspect of your life.”
-
“We create success or failure on the course primarily by our thoughts.”
-
“Most organizations don't fall apart as a result of one big blow. Most relationships don't end because of one grand argument. Most lives don't fall to pieces due to one sad event. No, I suggest to you that sustained failure happens as the consequence of small, daily acts of neglect that stack up over time to lead to a blow up - and break down.”
-
“Anything less than gold is a failure to me. It's extreme pressure, but I hold myself to a high standard.”
-
“I honestly think I'm the kind of person that is driven by fear of failure rather than striving for success. I tend to go to bed scared and wake up terrified.”
-
“The entrepreneurial life is one of challenge, work, dedication, perseverance, exhilaration, agony, accomplishment, failure, sacrifice, control, powerlessness… but ultimately, extraordinary satisfaction.”
-
“Fear of failure must never be a reason not to try something.”
-
“Success is a public affair. Failure is a private funeral.”
-
“Even when you have doubts, take that step. Take chances. Mistakes are never a failure - they can be turned into wisdom.”
-
“All war represents a failure of diplomacy.”
-
“Tenacity is not about avoiding being overwhelmed but being indomitable in the face of the overwhelming odds of your venture's failure.”
-
“In the 1940s, traveling for an African was a complicated process. All Africans over the age of sixteen were compelled to carry 'Native passes' issued by the Native Affairs Department and were required to show that pass to any white policeman, civil servant, or employer. Failure to do so could mean arrest, trial, a jail sentence or fine.”
-
“We all have anxiety about things. We all have little insecurities, but eventually you have to face your fears if you want to be successful, and everybody has some fear of failure.”
-
“The first thing successful people do is view failure as a positive signal to success.”
-
“Without failure there is no achievement.”
-
“The most tragic paradox of our time is to be found in the failure of nation-states to recognize the imperatives of internationalism.”
-
“There is not a fiercer hell than the failure in a great object.”
-
“Most social acts have to be understood in their setting and lose meaning if isolated… No error in thinking about social facts is more serious than the failure to see their place and function.”
-
“Anybody who dies with money in the bank is a failure.”
-
“The point is not to take the world's opinion as a guiding star but to go one's way in life and working unerringly, neither depressed by failure nor seduced by applause.”
-
“I was a diabetic for 16 years, since I was 14. Being that I lost weight, no more diabetes. You don't have to lose your eyesight, cut off your toes, have a stroke, get kidney failure. You just have to lose weight - you know - for most of the diabetes.”
-
“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.”
-
“Failure has been my best friend as a writer. It tests you, to see if you have what it takes to see it through.”
-
“Is the proposed operation likely to succeed? What might the consequences of failure? Is it in the realm of practicability in terms of material and supplies?”
-
“My dad encouraged us to fail. Growing up, he would ask us what we failed at that week. If we didn't have something, he would be disappointed. It changed my mindset at an early age that failure is not the outcome, failure is not trying. Don't be afraid to fail.”
-
“Failure is enriching. It's also important to accept that you'll make mistakes - it's how you build your expertise. The trick is to learn a positive lesson from all of life's negative moments.”
-
“In the different voice of women lies the truth of an ethic of care, the tie between relationship and responsibility, and the origins of aggression in the failure of connection.”
-
“The will to persevere is often the difference between failure and success.”
-
“Successful people have a bigger fear of failure than people who've never done anything because if you haven't been successful, then you don't know how it feels to lose it all. You don't have that fear. So why do you think people get stuck in those boxes? It's that fear of going back down.”
-
“Failure doesn't exist. It's only a change of direction.”
-
“If you aren't learning, you are regressing, because more growth comes from failure than from success.”
-
“The Communist bloc of old was a study in the failure of failure. Losers in the Soviet economy were the people at the end of the long lines for consumer goods. Worse losers were the people who had spent hours getting to the head of the line, only to be told that the goods were unavailable.”
-
“Most people are afraid of failure. I love failure because it tells me where to go next.”
-
“I always feel like a vague failure in L.A.”
-
“Civilization is a failure. We need to think what we can do together in love and peace.”
-
“A failure will not appear until a unit has passed final inspection.”
-
“Failure is good. It's fertilizer. Everything I've learned about coaching, I've learned from making mistakes.”
-
“American democracy must be a failure because it places the supreme authority in the hands of the poorest and most ignorant part of the society.”
-
“People who try to tackle failure attract failure. The more you indulge in analysis, it gets tougher. So just keep making mistakes and learn.”
-
“If one's man's trash is another man's treasure, then one industry's potential failure is another's opportunity.”
-
“Success is often built on the shoulders of failure - from which new configurations emerge.”
-
“Taxation is the price we pay for failing to build a civilized society. The higher the tax level, the greater the failure. A centrally planned totalitarian state represents a complete defeat for the civilized world, while a totally voluntary society represents its ultimate success.”
-
“Failure's not a bad thing. It builds character. It makes you stronger.”
-
“Mr. Gonzales' failure to respond to questions legitimately posed to him by the Senate raises grave doubts in my mind as to his fitness to serve the people of the United States as their Attorney General.”
-
“Being human means you will make mistakes. And you will make mistakes, because failure is God's way of moving you in another direction.”
-
“There's always a possibility that you can have a catastrophic failure, of course. This could happen on any flight.”
-
“Young players need freedom of expression to develop as creative players… they should be encouraged to try skills without fear of failure.”
-
“I went to a motivational training course once, a course of self-discovery, and I found out after a week that my fear - it was not a fear of not being accepted - was a very violent fear of failure.”
-
“Love is such a powerful subject matter because it comes in so many different shapes and sizes. It's about timing, fate, failure, redemption.”
-
“Leadership is solving problems. The day soldiers stop bringing you their problems is the day you have stopped leading them. They have either lost confidence that you can help or concluded you do not care. Either case is a failure of leadership.”
-
“My thing with failure, just forget about it and get up and do it again.”
-
“Most great people have attained their greatest success just one step beyond their greatest failure.”
-
“Failure is a gift and it becomes a bridge to the next thing, a better thing, the thing that works.”
-
“The greatest failure is that although we have created institutions, we have not created a civil society.”
-
“There are people who say that you can't experiment… That condemns you to failure.”
-
“It's a European Union of economic failure, of mass unemployment and of low growth.”
-
“I believe only in art and failure.”
-
“Success is more difficult to handle than failure.”
-
“There is no doubt that the Mindset failure is a major setback for Axovant, but it is not the end of the road.”
-
“In one world, effort is a bad thing. It, like failure, means you're not smart or talented. If you were, you wouldn't need effort. In the other world, effort is what makes you smart or talented.”
-
“The great thing about baseball is the causality is easy to determine and it always falls on the shoulders of one person. So there is absolute responsibility. That's why baseball is psychologically the cruelest sport and why it really requires psychological resources to play baseball - because you have to learn to live with failure.”
-
“Radical common sense is the wisdom gleaned from the past that recognizes the perishable opportunities of the moment. It is the willingness to admit error and the refusal to be deterred by failure.”
-
“If you try to do your best there is no failure.”
-
“Everyone understands the European Union is a failure. It has not kept any of its promises - in particular about prosperity, security - and, worst of all, has put us under a guardianship.”
-
“I'm hopeful. I know there is a lot of ambition in Washington, obviously. But I hope the ambitious realize that they are more likely to succeed with success as opposed to failure.”
-
“Fear of failure has always been my best motivator.”
-
“The moral turpitude of the boys of today appears to center in their failure to concentrate on any particular objective long enough to obtain their maximum results.”
-
“Failure in the theater is more dramatic and uglier than any other form of writing. It costs so much, you feel so guilty.”
-
“Comedy was my sport. It taught me how to roll with the punches. Failure is the exact same as success when it comes to comedy because it just keeps coming. It never stops.”
-
“Fear of failure is a great thing. It pushes you past your comfort levels.”
-
“The threat posed by Bank of America isn't just financial - it's a full-blown assault on the American dream. Where's the incentive to play fair and do well, when what we see rewarded at the highest levels of society is failure, stupidity, incompetence and meanness? If this is what winning in our system looks like, who doesn't want to be a loser?”
-
“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.”
-
“As a boss, as a CEO, as a creative director, as a chef, I've learned that failure will always come. I've learned to give it a big squeeze, smile at it, humble myself to it and then use it as a springboard to send me on my way to strength, success, and fulfillment.”
-
“Life is so fresh, life is every day so new if we are fighting, only for the best. Sometimes I think the only real satisfaction in life is failure, failure in your endeavor to do your best.”
-
“Failure is simply the non-presence of success. But a fiasco is a disaster of mythic proportions.”
-
“The theory seems to be that as long as a man is a failure he is one of God's children, but that as soon as he succeeds he is taken over by the Devil.”
-
“There are only really a few stories to tell in the end, and betrayal and the failure of love is one of those good stories to tell.”
-
“Fear of failure is caused by lack of self-esteem and confidence. Dealing with fear is the key to super success.”
-
“Learning starts with failure; the first failure is the beginning of education.”
-
“It's the same with success and failure. There's always the momentum thing, but you just have to put whatever happened in the past behind you.”
-
“Only in our failures are we absolutely alone. Only in the pursuit of failure can a person really be free. Losers may be the avant garde of the modern age.”
-
“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.”
-
“There's always failure. And there's always disappointment. And there's always loss. But the secret is learning from the loss, and realizing that none of those holes are vacuums.”
-
“Treat failure as a lesson on how not to approach achieving a goal, and then use that learning to improve your chances of success when you try again. Failure is only the end if you decide to stop.”
-
“There's a silly notion that failure's not an option at NASA. Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.”
-
“Surviving failure is one thing. Surviving success is… is challenging, with the consequences and what you lose along the way.”
-
“Most girls are taught to avoid risk and failure. We're taught to smile pretty, play it safe, get all A's. Boys, on the other hand, are taught to play rough, swing high, crawl to the top of the monkey bars, and then just jump off headfirst.”
-
“Striving for success is healthy - but believing you need to succeed the first time around may backfire. Mentally strong people believe failure is part of the process toward a long journey to success. By viewing failure as a temporary setback, they're able to bounce back and move forward with ease.”
-
“Once you can accept failure, you can have fun and success.”
