Failure Quotes

400+ Sourced quotes

Fidel Castro

Agatha Christie

Rudyard Kipling

Malcolm X

Sri Aurobindo

Max Beerbohm

Allan Bloom

In all our deeds, the proper value and respect for time determines success or failure.

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

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

Rudyard Kipling

Most successes are unhappy. That's why they are successes — they have to reassure themselves about themselves by achieving something that the world will notice.... The happy people are failures because they are on such good terms with themselves that they don't give a damn.

Agatha Christie

There is much to be said for failure. It is much more interesting than success.

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.

Good people are good because they've come to wisdom through failure. We get very little wisdom from success, you know.

William Saroyan

Now life is the only art that we are required to practice without preparation, and without being allowed the preliminary trials, the failures and botches, that are essential for the training of a mere beginner.

The American system demands success, and in order to succeed we must first believe that we can. Yet our society, with its intolerance of failure and poverty, traps millions of people in positions where any kind of success seems impossible to contemplate, and in which failure itself is a kind of passive rebellion against their own misery and the social system which created it in the first place.
To succeed it is necessary to accept the world as it is and rise above it.

Philosophers' Syndrome: mistaking a failure of the imagination for an insight into necessity.

Because a fellow has failed once or twice or a dozen times, you don't want to set him down as a failure till he's dead or loses his courage.

George Horace Lorimer

Sometimes a noble failure serves the world as faithfully as a distinguished success.

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.

Show me a good and gracious loser, and I'll show you a failure.

Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good. In area after area - crime, education, housing, race relations - the situation has gotten worse after the bright new theories were put into operation. The amazing thing is that this history of failure and disaster has neither discouraged the social engineers nor discredited them.

The dream is real, my friends. The failure to realize it is the only unreality.

Toni Cade Bambara

Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive.

A word of caution: people will tell you that success can't buy you happiness. 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.

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.

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.