-
“Most of us spend the first six days of each week sowing wild oats; then we go to church on Sunday and pray for a crop failure.”
-
“Engineering is achieving function while avoiding failure.”
-
“Like all alchemists, Trump seeks to convert dross into gold, to toss a broth of his incompetence, denial, delay, deception, and failure into some supernatural alembic and extract political advantage.”
-
“It's not necessary to fear the prospect of failure but to be determined not to fail.”
-
“Failure holds the seeds for greatness - so long as you water those seeds with introspection, they can be the root of your success.”
-
“There is no loneliness greater than the loneliness of a failure. The failure is a stranger in his own house.”
-
“I wouldn't call Loopt a failure. It didn't turn out like I wanted, for sure, but it was fun, I learned a lot, and I made enough money to start investing, which led me to my current job. I don't regret it at all.”
-
“The man who has done his level best… is a success, even though the world may write him down a failure.”
-
“Belief in the supernatural reflects a failure of the imagination.”
-
“Students rarely disappoint teachers who assure them in advance that they are doomed to failure.”
-
“One of the reasons people stop learning is that they become less and less willing to risk failure.”
-
“Why should anybody be interested in some old man who was a failure?”
-
“We keep score in life because it matters. It counts. It matters. Too many people opt out and never discover their own abilities because they fear failure. They don't understand commitment.”
-
“The reality of most software development is that the consequences of failure are simply nonexistent.”
-
“Game development is very difficult. Nobody sets out to create a game that's not fun. It's all of the challenges and difficulties that happen throughout development that determine whether a game is a failure or a success. I think playing those thousands of games is the single best and easiest way to learn from my predecessors.”
-
“Overhead will eat you alive if not constantly viewed as a parasite to be exterminated. Never mind the bleating of those you employ. Hold out until mutiny is imminent before employing even a single additional member of staff. More startups are wrecked by overstaffing than by any other cause, bar failure to monitor cash flow.”
-
“Never tell anyone outside my staff that the Submarine Force and the First Air Fleet were responsible for the failure at Midway. The failure at Midway was mine.”
-
“The historic lesson is that it was a strategic failure to go into Iraq. History will not be and should not be kind with that decision.”
-
“Even as far back as when I started acting at 14, I know I've never considered failure.”
-
“I have never described the time I was in Doctor Who as anything except a kind of ecstatic success, but all the rest has been rather a muddle and a disappointment. Compared to Doctor Who, it has been an outrageous failure really - it's so boring.”
-
“I don't look at football as a violent, barbaric sport. It's a very spiritual sport, especially for someone facing the challenges during a game: the fear of failure, the fear of getting too big an ego, of making a mistake and everybody criticizing you.”
-
“To me, all war is failure for humanity, though it often is a bounty for commerce.”
-
“The difference between average people and achieving people is their perception of and response to failure.”
-
“The main reason for the failure of the modern medical science is that it is dealing with results and not causes. Nothing more than the patching up of those attacked and the burying of those who are slain, without a thought being given to the real strong hold.”
-
“With everything that is complex, we learn. If you don't learn, then it's an utter and abject failure. If you do learn, and you're able to apply that to the next situation, then you take away a measure of success.”
-
“With engineering, I view this year's failure as next year's opportunity to try it again. Failures are not something to be avoided. You want to have them happen as quickly as you can so you can make progress rapidly.”
-
“I'm sure not afraid of success and I've learned not to be afraid of failure. The only thing I'm afraid of now is of being someone I don't like much.”
-
“As soon as I did my first five minutes of stand-up I knew that I would rather be a failure at comedy than a success in marketing.”
-
“In most parts of the world, starting a company that goes bust is dubbed a 'failure.' In Silicon Valley, we call this 'gaining experience.' We are willing to take the risks that are inherent for innovation.”
-
“Trump's biggest failure as a political leader is that he sees the worst in people, and he encourages the worst in people.”
-
“A real failure does not need an excuse. It is an end in itself.”
-
“I want to speak seventeen languages. When you think like that, you'll be consumed by failure. I'm haunted daily by what I don't know.”
-
“Don't come home a failure.”
-
“Most success springs from an obstacle or failure. I became a cartoonist largely because I failed in my goal of becoming a successful executive.”
-
“I have been relegated as a player, and I have suffered the feeling of failure. It is awful, and when you are part of an international outfit that gets so close, and you don't do it, it is not a good feeling. I don't want that again. I want to be part of a team that does something no one else has done.”
-
“There is no failure except in no longer trying. There is no defeat except from within, no really insurmountable barrier save our own inherent weakness of purpose.”
-
“Within the U.S., the Obama presidency will be mainly measured by the success or failure of his economic policies. And here, I fear, the monstrous stimulus package with which this administration stumbled out of the gate will prove to be Obama's Waterloo.”
-
“I always substitute the word 'feedback' for 'failure.'”
-
“The more control you have over your life, the more responsible you feel for your own success - or failure.”
-
“The line between failure and success is so fine that we scarcely know when we pass it: so fine that we are often on the line and do not know it.”
-
“With improvisation, I just do it. It might be a total failure but then you just throw the dice again.”
-
“You know, failure hurts. Any kind of failure stings. If you live in the sting, you will - undoubtedly - fail. My way of getting past the sting is to say no, I'm just not going to let this get me down.”
-
“You have to risk failure to succeed. The important thing is not to make one single mistake that will jeopardize the future.”
-
“A love of nature is a consolation against failure.”
-
“Suffering, failure, loneliness, sorrow, discouragement, and death will be part of your journey, but the Kingdom of God will conquer all these horrors. No evil can resist grace forever.”
-
“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.”
-
“And I went to New York and died; for 10 years I walked those pavements. I can't think of New York without feeling uncomfortable and feeling like a failure.”
-
“As much as you learn to handle failure, you must learn to handle success too, because that's also important.”
-
“All I can do will only ever be a faint image of what I see and my success will always be less than my failure or perhaps equal to the failure.”
-
“Success and failure are both part of life. Both are not permanent.”
-
“I have never, ever considered myself a failure.”
-
“When you believe in your dream and your vision, then it begins to attract its own resources. No one was born to be a failure.”
-
“Failure worries me; nobody wants to fail. There is a fear that one day, films will not come my way, or if someone doesn't watch your film, that is a worrying point. It is unpredictable in the industry.”
-
“To the extent that the academy is producing people who are talking utter nonsense, and imagining that it is sophisticated and enlightened - that system is a failure.”
-
“The freedom to fail is vital if you're going to succeed. Most successful people fail from time to time, and it is a measure of their strength that failure merely propels them into some new attempt at success.”
-
“My story of success and failure is not just about music and being famous. It's about living and loving and trying to find purpose in this crazy world.”
-
“The very nature of finance is that it cannot be profitable unless it is significantly leveraged… and as long as there is debt, there can be failure and contagion.”
-
“Nine out of ten people who are failing blame their failure on somebody else. And that is the common denominator of failure.”
-
“You can be discouraged by failure, or you can learn from it. So go ahead and make mistakes, make all you can. Because, remember that's where you'll find success - on the far side of failure.”
-
“Ultimately there is no such thing as failure. There are lessons learned in different ways.”
-
“War is the greatest failure of mankind.”
-
“Success is 99 percent failure.”
-
“Confidence alone does not make peace, but acknowledging rights and confidence do. Failure to recognize these rights creates a sense of injustice; it keeps the embers burning under the ashes.”
-
“Generational disinterest in education means that too many young children lack the push from their parents in early years which can make the difference between success and failure in schools.”
-
“Life is bigger than cinema. Cinema is just a part of life, so I never take success or failure seriously.”
-
“I think success has no rules, but you can learn a great deal from failure.”
-
“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.”
-
“Success and failure are a part of filmmaking.”
-
“I think failure is nothing more than life's way of nudging you that you are off course. My attitude to failure is not attached to outcome, but in not trying. It is liberating. Most people attach failure to something not working out or how people perceive you. This way, it is about answering to yourself.”
-
“One of the most basic factors in sports is that winning becomes a habit, and losing is the same way. When failure starts to feel normal in your life or your work or even your darkest vices, you won't have to go looking for trouble, because trouble will find you. Count on it.”
-
“Mental health is an area where people are embarrassed. They don't want to talk about it because somehow they feel they're a failure as a parent or, you know, they're embarrassed for their child or they want to protect their child, lots of very good reasons, but mental health, I feel, is something that you have to talk about.”
-
“Learning to accept failure on multiple levels is, to my way of thinking, the key to become a world-class therapist. But that means humility, and setting your ego aside, while you develop superb new technical skills.”
-
“Failure is simply a few errors in judgment, repeated every day.”
-
“It's how you deal with failure that determines how you achieve success.”
-
“I will not be discouraged by failure; I will not be elated by success.”
-
“Unless we practice conservation, those who come after us will have to pay the price of misery, degradation, and failure for the progress and prosperity of our day.”
-
“Our inner beliefs trigger failure before it happens. They sabotage lasting change by canceling its possibility. We employ these beliefs as articles of faith to justify our inaction and then wish away the result. I call them belief triggers.”
-
“I honestly think it is better to be a failure at something you love than to be a success at something you hate.”
-
“Historically, defense spending cuts have preceded increased international turmoil as America's global enemies sense a failure of will.”
-
“We're born with success. It is only others who point out our failures, and what they attribute to us as failure.”
-
“There's something to be said for failing. It's not the failure you feel, it's the failure that people project when something disappoints. You're back to ground zero, where there's no expectations, and that's where I like to be.”
-
“Success is boring… failure is exciting and more entertaining.”
-
“To not follow your passion in life is a recipe for failure and unhappiness.”
-
“It's not about the failure, it's about learning from the failures. Failure itself cannot be celebrated.”
-
“We feel a lot of pressure about looking silly or appearing weak, whatever that means, or being a failure. You have to keep in your head: what's the worst that can happen?”
-
“It is in our genes that we think of breaking up when we love and of failure and fall when we succeed.”
-
“In a sense it might even be said that our failure is to form habits: for, after all, habit is relative to a stereotyped world, and meantime it is only the roughness of the eye that makes two persons, things, situations, seem alike.”
-
“I think one of the keys is to celebrate intelligent failures and when things don't work, learn from those. Celebrate learning more than we celebrate the failure itself.”
-
“Failure doesn't scare me. And neither success. I am equally detached to both.”
-
“In Britain, by contrast, we still think that class plays a part in determining a person's life chances, so we're less inclined to celebrate success and less inclined to condemn failure. The upshot is that it's much easier to be a failure in Britain than it is in America.”
-
“If learners do not have a roof under which they can learn we are already setting them up for failure.”
-
“I've always embraced failure as a noble pursuit. It allows you to be anti whatever anyone wants you to be, and to break all the rules.”
-
“I'm not afraid of failure.”
-
“I am constantly hungry for growth and that's what drives me. Success or failure of a project doesn't drive me.”
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“We do not become an astronaut because we fear not only the risk of space, but we fear the risk of failure along the way more than we want to put in the work to make it happen - and it is easier not to try.”
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“My time at Real Madrid wasn't a failure. I played 120 matches, I scored 28 goals, and I played an average of 30 games a season. What's more, I won three trophies: La Liga, a Copa del Rey, and a Supercopa de Espana.”
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“All wars signify the failure of conflict resolution mechanisms, and they need post-war rebuilding of faith, trust and confidence.”
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“As might be supposed, my parents were quite poor, but we somehow never seemed to lack anything we needed, and I never saw a trace of discontent or a failure in cheerfulness over their lot in life, as indeed over anything.”
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“I didn't allow failure to break my heart. So I wouldn't allow success to bloat my head.”
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“The dumb-manager theory of business problems just didn't hold water for me. There had to be a deeper reason why smart people would make decisions that lead to failure.”
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“I've loved every minute I've spent in television. And I've had much more failure, as traditionally measured, than success in television. I've done four shows, and only one of them was the 'West Wing.'”
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“Failure too is a form of death.”
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“We are human beings, at the end of the day. Success and failure are a part and parcel of our life.”
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“Over-dependence on finite resources, like oil, ignores the ability of our great minds to develop alternative energy for the masses, and in doing so ignores climate change and sets up our students and workforce for failure by not educating them about the needs of our future.”
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“We now live in a world where the only thing to have is success, but failure is marvelous. It's fertiliser, it's like living fertiliser, because you're forced on yourself.”
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“Never be afraid of failure. And don't stop yourself from doing something you want to do because of what others might think. Only you know yourself best.”
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“Escapism, we are led to believe, is evidence of a deficiency in character, a certain failure of temperament, and like so many -isms, it is to be strenuously avoided. 'How do you expect to get ahead?,' people ask. But the question altogether misses the point. The escapist doesn't want to get ahead. He simply wants to get away.”
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“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.”
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“Often the difference between a successful man and a failure is not one's better abilities or ideas, but the courage that one has to bet on his ideas, to take a calculated risk, and to act.”
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“A man can get discouraged many times but he is not a failure until he begins to blame somebody else and stops trying.”
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“To begin to think with purpose, is to enter the ranks of those strong ones who only recognize failure as one of the pathways to attainment.”
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“If there exists no possibility of failure, then victory is meaningless.”
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“If you think my career has been a failure because I have never won a national title, you have another thing coming.”
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“The failure in Ohio to have adequate voting capacity for the people who were registered and eligible to vote was an absolute denial of their right to vote.”
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“There is no such thing as darkness; only a failure to see.”
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“A passionate belief in your business and personal objectives can make all the difference between success and failure. If you aren't proud of what you're doing, why should anybody else be?”
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“I fought COVID double bilateral pneumonia - both lungs - and kidney failure in my house.”
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“It takes two to make a marriage a success and only one to make it a failure.”
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“My motto is more, 'If you want to find something new, look for something new!' There is a certain amount of risk in this attitude, as even the slightest failure tends to be resounding, but you are so happy when you succeed that it is worth taking the risk.”
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“Your attitude towards failure determines your altitude after failure.”
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“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.”
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“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.”
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“You can't be afraid of failure and you can't be afraid of success, because either one gets in the way of your work.”
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“No other industry appears to reward failure more than football's managerial merry-go-round.”
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“Twenty million more have Chronic Kidney Disease, where patients experience a gradual deterioration of kidney function, the end result of which is kidney failure.”
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“As I said there is nothing wrong with failing. Pick yourself up and try it again. You never are going to know how good you really are until you go out and face failure.”
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“Objectively speaking, Traf-O-Data was a failure as a company. Right as our business started to pick up, states began to provide their own traffic-counting services to local governments for free.”
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“My failures may be my greatest successes. It is in failure that I have often drawn closer to God, learn to depend more on Him than myself, gained self-knowledge, and seen things in their right perspective.”
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“Ergonomics is about designing for failure modes and extremes: how things break under repetition, stress or other limits. And the goal of ergonomic designis to create an alignment between the user's limits, the thing you're designing, and how people will ideally use that thing.”
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“I was very afraid of failure because if you fail at something you love, then you ruin what you love.”
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“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.”
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“It is incredibly important to set goals for your business, as if you have no direction for your business, your online business will be a failure.”
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“The war on drugs is a joke. We spend $40 billion a year, and the proof that it's a failure is that any kid can get almost any drug they want in any city in America within half an hour.”
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“Some people will go to the opening of an envelope. They live their lives in the public eye and get off on it, they need it. They need that kind of adoration. If their name isn't in the tabloids once a week they feel like a failure.”
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“Case studies of failure should be made a part of the vocabulary of every engineer so that he or she can recall or recite them when something in a new design or design process is suggestive of what went wrong in the case study.”
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“Failure to find a way to incorporate political Islam in democracy, however uncomfortable its ideology is for secular liberals, will mean we have given them little alternative but to find other means of expression. Inevitably, some of this would be violent.”
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“Failure is an enigma. You worry about it, and it teaches you something.”
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“Spend enough time around success and failure, and you learn a reverence for possibility.”
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“I've never been a jealous person, and I've never felt built up by someone else's failure - that's a cheap thrill.”
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“Sound character provides the power with which a person may ride the emergencies of life instead of being overwhelmed by them. Failure is… the highway to success.”
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“A failure is a man who has blundered, but is not able to cash in the experience.”
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“You have to be able to bounce back and deal with disappointment, failure and weaknesses, and a lot of that happens behind the scenes for teams that are very successful.”
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“You look at any culture, and prohibition has invariably been an unmitigated failure. It is just idiotic to criminalise any substance, I think.”
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“I tell young people, including my own kids, don't do this, it's too difficult. It's a career full of rejection, disappointment and failure. It's murderously hard on the ego. Don't become an actor.”
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“Not failure, but low aim is sin.”
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“I guess I'm motivated by the fear of failure to some degree and knowing what can happen when you don't do things the way you need to do them to have success.”
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“If the whole process of learning from failure means discarding stuff that's not working, but in fact, our natural reaction is to keep going, to throw more money behind it, to throw more emotional energy behind it… that's a real problem.”
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“As a kid, falling was embarrassing. As I got older, I got used to falling and picking myself back up. There's not a sense of failure. It's of disappointment. You train so hard to not make mistakes. When you do, you're learning from that. How do I improve? How do I get better for the next time? Through every failure, there's something to be learned.”
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“For as long as I can remember, I have wanted to be a godly person. Yet when I look at the yesterdays of my life, what I see, mostly, is a broken, irregular path littered with mistakes and failure. I have had temporary successes and isolated moments of closeness to God, but I long for the continuing presence of Jesus.”
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“Exercise, from a public health perspective, is an unmitigated failure. The world's longest-lived people live in environments that nudge them into more movement. They don't use power tools, they do their own yard work, they grow a garden.”
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“We're all going to experience death and failure and setbacks and disappointments and cancer and, you know, it's a really difficult world. And for me, God has always - in my relationship with Christ - He's given me hope and peace.”
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“The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency - the belief that the here and now is all there is.”
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“Ultimately, all human activities have as their goal the realization of happiness. Why, then, have we ended up producing the opposite result? Could the underlying cause be our failure to correctly understand the true nature of happiness?”
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“Nothing fails like failure.”
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“The one trait in a lot of dyslexic people I know is that by the time we got out of college, our ability to deal with failure was very highly developed. And so we look at most situations and see much more of the upside than the downside.”
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“To harmonize the One with the Many, this is indeed a difficult adjustment, perhaps the most difficult of all, and so important, withal, that nations have perished from their failure to achieve it.”
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“I'd like to see much more understanding of emotional issues around hurt, abandonment, disappointment, longing, failure and shame, where they stem from and how they drive people and policies brought into public discourse.”
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“Divorce is so common and accepted in America that beating myself up over it may sound ridiculous. But I was raised to believe that divorce wasn't an option; to me, divorce equaled failure. I wasn't able to change that equation until I found myself in the right relationship.”
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“Sloth is the failure to do what needs to be done when it needs to be done - like the kamikaze pilot who flew seventeen missions.”
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“Why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me.”
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“Greatly begin. Though thou have time, but for a line, be that sublime. Not failure, but low aim is crime.”
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“In the worst of our recession, bars were making money. Every bar can make money. If they're failing, it's not because of the president or Congress or Ukraine. It's because of them. And if you own failure, then you'll own success.”
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“It does not matter what you know about anything if you cannot communicate to your people. In that event, you are not even a failure. You're just not there.”
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“The reality is gas prices should be much more expensive then they are because we're not incorporating the true damage to the environment and the hidden costs of mining oil and transporting it to the U.S. Whenever you have an unpriced externality, you have a bit of a market failure, to the degree that eternality remains unpriced.”
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“The man who has won millions at the cost of his conscience is a failure.”
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“The hippy movement was a failure.”
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“For my first show at 'SNL', I wrote a Bill Clinton sketch, and during our read-through, it wasn't getting any laughs. This weight of embarrassment came over me, and I felt like I was sweating from my spine out. But I realized, 'Okay, that happened, and I did not die.' You've got to experience failure to understand that you can survive it.”
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“I was taught that to create anything you had to believe in failure, simply because you had to be prepared to go through an idea without any fear. Failure, you learned, as I did in art school, to be a wonderful thing. It allowed you to get up in the morning and take the pillow off your head.”
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“You can't be afraid of the problem. Don't be afraid of failure; don't be afraid to make mistakes. Make sure you learn from each step; iterate, and stay as efficient as possible without being paralyzed by a difficult situation.”
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“Christmas is the season I use to clock failure in life. It stops time, as it were, on the year - where you are in it, where you are in your travail unto the grave.”
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“If you don't accept failure as a possibility, you don't set high goals, you don't branch out, you don't try - you don't take the risk.”
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“The U.S. has a law on the books called the debt limit, but the name is misleading. The debt limit started in 1917 for the purpose of facilitating more national debt, not reducing it. It still serves that purpose. It's unconnected to spending, hurts our credit rating and has been an abject failure at limiting debt.”
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“We can't leave everything to the free market. In fact, climate change is, I would argue, the greatest single free-market failure. This is what happens when you don't regulate corporations and you allow them to treat the atmosphere as an open sewer.”
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“'The White Woman on the Green Bicycle' is a love story mapped onto an unfolding political tragedy: that of the failure of the Independence era in Trinidad.”
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“I don't think anybody whose ever been divorced can tell you divorce is easy or fun or feels like anything other than a tremendous failure.”
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“The draconian spirit that seeks to enhance penalties and to lower the age at which juveniles will be tries as adults, is part of the 'whole cloth' of three strikes. Our failure to address the depair of our inner-city youth is only delayed by our over-confidence in a stance that is 'tougher than thou.'”
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“Like Lyndon Johnson, President Obama understands that timidity in a time of troubles is a prescription for failure.”
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“I love Rauschenberg. I love that he created a turning point in visual history, that he redefined the idea of beauty, that he combined painting, sculpture, photography, and everyday life with such gall, and that he was interested in, as he put it, 'the ability to conceive failure as progress.'”
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“Never fret for an only son, the idea of failure will never occur to him.”
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“What people often ask me is, 'What are the ingredients of Silicon Valley?' While the answer to that is complex, some of the ingredients I talk about are celebrating entrepreneurship, accepting failure, and embracing a mobile and diverse workforce.”
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“I've probably earned the right to screw up a few times. I don't want the fear of failure to stop me from doing what I really care about.”
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“I always write about subjects which attract me because if I didn't, it would be awful, a failure.”
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“No man ever achieved worth-while success who did not, at one time or other, find himself with at least one foot hanging well over the brink of failure.”
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“Emphasizing effort gives a child a variable that they can control. They come to see themselves as in control of their success. Emphasizing natural intelligence takes it out of the child's control, and it provides no good recipe for responding to a failure.”
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“Only commit to things you know you can accomplish because they're incredibly important to you. Otherwise, you set yourself up for continued failure.”
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“Every stumble is not a fall, and every fall does not mean failure.”
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“Entrepreneurs are risk takers, willing to roll the dice with their money or reputation on the line in support of an idea or enterprise. They willingly assume responsibility for the success or failure of a venture and are answerable for all its facets.”
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“Forget about the consequences of failure. Failure is only a temporary change in direction to set you straight for your next success.”
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“Whenever you have a failure or setback, you need to take a step back and find out what you can learn from the scenario. What did you do to contribute to that failure? This way, you can make sure you don't repeat that pattern.”
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“Failure is knowledge, and knowledge is success.”
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“Smokey Robinson writes the heartfelt songs, whereas it was my job to write the songs about weakness and failure in love.”
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“'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.”
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“I feel that 'The Great Failure' is really a book written out of great love and a willingness to face all of who a human being is.”
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“Our country's got a sin problem, and I believe if these politicians in Washington would recognize the moral failure of so many of their policies that maybe we could fix it.”
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“I even get inspired by movies that aren't very good, because there's always something good in movies that are collectively thought of as a failure. There's good in everything, I find.”
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“One of the things I definitely think of as a driver of me is fear. And it's fear of failure, fear of being overtaken.”
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“I believe you must find the things in life that you love, and don't let anybody or anything stop you. There may be lesser successes, but you're never a failure unless you choose not to do something. I don't fail unless I quit. You must believe to receive.”
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“You have to look at the history of the Middle East in particular. It has been one of failure and frustration, of feudalism and tribalism.”
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“Failure. It doesn't exist. 'Failure' is just what happens when we lose perspective.”
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“Creative risk taking is essential to success in any goal where the stakes are high. Thoughtless risks are destructive, of course, but perhaps even more wasteful is thoughtless caution which prompts inaction and promotes failure to seize opportunity.”
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“Bacon is so good by itself that to put it in any other food is an admission of failure. You're basically saying, 'I can't make this other food taste good, so I'll throw in bacon.'”
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“What saved me from total academic failure and overwhelming ennui, was my love of libraries and all they encompass.”
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“I think the fall in Eden was ultimately a failure to give thanks.”
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“The more important argument against grade curves is that they create an atmosphere that's toxic by pitting students against one another. At best, it creates a hypercompetitive culture, and at worst, it sends students the message that the world is a zero-sum game: Your success means my failure.”
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“Being unhoused in America must no longer be viewed as an individual shortcoming, but rather as an unacceptable, life-threatening policy failure.”
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“Failure to pass TPP sends a big signal. The United States is backing off, backing away. That will create a huge void here.”
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“I think that the failure of newspaper competition in a community is a very serious handicap to the dissemination of the knowledge that the citizens need to participate in a democracy.”
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“Since the global financial crisis and recession of 2007-2009, criticism of the economics profession has intensified. The failure of all but a few professional economists to forecast the episode - the aftereffects of which still linger - has led many to question whether the economics profession contributes anything significant to society.”
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“Working hard to fulfill a dream or instinct and learning over time it doesn't work, doesn't mean a career is over and a reputation killed. When a reputation is killed, it's when failure comes as a result of loss of integrity or judgement… breaking of laws.”
-
“Jill Eisenstadt's comic second novel, 'Kiss Out,' is a work of such extravagant wackiness, eccentricity, and exuberance that any attempt to squeeze it into the confines of a simple plot summary seems doomed to failure and is possibly pointless.”
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“There is no middle ground in Hollywood; you're a failure or you're a success. That mentality is wild.”
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“Any critic is entitled to wrong judgments, of course. But certain lapses of judgment indicate the radical failure of an entire sensibility.”
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“Inability to make decisions is one of the principal reasons executives fail. Deficiency in decision-making ranks much higher than lack of specific knowledge or technical know-how as an indicator of leadership failure.”
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“Successful people have a bigger fear of failure than people who've never done anything because if you haven't been successful, then you don't know how it feels to lose it all.”
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“Ideology, politics and journalism, which luxuriate in failure, are impotent in the face of hope and joy.”
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“Failure is never fatal. But failure to change can and might be.”
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“Having the positive belief that it will all be O.K. just means that you hustle and make it work because failure is not even an option in your own mind.”
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“Don't think of it as failure. Think of it as time-released success.”
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“Honesty is about the scars. It's about the blemishes. But it's more than just bragging about failure, which could be a form of ego. It's about truly helping people.”
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“Most leadership strategies are doomed to failure from the outset. As people have been noting for years, the majority of strategic initiatives that are driven from the top are marginally effective - at best.”
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“One thing I do believe is I'm a believer in the presence of God. I believe that God is close. Whether it's in joy, pain or personal failure, I believe that God is close. That much I feel in my life.”
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“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.”
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“I think you have to try and fail, because failure gets you closer to what you're good at.”
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“Drama school should set you up for failure in a really positive way, because your life as an actor is going to be rejection and it also should train you not be afraid of success either.”
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“I think that a failure of statistical thinking is the major intellectual shortcoming of our universities, journalism and intellectual culture.”
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“I used to feel an obligation to invent things. I felt I was a failure because I didn't do massive great novels about Australia or the outback or something. I just don't feel that any more.”
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“Failure is an amazing data point that tells you which direction not to go.”
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“'Catch-22' was a huge failure, and it rubbed off on everybody connected to it. I had a bunch of lean years where I had to do things, a lot of which I wasn't wildly enthusiastic about.”
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“It's your own fear of failure that stops you from doing things.”
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“What America does best is produce the ability to accept failure.”
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“New Year's resolutions have always been something to beat myself up with by the second week of January. It seems perverse to set yourself up for failure right at the start of the year.”
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“I emphasize that virtually every engineering calculation is ultimately a failure calculation, because without a failure criterion against which to measure the calculated result, it is a meaningless number.”
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“Optimism is a kind of heart stimulant - the digitalis of failure.”
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“Where do we enroll in Life 101? Where are the classes dealing with the loss of a job, the death of a loved one, the failure of a relationship? Unfortunately, those lessons are mostly learned through trial by fire and the school of hard knocks.”
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“Ignorance is the failure to discriminate between the permanent and the impermanent, the pure and the impure, bliss and suffering, the Self and the non-Self.”
-
“Start-ups make so many mistakes that the challenge to identify the root cause of a failure is tough. But believing in your own plan is probably the worst.”
-
“Failure happens to everyone in this game. It's not something worth harping on. What is worth focusing on is how you respond to that failure.”
-
“Before I was married, I didn't consider my failure to manage even basic hand tools a feminist inadequacy. I thought it had more to do with being Jewish. The Jews I knew growing up didn't do 'do-it-yourself.' When my father needed to hammer something he generally used his shoe, and the only real tool he owned was a pair of needle-nose pliers.”
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“It is commonly said that a teacher fails if he has not been surpassed by his students. There has been no failure on our part in this regard considering how far they have gone.”
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“The consequence of the Bay of Pigs failure wasn't an acceptance of Castro and his control of Cuba but, rather, a renewed determination to bring him down by stealth.”
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“When you learn to keep fighting in the face of potential failure, it gives you a larger skill set to do what you want to do in life. It gives you vision. But you can't acquire it if you're afraid of keeping score.”
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“To me, if we're not failing a little bit, we're not trying hard enough. I think great cultures encourage risk and are tolerant of failure. If you don't do that, you're going to end up with a culture that is stagnant and not thinking about the next generation of products and experiences.”
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“I'm terrorized by a fear of failure. Failure is always there.”
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“Failure is nature's plan to prepare you for great responsibilities.”
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“We are all searching for something in our life and rejection, failure and ridicule are part of that struggle.”
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“Spain held the doctrine (and was right in holding it) that every human enterprise should stand on two pillars - the temporal and the spiritual. To depend upon one of these pillars alone is to call down final failure upon any undertaking.”
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“I've always felt that 'game over' is a state of failure more for the game designer than from the player.”
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“I have always believed that it's important to show a new look periodically. Predictability can lead to failure.”
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“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.”
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“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.”
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“It's a failure of national vision when you regard children as weapons, and talents as materials you can mine, assay, and fabricate for profit and defense.”
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“The human spirit is so resilient, and failure teaches you so much.”
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“If your goal is to lose 10 pounds, you may wake up each day with failure in mind because the goal is hard to reach, and you are progressing only by small amounts. It takes up all your willpower. I recommend that instead of a goal, you have a system.”
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“Failure can teach you something, and as long as you're moving very, very quickly, you're going to start piling up the wins. Speed gives you the luxury to be able to fail.”
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“Failure is easy to handle because once you fail, the options are very simple… like, 'Try something different,' or, 'Maybe if you do the same thing, do it in a different way.'”
-
“Just because you're struggling with self-discipline doesn't mean you have to raise the white flag and declare your self-improvement efforts a complete failure. Instead, work to increase the chances that you'll stick to your healthier habits - even when you don't feel like it.”
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“If you show me someone who's afraid of failure, I'll show you someone who is not a groundbreaking, innovative pioneer of a certain industry.”
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“Every time you go out there to do something, you wonder if you can do it. There's no assured success. There's no secret recipe for success. Every time you go out there, you go out there with the possibility of great failure.”
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“Everybody is an expert on one thing - that's what I learned in my high school journalism class - and that's, of course, his own life. And everybody deserves to live and have his story told. And if it doesn't seem like an interesting story, then that's the failure of the listener, or the journalist who retells it badly.”
-
“I saw why people died and how they died. I saw gunshot wounds and liver failure. It was a good learning experience, so I came regularly on weekends and holidays.”
-
“During my sojourn in ironclad atheism, the primary arsenal leveled against Christianity had been its failure on empirical grounds. Surely, enlightened reason offered a more coherent cosmos. Surely, Occam's razor cut the faithful free from blind faith. There is no proof of God; therefore, it is unreasonable to believe in God.”
-
“We have actually experienced in recent months a dramatic demonstration of an unprecedented intelligence failure, perhaps the most significant intelligence failure in the history of the United States.”
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“It would be naive if I said that I don't fear failure.”
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“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.”
-
“I never feel any pressure about a film. What is meant to happen will happen. I have seen failure as well as success several times.”
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“Without exposure to potential failure, there is no risk.”
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“The fear of failure never goes away. In many ways, you could argue that success multiplies the opportunities for failure. It's just more of an argument for becoming more comfortable with it.”
-
“But while success and failure depend on conditions, the mind neither waxes nor wanes.”
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“I'm bound to fail when I write in Italian, but unlike my sense of failure in the past, this doesn't torment or grieve me.”
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“Man's sin is in his failure to live what he is. Being the master of the earth, man forgets that he is the servant of God.”
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“Failure is an awful thing, and when I look at the common denominator of failure, it seems to always be the same thing: excuses.”
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“I'm a polarizing person, so people get caught up in hoping I fail. And just like success, failure is a perspective.”
-
“Any societal platform needs a bold steward, willing to hold the moral compass and risk failure. A system steward must persist as a positive catalyst that continuously creates opportunities and sustains the grammar of the intent.”
-
“This attempt to isolate cell constituents might have been a failure if they had been destroyed by the relative brutality of the technique employed. But this did not happen.”
-
“Golf is a game of endless failure and frustration.”
-
“Believe it or not, Christianity is not about good people getting better. If anything, it is good news for bad people coping with their failure to be good.”
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“I have experienced failure as a politician and for that very reason, I am ready to give everything for Japan.”
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“If you're not a born-again Christian, you're a failure as a human being.”
-
“Most leadership strategies are doomed to failure from the outset.”
-
“Schools don't really allow failure and yet it's a valid part of any endeavour, not just writing.”
-
“I wish I had been more prepared, both for success and for failure, when I was younger.”
-
“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.”
-
“Successful entrepreneurs find the balance between listening to their inner voice and staying persistent in driving for success - because sometimes success is waiting right across from the transitional bump that's disguised as failure.”
-
“Lincoln made mistakes. Roosevelt made mistakes. Eisenhower made mistakes. The Battle of the Bulge was the biggest intelligence failure in American military history, much bigger than any in Vietnam or now. We didn't know that the Soviets were moving 400,000 or 500,000 troops. We missed it.”
-
“Art school had taught me it was far better to be a flamboyant failure than any kind of benign success.”
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“It's the failure of my debut film which made me an actor, which made me want to succeed in the industry. But that doesn't mean I regret whatever choices I've made over the years. No, not even 'Kaiyethum Doorathu!'”
-
“I failed the LSAT. Basically, if I had not failed, I'd have been a lawyer and there would be no Spanx. I think failure is nothing more than life's way of nudging you that you are off course. My attitude to failure is not attached to outcome, but in not trying. It is liberating.”
-
“I'm not scared of anything in particular, but I am motivated by a fear of failure as opposed to a need to succeed.”
-
“Failure means a stripping away of the inessential.”
-
“By virtually any measure, the record of the Republican Majority is an appalling failure.”
-
“If you want to become physically stronger, you'll need healthy habits - like going to the gym. You'll also have to give up unhealthy habits - like eating junk food. Building mental strength requires healthy habits - like practicing gratitude - while also giving up unhealthy behavior, like giving up after the first failure.”
-
“While it is important for people to see your promise you must also remember that hope is the keeper of both happiness and disappointment, the father of both progress and failure.”
-
“At some point, most of us reach a place where we're afraid to fail, where we instinctively avoid failure and stick only to what is placed in front of us or only what we're already good at. This confines us and stifles us.”
-
“I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.”
-
“You can't have any successes unless you can accept failure.”
-
“At the root of many a woman's failure to become a great cook lies her failure to develop a workmanlike regard for knives.”
-
“The main failure of education is that it has not prepared people to comprehend matters concerning human destiny.”
-
“Destiny: A tyrant's authority for crime and a fool's excuse for failure.”
-
“There is much to be said for failure. It is much more interesting than success.”
-
“There is always time for failure.”
-
“It has always felt like a failure that Bjorn and I couldn't keep our family together. You never get it back, but to this day I don't regret splitting up. The reason behind our separation is one of those things I definitely don't want to go into!”
-
“The dream is real, my friends. The failure to realize it is the only unreality.”
-
“Success and failure are greatly overrated. But failure gives you a whole lot more to talk about.”
-
“In order to succeed, your desire for success should be greater than your fear of failure.”
-
“What we have most to fear is failure of the heart.”
-
“Most people think of success and failure as opposites, but they both are products of the same process.”
-
“Thoughtless risks are destructive, of course, but perhaps even more wasteful is thoughtless caution which prompts inaction and promotes failure to seize opportunity.”
-
“Translation is the art of failure.”
-
“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.”
-
“I fear that our true motivation is about oil and our own flailing economy; about the failure to destroy Al Qaeda and about revenge.”
-
“I have always been pushed by the negative. The apparent failure of a play sends me back to my typewriter that very night, before the reviews are out. I am more compelled to get back to work than if I had a success.”
-
“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.”
-
“A failure establishes only this, that our determination to succeed was not strong enough.”
-
“However things may seem, no evil thing is success and no good thing is failure.”
-
“We need to teach the highly educated man that it is not a disgrace to fail and that he must analyze every failure to find its cause. He must learn how to fail intelligently, for failing is one of the greatest arts in the world.”
-
“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.”
-
“We do not know, in most cases, how far social failure and success are due to heredity, and how far to environment. But environment is the easier of the two to improve.”
-
“The paranoiac is the exact image of the ruler. The only difference is their position in the world. One might even think the paranoiac the more impressive of the two because he is sufficient unto himself and cannot be shaken by failure.”
-
“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.”
-
“It really is impossible not to like him. His success was his failure.”
-
“About the only problem with success is that it does not teach you how to deal with failure.”
-
“It is often the failure who is the pioneer in new lands, new undertakings, and new forms of expression.”
-
“No failure in America, whether of love or money, is ever simple; it is always a kind of betrayal, of a mass of shadowy, shared hopes.”
-
“I've always believed that it's important to show a new look periodically. Predictability can lead to failure.”
-
“The failure of women to have reached positions of leadership has been due in large part to social and professional discrimination.”
-
“The success or failure of a life, as far as posterity goes, seems to lie in the more or less luck of seizing the right moment of escape.”
-
“I rise today to offer a formal and heartfelt apology to all the victims of lynching in our history, and for the failure of the United States Senate to take action when action was most needed.”
-
“It has now been over 7 years since Congress last raised the minimum wage to its current level of $5.15 per hour. Since that last increase, Congress's failure to adjust the wage for inflation has reduced the purchasing power of the minimum wage to record low levels.”
-
“Over the next four years, we will be bold. We will be willing to experiment. We will not fear failure.”
-
“If those committed to the quest fail, they will be forgiven. When lost, they will find another way. The moral imperative of humanism is the endeavor alone, whether successful or not, provided the effort is honorable and failure memorable.”
-
“There's tons of creative people in television that have one failure after another, and they just step up higher. I could never get over that. When I had a failure, there was no such thing as just getting over it.”
-
“Mohammed was not an apparent failure. He was a dazzling success, politically as well as spiritually, and Islam went from strength to strength to strength.”
-
“The rise of China as a new power is another great challenge for the US. Our failure to properly handle Germany and Japan earlier in the 20th century cost us and the world dearly. We must not make this same mistake with China.”
-
“Having in my life been bitten by the jaws of both victory and defeat, I must rush to add that success is to failure as butter pecan ice cream is to death.”
-
“Failure and its accompanying misery is for the artist his most vital source of creative energy.”
-
“Slowly the poison the whole blood stream fills. It is not the effort nor the failure tires. The waste remains, the waste remains and kills.”
-
“The failure to dissect the cause of war leaves us open for the next installment.”
-
“America's most dangerous diseases have developed an immunity to politics. We suffer not from a failure of political organization or power, but a failure of love.”
-
“Never permit failure to become a habit.”
-
“The failure of Socialism since 1945 is that whilst encouraging us all, the creators of wealth, to produce less through strikes, it has caused us all to demand a higher level of our own product.”
-
“Of course, Third World leaders love you. By ascribing third world ills to First World sins, you absolve them of blame for their countries' failure to advance.”
-
“He who has conquered doubt and fear has conquered failure.”
-
“I think I've failed every test I've ever taken. If there was a failure I would have been it.”
-
“Sometimes you learn more from failure than you do from success, and in some ways it's better to have failure at the beginning of your career, or your life.”
-
“When I was about 15… I made my first attempt as a leading lady, and was, of course, a complete failure.”
-
“I was never afraid of failure after that because, I think, coming that close to death you get kissed. With the years, the actual experience of course fades, but the flavor of it doesn't. I just had a real sense of what choice do I have but to live fully?”
-
“Keep in mind that neither success nor failure is ever final.”
-
“Y'know, the real reason why I was such a failure in the sense of being unable to make any sort of a living was because I was really not motivated. I had no motivation.”
-
“One of the biggest problems with the modern feminist movement is its failure to bring men along with us.”
-
“There is only one real failure in life that is possible, and that is, not to be true to the best one knows.”
-
“Outward failure may be a manifested variant of inward success.”
-
“Educational institutes can no longer be prizes in church politics or furnish berths for failure in other walks of life.”
-
“The key to accepting responsibility for your life is to accept the fact that your choices, every one of them, are leading you inexorably to either success or failure, however you define those terms.”
-
“Hollywood… a city I was to come back to time and again, in sickness and in health, in success and in failure, with anticipation and with dread.”
-
“I think you can learn as much from success as you can from failure.”
-
“I think somehow you need to get to a certain point in your life where the notion of failure is absurd.”
-
“Our failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq thus far has been deeply troubling, and our intelligence-gathering process needs thorough and unbiased investigation.”
-
“I failed first grade, which is my biggest problem. You always feel like a failure, like you're stupid.”
-
“I understand the harsh feelings and sentiments from my opponents and their supporters because I myself have been defeated twice in my political life in the past and I understand very well it is hard to accept your own failure.”
-
“Their lives have been largely defined by failure and you would think the prospect of marriage, which is supposed to be bountiful and hopeful, it's just really another kind of tangential thing in his life.”
-
“But all actors go through the process, it's hit and miss, you have achievement and failure.”
-
“It breaks my heart to see these young, really talented bands getting chewed up into the system. I remember a time if you'd signed to a major label it was such a sell out! But now… unless you've signed to a big label, you're a failure now.”
-
“Failure is unfortunately as common as success.”
-
“The very reasons sometimes that you make a film are the reasons for its failure.”
-
“Definitely, it's a fear of failure that drives me.”
-
“I believe in trusting men, not only once but twice - in giving a failure another chance.”
-
“What is more comforting to the terrorists around the world: the failure to pass the 9/11 legislation because we lacked a majority of the majority,' or putting aside partisan politics to enact tough new legislation with America's security foremost in mind?”
-
“Humanitarian missions are little different from any other public enterprise, diplomacy included, which is susceptible of misinterpretation by the public, hence ultimately of failure.”
-
“If Liberia has failed, then, it is no evidence of the failure of the Negro in government. It is merely evidence of the failure of slavery.”
-
“Well, I think it's too early to call Fallujah a failure.”
-
“Before this government came to power, many failing schools were simply allowed to drift on in a pattern of continuing failure. The government is determined to break that pattern and is successfully doing so.”
-
“But if you look at WorldCom, which is the biggest failure to date, they grew dramatically, they were buying companies that were bigger than they were and they were doing it off inflated stock.”
-
“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.”
-
“This dullness of vision regarding the importance of the general welfare to the individual is the measure of the failure of our schools and churches to teach the spiritual significance of genuine democracy.”
-
“Our system provides for a winner to take office on January 20th, and he is expected to take command of the ship of state. Failure to do so, characterized by hesitation and indecision, will harm the national interest.”
-
“We are equally glad and surprised at Winston's return to office. It shows that he was built for success that he should have declined to withdraw and sulk over a superficial failure.”
-
“As efforts to fix this failure at the Veterans Administration continue, I also intend to persist in demanding answers and action on the establishment of a new clinic to serve the veterans in North Central Washington.”
-
“But if you have a solid walk with the Lord, then you won't fear that failure.”
-
“I want to swim in both directions at once. Desire success, court failure.”
-
“When I got Jacob's Latter, I was nervous because I felt I wasn't allowed to fail. I felt that they were waiting for one little failure and that would prove them right and I'd be, 'out of there.'”
-
“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.”
-
“If you're the type of person who has to fulfill your dreams, you've gotta be resourceful to make sure you can do it. I came out to California when I was 21, thinking my New York credentials would take me all the way. I came back home a year later all dejected and a failure.”
-
“Questioning the nature and implications of liminal instances necessarily involves failure, if only in the specifically technical sense of entering spaces where prevailing criteria of success scarcely apply.”
-
“There would seem to be a limit, even for an art preoccupied with boundaries and transgressions, beyond which a work reaches its breaking point and becomes an actual failure, a mere experimentation.”
-
“It must not be forgotten in fairness to the National Government that apartheid is not just a policy of oppression but an attempt - in my opinion an attempt doomed to failure - to find an alternative to a policy of racial integration which is fair to both white and black.”
-
“If we do not get No Child Left Behind right for Limited English Proficient students, the law will be a failure for most schools in the 15th Congressional District, and for many across the nation.”
-
“Sometimes people call me a success for all the reasons that make me think I'm a failure.”
-
“I didn't fear failure. I expected failure.”
-
“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.”
-
“Feeling is the consciousness of the resulting conditions - of success, failure, equilibrium, compromise or balance, in this continuous rivalry of ideas.”
-
“So I try not to have any actual expectations for myself for any level of success or failure.”
-
“The pressures are intense, because the rewards for success and the penalty for failure are more and more.”
-
“The success and the failure are not my concern, but His.”
-
“We do not realise that we are children of eternity. If we did, then success would be no success, and failure would be no failure to us.”
-
“After that he turned to the question of invading England. Hitler said that during the previous year he could not afford to risk a possible failure; apart from that, he had not wished to provoke the British, as he hoped to arrange peace talks.”
-
“The failure of the system to deal quickly was attributable to Nixon's lying, stonewalling and refusal to come clean. So it took 26 months for the final truth to be known.”
-
“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.”
-
“The Soviet Union did not achieve victory over the West, so was my information inadequate to help them to victory, or did it play no particular role in their failure to achieve victory?”
-
“In high school, in sport, I had a coach who told me I was much better than I thought I was, and would make me do more in a positive sense. He was the first person who taught me not to be afraid of failure.”
-
“I think some parents now look at a youngster failing as the final thing. It's a process, and failure is part of the process. I would like it if the teacher and the parents would connect more. I think that used to be, but we're losing a little bit of that right now.”
-
“I've tried to handle winning well, so that maybe we'll win again, but I've also tried to handle failure well. If those serve as good examples for teachers and kids, then I hope that would be a contribution I have made to sport. Not just basketball, but to sport.”
-
“Success breeds success, and failure leads to a sort of fallow period.”
-
“The reason was the failure of both Japan and China to understand each other and the inability of America and the European powers to sympathize, without prejudice, with the peoples of East Asia.”
-
“So it is in poetry. All we ask is that the mood recorded shall impress us as having been of the kind that exhausts the imaginative capacity; if it fails to do this the failure will announce itself either in prose or in insignificant verse.”
-
“My failure, during the first five or six years of my art training, to get set in the right direction, and the disappointment which it caused me, drove me the more persistently into writing as an alternative.”
-
“Fear comes in two packages fear of failure, and sometimes, fear of success.”
-
“Catastrophes are often stimulated by the failure to feel the emergence of a domain, and so what cannot be felt in the imagination is experienced as embodied sensation in the catastrophe.”
-
“I don't think there's any way it could have failed. We don't know failure in this band. We didn't know failure. We got to know it a little after awhile but at that time there was no such word.”
-
“And in reality, I don't think it's a real documentary. It's more a story of her life. It's a story of survival. It's a story of the time in which she lived. The story of success and failure.”
-
“The failure of the Russian Socialist Republic will be the defeat of the proletariat of the whole world.”
-
“I'm very comfortable with failure. I'm very comfortable being the guy who disappoints people.”
-
“Sometimes a noble failure serves the world as faithfully as a distinguished success.”
-
“If you're 40 years old and you've never had a failure, you've been deprived.”
-
“But whatever my failure, I have this thing to remember - that I was a pioneer in my profession, just as my grandfathers were in theirs, in that I was the first man in this section to earn his living as a writer.”
-
“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.”
-
“Failure is the most terrible thing in our business. When we fail, the whole world knows about it.”
-
“Directly after the show people might have responded better to it, but who really knows. It did what it did and while it seems like a failure to most but it was a success for me and has given me so many opportunities.”
-
“The mere thought of divorce terrified me. To me, divorce symbolized failure.”
-
“The failure of The Cable Guy impacted my career. I had to start writing and acting again.”
-
“It's probably foolish to expect relationships to go on forever and to say that because something only lasts 10 years, it's a failure.”
-
“We all struggle with our failure to communicate and our failure to reach beyond fear to love people.”
-
“A film's success or failure is strictly on the director's shoulders.”
-
“Something is wanting, and something must be done, or we shall be involved in all the horror of failure, and civil war without a prospect of its termination.”
-
“Most of the work performed by a development engineer results in failure.”
-
“My Brat Pack buddies and I didn't exactly handle celebrity very well. Success at an early age is far more difficult to handle than failure.”
-
“With failure, you just try again.”
-
“There is an increasingly pervasive sense not only of failure, but of futility. The legislative process has become a cruel shell game and the service system has become a bureaucratic maze, inefficient, incomprehensible, and inaccessible.”
-
“The carrying out of the Potsdam Agreement has, however, been obstructed by the failure of the Allied Control Council to take the necessary steps to enable the German economy to function as an economic unit.”
-
“War is something Arafat sends others to do for him. That is, the poor souls who believe in him. This pompous incompetent caused the failure of the Camp David negotiations, Clinton's mediation.”
-
“So the poet, who wants to be something that he cannot be, and is a failure in plain life, makes up fictitious versions of his predicament that are interesting even to other persons because nobody is a perfect automobile salesman.”
-
“So nevertheless, what I'm saying is that what one is - one's parameters are constantly narrowed by one's success, and my desire is to widen my field even if I risk failure.”
-
“I constantly experience failure in that my work is never as good as I want it to be. So I live with failure.”
-
“The only reason my work seems to be eclectic up to a certain period is because I was a failure as an actor.”
-
“It's not a very high failure rate if you choose people that you really like the sound of.”
-
“In Iraq we must succeed. Failure is not an option.”
-
“I don't know many people, if any, who have had some straight line toward success. I mean, they start here, they work hard, they've got what it takes, and they just go straight to the top over some number of years. Most people get a little failure.”
-
“The assertion of failure coming from such persons does not mean that Mr. Mill failed to promote the practical success of those objects the advocacy of which forms the chief feature of his political writings.”
-
“Well, I think first of all there was a failure to have real, clear information at our disposal. There was a real lack of situational awareness. We didn't have the capabilities on the ground to give us real-time, accurate assessments of the physical condition of the city.”
-
“There was a failure to recognize the deep problems in AI; for instance, those captured in Blocks World. The people building physical robots learned nothing.”
-
“People in the business will stay with you through drugs and alcohol and divorces and insanity and everything else, but you have a failure, pal, and they don't want to know nothing about you!”
-
“African Americans make up about 13 percent of the U.S. population but comprise 32 percent of patients treated for kidney failure, giving them a kidney failure rate that is 4.2 times greater than that of white Americans.”
-
“We decided to try in vitro, because both Peter and I felt we couldn't handle another failure. When I miscarried after that, we had to come to terms with the possibility that this wasn't meant to be.”
-
“My only failure was the restaurant in Myrtle Beach. I kept it open for four years. It was in a tourist town, it was only busy four and half, five months of the year. But the bills kept coming all year.”
-
“Los Angeles was an impression of failure, of disappointment, of despair, and of oddly makeshift lives. This is California? I thought.”
-
“In our tabulation of psychoanalytic results, we have classed those who stopped treatment together with those not improved. This appears to be reasonable; a patient who fails to finish his treatment, and is not improved, is surely a therapeutic failure.”
-
“A Failure in this Duty did once involve our Nation in all the Horrors of Rebellion and Civil War.”
-
“The time I had waited probably made the difference between success and failure.”
-
“I know acts and I'm not going to name names but these people sold ten million copies the first time and the second album sells three million and it's considered a failure and they're dropped and that's really a shame.”
-
“I think it's one of the main negative emotional ingredients that fuels show business, because there's so much at stake and the fear of failure looms large.”
-
“I met Ashley two weeks before I married him. It was a joke-the most ridiculous thing I've ever done. Once I was married, I didn't want to be a failure, so I stuck it out for six months, which was about six months too long.”
-
“That sense of failure, I don't know where people put it who don't write songs and aren't able to emote physically. It must go somewhere.”
-
“It was an interesting question as to whether the BBC had a future in the digital world, and what form of market failure could justify the licence fee system.”
-
“In Torch Song, I did that character almost non-stop from 1978 until I made the movie in 1987. Then I had some failure, which also colors how you react to doing other things.”
-
“Pharmaceutical companies are enjoying unprecedented profits and access with this Administration. Yet the Republicans' prescription drug plan for seniors has been a colossal failure, and over 43 million Americans wake up every morning without health insurance.”
-
“It is Basic Management 101 that if you reward failure you are going to get more failure, and if you want success you should reward success. But if you look at the way this administration has approached national security, they have kind of got that principle backwards.”
-
“When an action is once done, it is right or wrong for ever; no accidental failure of its good or evil fruits can possibly alter that.”
-
“Failure to properly control our borders costs citizens in many ways: schools become overcrowded, medical resources are stretched too thin, other government services are overtaxed, and taxes increase further.”
-
“The Bush Administration's failure to be consistently involved in helping Israel achieve peace with the Palestinians has been both wrong for our friendship with Israel, as well as badly damaging to our standing in the Arab world.”
-
“Failure has gone to his head.”
-
“Is anarchism possible? The failure of attempts to attain freedom does not mean the cause is lost.”
-
“There's no such thing as failure - just waiting for success.”
-
“War, except in self-defense, is a failure of moral imagination.”
-
“In all our deeds, the proper value and respect for time determines success or failure.”
-
“Failure to accord credit to anyone for what he may have done is a great weakness in any man.”
-
“Nothing succeeds, they say, like success. And certainly nothing fails like failure.”
-
“There's a difference between a failure and a fiasco… a fiasco is a disaster of mythic proportions.”
-
“Mass transportation is doomed to failure in North America because a person's car is the only place where he can be alone and think.”
-
“The failure of women to produce genius of the first rank in most of the supreme forms of human effort has been used to block the way of all women of talent and ambition for intellectual achievement.”
-
“My biggest failure is I have too many to talk about.”
-
“The higher the artist, the fewer the gestures. The fewer the tools, the greater the imagination. The greater the will, the greater the secret failure.”
-
“I read less and less. I have not forgiven books for their failure to tell me the truth and make me happy.”
-
“You must not demand the failure of your peers, because the more good things that are around in film, in television, in theater - why the better it is for all of us.”
-
“I believe my publisher has shown a great deal of faith in me over a lot of years but I'm not prepared to be so arrogant to say that the long-term literary value of my work would compensate them for a financial failure.”
-
“In Washington, success is just a training course for failure.”
-
“Ken Lay has, does and will continue to accept responsibility for the fall of Enron. He was the man at the controls. But failure is not a crime.”
-
“None of us is guaranteed against failure or corruption of any kind; witness what's going on in the world in this moment, the follies of human nature and the failures of human nature.”
-
“The clearest explanation for the failure of any marriage is that the two people are incompatible; that is, that one is male and the other female.”
-
“The fear of failure is so great, it is no wonder that the desire to do right by one's children has led to a whole library of books offering advice on how to raise them.”
-
“I simply don't believe in failure. In itself, it doesn't exist. We create it. We make ourselves fail.”
-
“Failure is not a crime. The crime is not trying.”
-
“We go there with confidence, but we know there is a very fine line between success and failure in this game.”
-
“We can't have a failure in Iraq, but we also can't be there for the next 10 years because if we are, it's going to become, I think, a failure in and of itself.”
-
“We judged that a sudden, disorderly failure of Bear would have brought with it unpredictable but severe consequences for the functioning of the broader financial system and the broader economy, with lower equity prices, further downward pressure on home values, and less access to credit for companies and households.”
-
“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.”
-
“America traditionally represents the greatest possibility of someone's going from nothing to something. Why? In theory, if not practice, the government stays out of the way and lets individuals take risks and reap rewards or accept the consequences of failure. We call this capitalism - or, at least, we used to.”
-
“Big companies are like marching bands. Even if half the band is playing random notes, it still sounds kind of like music. The concealment of failure is built into them.”
-
“Sometimes failure isn't an opportunity in disguise, it's just you.”
-
“Failure is authentic, and because it's authentic, it's real and genuine, and because of that, it's a pure state of being.”
-
“If a building looks better under construction than it does when finished, then it's a failure.”
-
“Sometimes the best lighting of all is a power failure.”
-
“Without failure there is no sweetness in success. There's no understanding of it.”
-
“I've criticized President Bush for his failure to use his veto pen. There's plenty of blame to go around. The question is how to solve problems. It's not bailouts. What made America great? Free markets, free enterprise, manufacturing, job creation. That's how we're gonna do it, not by enlarging government.”
-
“Jobs for every American is doomed to failure because of modern automation and production. We ought to recognize it and create an income-maintenance system so every single American has the dignity and the wherewithal for shelter, basic food, and medical care. I'm talking about welfare for all. Without it, you're going to have warfare for all.”
-
“I - and I still consider myself, I'm sorry to tell you, a Marxist and a Communist, but I couldn't help noticing how all the best Marxist analyses are always analyses of a failure.”
-
“Other countries, such as Israel, successfully employ behavior detection techniques at their airports, but the bloated, ineffective bureaucracy of TSA has produced another security failure for U.S. transportation systems.”
-
“The failure of national economic policy is costing us more than jobs; it has begun to weaken that uniquely American spirit of risk-taking, large ambition, and optimism about the future. We must rally them now to bold departures that rebuild our national morale as well as our material prosperity.”
-
“So while I will never minimize the costs involved in military action, I am convinced that a failure to act in Libya would have carried a far greater price for America.”
-
“When you experience a failure as a leader, don't hide it - talk about it. Your missed opportunity will encourage others to take risks.”
-
“I don't want to feel like a failure to my daughter. She's the best thing I've ever done. Buffy - pretty great and all, but Charlotte's way better.”
-
“Even in a gleefully negative comic, there is optimism, although it's slightly hidden: It comes out through a comic character's sheer tenacity. He keeps going and trying to find some sort of fulfillment regardless of his perpetual failure record. That's a form of hope, a form of optimism. Really hokey I know, but it's true.”
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“The fact that we are here today to debate raising America's debt limit is a sign of leadership failure. America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership. Americans deserve better. I, therefore, intend to oppose the effort to increase America's debt.”
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“It's not about failure; it's about trying something and risking something for attaining your goal.”
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“I was brought up to believe that there is no such thing as failure as long as I'm trying my best. So I've had a 'blood, guts and glory' approach through my whole life.”
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“As a younger player, you always kind of play with that fear of failure.”
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“The banking collapse was caused, more than anything, by bad government policy and the total failure of bad regulation, rather than by greed.”
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“Ninety-nine percent of pilots that go up never have engine failure, and the 1 percent that do usually land it. But if you're up in the air and something goes wrong, you pull that parachute, and the whole plane goes down slowly.”
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“I've had great success and I've had catastrophic failure. It's really how you handle the rough stuff that defines you, I think.”
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“I've learned to think in terms of having a long career. Actors can have very long careers that last until the day we die, but there will be moments when you'll feel like you're a failure or when you're disappointed in yourself.”
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“Failure and things of this sort - you can take it one of two ways. You can either let that hurt you and really affect the way that you live your life in the future, or you can use that as an opportunity for growth.”
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“I grew up playing sports. There is a clear line between success and failure.”
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“There comes a point in your moviegoing life where you look at the screen and then you look at the world and you ask, 'What is going on?' You want the movies to show you the chaos and mess and risk and failure that are normal for a lot of us. Generally, the movies hide all of that.”
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“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.”
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“It is hard as an American to support the failure of American military operations in Iraq. Such failure will bring with it the death and wounding of many American service members, and many more Iraqis.”
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“The difference between a beautifully made failure and a beautifully made hit is who you've got playing the leads.”
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“You get so afraid of failure and so afraid of losing and so afraid of not being the best that it's not a natural drive - it's born out of fear of failure. Which helps in Hollywood.”
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“Failure? Scared to death of it.”
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“I was convicted of three misdemeanors of willful failure to file a form.”
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“My work ethic came from my parents and my fear of failure. I came from a small, predominantly black school and I didn't want to let them down.”
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“But I look at failure as education. In that respect, I am so well-educated.”
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“I don't have a fear factor. Well, not much of one. And I'm willing to risk quite a lot - as a comedian, you're always risking a lot. You're risking failure, especially if you're improvising and going on TV shows trying to make comedy out of thin air. That is quite a risky business.”
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“That's the conundrum of cartoon stripping, as opposed to political cartoons. When your anger is the driving force of your drawing hand, failure follows. The anger is OK, but it has to serve the interests of the heart, frankly.”
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“You'll never convince me there is a hopeless situation or there is any finality in any success or any failure.”
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“I don't need to be looking at every failure of government, I need to be looking where failure of government needs reform.”
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“I've become a professional failure - in order to pay the mortgage I have to remain unemployed. Luckily, a disaster always seems to befall me at exactly the right moment.”
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“America thinks of itself as a meritocracy, so people have more respect for success and more contempt for failure.”
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“We know there is no such thing as freedom without the risk of failure.”
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“I think everyone shares a fear of failure - that you're only as good as your most recent collection. That's definitely a fear, but it's a fear that fuels me, that makes me want to work harder, that makes me take on more challenges.”
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“Acting allows me the freedom to let go, to be in the moment, to be spontaneous. I no longer have the fear of losing, of failure.”
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“I have a tendency to sabotage relationships; I have a tendency to sabotage everything. Fear of success, fear of failure, fear of being afraid. Useless, good-for-nothing thoughts.”
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“The idea of capitalism is not just success but also the failure that allows success to happen.”
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“Some of the reasons John McCain lost in 2008 were his lackluster campaign, his refusal to showcase Obama's extreme liberalism and, thus, his failure to demonstrate why he would make a better president than Obama.”
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“Why do we capital-N Nerds love Mars so much? Because it's beautiful, it's tough, it's buried in our mythic, childhood memories. It's covered with human triumphs but also with sad stories of failure.”
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“I don't understand a way to work other than bold-facedly running towards failure.”
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“My films seem to be about men's struggle with failure.”
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“There's no right or wrong, success or failure.”
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“If you're a doctor or a lawyer or teacher, if you only get three things right out of 10, you're considered a failure.”
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“The exposed nature of life in the public square affects leaders' attitudes toward risk - and failure.”
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“As long as the G.O.P., led by its increasingly visible women, continues to insist that the problem is not their policies but women's failure to understand their own lives and interests, the gender gap won't go away.”
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“If we don't succeed, we run the risk of failure.”
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“Ambitious failure, magnificent failure, is a very good thing.”
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“The traditional religious right's failure to restore public-school prayer or pass an antiabortion constitutional amendment has likely helped fuel the spread of the more extreme dominionist school.”
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“It's not that we fly by the seat of our pants. We're not afraid of failure.”
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“I realized that I was afraid to really, really try something, 100%, because I had never reached true failure.”
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“Failure, it is thought, is what sells, and what people want to hear and read about. I am not so sure.”
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“Success needs no explanation. Failure does not have one that matters.”
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“So many financial dreams are thwarted by the failure to act upon good intentions.”
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“I'm fully aware that things that resonate and become real hits are the exception to the rule, so much so that I've wired myself for failure.”
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“I mean, I love L.A.”
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“One must never assume that a character is sympathetic because of either the actor playing them or the fact that they're a lead. I think that's a recipe for failure, actually, because if they become unsympathetic, you lose your audience.”
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“Coming to terms with the fact that my marriage was a failure was devastating and very difficult.”
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“The failure of world leaders to act on the critical issue of global warming is often blamed on economic considerations.”
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“I feel, in the end, as if everything I've done has been a failure.”
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“By far the most important factor in the success or failure of any school, far more important than tests or standards or business-model methods of accountability, is simply attracting the best-educated, most exciting young people into urban schools and keeping them there.”
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“Failure's a natural part of life.”
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“If I didn't have children, I think my life would be a failure.”
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“Every book I've written has been a different attempt to understand something, and the success or failure of the previous one is irrelevant. I write the book I want.”
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“I'm fascinated by failure, and I'm fascinated by finality. Shakespeare's historical plays are more universal than his comedies because they relate to the finality of life. Without finality, life would not be beautiful.”
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“Washington, D.C. is what is broken, not the immigration policies. We have good laws. We have people suffer every day because of government's failure to enforce the law and be respectful to the process we have. We have a pathway to citizenship already in place.”
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“I had to succeed. Failure means I would have to be homeless again.”
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“The failure of the White House and Congress to seriously address the nation's fiscal situation is certain to broaden the belief among many voters that the U.S. political system is broken.”
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“I may be a successful football player, but I feel like such a failure.”
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“Unwillingness to risk failure is always there, but it gets harder when you feel you have more to lose.”
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“If you've gone into a marriage and you haven't been clear about how you're going to handle money, how you want to raise kids, who is going to work or stay home or what have you, then you've set yourself up for failure.”
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“Success is always less funny than failure.”
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“You shouldn't be afraid of failure - when something fails, you think, 'What did I learn from that experience? I can do better next time.' Then kill that project and move on to the next. Don't get disappointed.”
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“The sentiments in Hawaii about Washington's failure of leadership are no different than the rest of the country.”
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“I get asked, 'How can you have such failures in your films?' Well, what else is life about? There's some sense of constant failure in something. Humor gives you a distance from it.”
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“At the end of the day I have always seen the end of my relationships as a personal failure. There is nothing ever pretty in saying goodbye.”
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“I assume everything I do in life is gonna be a failure, and then if it turns up roses, then I'm psyched.”
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“If you get into a Broadway show and it doesn't work, you're a failure. And if it does work, you may be stuck for who knows how long. It just doesn't sound great to me!”
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“When you're fearless, you take more risks because you're less conscious of failure or what can go wrong.”
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“If you have a level of expectation in your life that you have to be a quote-unquote star, whatever that means, you might be setting yourself up for failure.”
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“I find writing very difficult. It's hard and it hurts sometimes, and it's scary because of the fear of failure and the very unpleasant feeling that you may have reached the limit of your abilities.”
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“If 50 percent of your career is not filled with failure, you're not really successful.”
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“I hate how box-office failures are blamed on an actress, yet I don't see a box-office failure blamed on men.”
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“I think there's something quite interesting about the almost tragic quality of a lot of overwrought prose, because it has a much more self-conscious awareness of its own failure to touch the real.”
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“The vast majority of large scale change efforts fail. Which means that the probability that you have actually experienced a failure, and your people know that and are pessimistic, therefore, about trying something again, is very high.”
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“Failure is what we're all running from, we're always running toward success with failure at our back.”
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“Critics? Don't talk to me of critics! You think some jackanapes journalist, his soul eaten away by the maggots of jealousy and failure, has anything worthwhile to say of art? I don't.”
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“Admitting failure is quite cleansing, but never - pleasurable.”
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“Sadness is a super important thing not to be ashamed about but to include in our lives. One of the bigger problems with sadness or depression is there's so much shame around it. If you have it you're a failure. You are felt as being very unattractive.”
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“I'm living life as best I can - but I'm not exempt from failure and making bad choices.”
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“Well, the idea is that failure is an inevitable partner on the road to success and, if you're not willing to confront failure, you can never find out how good you are.”
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“Beside every great success are the seeds of enormous failure. In every failure, there's the opportunity seeds of great success. They're not miles apart. So if they're that close together, and if you're really working, you're always gonna have that likelihood that something's not going to work.”
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“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.”
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“I'm kind of a failure. I mean, I'll be honest. I'm successful in that I'm getting to work on great stuff, but I think I'm a failure in all the personal stuff that is most important to me.”
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“Our nation's Social Security Trust Fund is depleting at an alarming rate, and failure to implement immediate reforms endangers the ability of Americans to plan for their retirement with the options and certainty they deserve.”
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“My film directorial career has been nothing but repetition of one failure after another!”
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“But thankfully, my first album, 'Wide Screen,' was sort of a critics' darling - everyone raved about it, but no one bought it. They only manufactured 10,000 copies; I wasn't even in the running for failure!”
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“Don't take too much comfort in the fact that you're successful today because tomorrow could bring failure. There's no surety in life.”
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“What matters is this: Being fearless of failure arms you to break the rules. In doing so, you may change the culture and just possibly, for a moment, change life itself.”
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“Everyone should be commended for allowing people to make disasters, to make failures - you've just got to be sure that it's a magnificent failure and that, by creating a magnificent failure, you plant the seed.”
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“Divorce is never a pleasant experience. You look upon it as a failure. But I learned to be a different person once we broke up. Sometimes you learn more from failure than you do from success.”
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“Among all the tests President Obama faced in his first term, his biggest failure was climate change.”
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“Everybody keeps saying that India's a poor country. Yes, we have poverty. But I blame the government of India, the political establishment, for their failure to educate and therefore their failure to control the poverty.”
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“The attributes for entrepreneurs cut both ways. You need the ability to ignore inconvenient facts and see the world as it should be and not as it is. This inspires people to take huge leaps of faith. But this blindness to facts can be a liability, too. The characteristics that help entrepreneurs succeed can also lead to their failure.”
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“I can't say I'm not grateful to have journalists writing about me as a genius. But I know it's not true. I'm not confused. I understand that success comes through a lot of failure and a lot of very embarrassing failure. People want to create the next Facebook, but they are too afraid to create the next Facemash.”
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“Our educational system is not preparing people for the 21st Century. Failure is an essential part of entrepreneurship. If you work hard, you can get an 'A' pretty much guaranteed, but in entrepreneurship, that's not how it works.”