Failure Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Accustom yourself to look first to the dreadful consequences of failure; then fix your eye on the glorious prize which is before you; and when your strength begins to fail, and your spirits are well nigh exhausted, let the animating view rekindle your resolution, and call forth in renewed vigour the fainting energies of your soul.

William Wilberforce

I wasn't prepared before in life,... it came too quickly. I didn't know how to handle success, I didn't know how to handle failure.

Everything that meant anything to me — the Pentagon, Georgetown, flying out of Andrews, everything I had done in life up to that point, I was throwing away. I felt absolutely miserable — miserable and a failure.

Restructuring is a favorite tactic of antisocials who have reached a senior position in an organization. The chaos that results is an ideal smokescreen for dysfunctional leadership. Failure at the top goes unnoticed, while the process of restructuring creates the illusion of a strong, creative hand on the helm.

Manfred F.R. Kets de Vries

Engineers speak of a control loop, in which the man in the loop is the problematical element. This is the human component in a series of sequentially interacting pieces of equipment that control or adjust a function. But when the pilot is suddenly and unexpectedly brought into the control loop (in other words, participates in decision making) as a result of (inevitable) equipment failure, he is disoriented. Long periods of passive monitoring make one unprepared to act in emergencies. The sudden appearance of several alarms, all there for safety reasons, leads to disorientation.

I guess my biggest failure was not getting reelected. [The loss taught me] not to ever let American hostages be held for 444 days in a foreign country without extracting them. I did the best I could, but I failed.

I want you to back yourself into a corner. Give yourself no choice but to succeed. Let the consequences of failure become so dire and so unthinkable that you'll have no choice but to do whatever it takes to succeed.

Wallace's error on human intellect arose from the inadequacy of his rigid selectionism, not from a failure to apply it. And his argument repays our study today, since its flaw persists as the weak link in many of the most modern evolutionary speculations of our current literature. For Wallace's rigid selectionism is much closer than Darwin's pluralism to the attitude embodied in our favored theory today, which, ironically in this context, goes by the name of Neo-Darwinism.

Stephen Jay Gould

If we don't see a failure as a challenge to modify our approach, but rather as a problem with ourselves, as a personality defect, we will immediately feel overwhelmed.

Anthony Robbins

Criticism is the forerunner of divorce, the cultivator of rebellion, sometimes an agent that leads to failure.

Gordon B. Hinckley

No marriage is one person's failure any more than it's one person's success, so it works best to see a marriage that has ended simply as something that didn't work out.

I sat in my desolation Withdrawn from all around, Feeling my life was a ruin, a failure. I was empty inside with the utter collapse of my being. I did not care anymore for living or dying. I was alone in my distress and desolation. But as I sat sadly on the ground, The sun reached out his hand to me and touched my face. And so my healing began.

One of the biggest problems with the modern feminist movement is its failure to bring men along with us.

I yield to no one precedence in love for the South. But because I love the South, I rejoice in the failure of the Confederacy.

Kantians may in turn be skeptical about all such projects, and whether anything deserving to be called either 'morality' or moral 'reasons' could ever be got out of them. A long philosophical tradition claims that there are powerful reasons to meet the requirements of morality, reasons that are necessarily connected with being a rational agent at all, and hence that conduct which violates moral principles necessarily constitutes a significant failure of rationality (even if we don't customarily apply to it the term 'irrational'). Kantian ethics does not need to apologize for adhering to that tradition.

There is no such thing as darkness; only a failure to see.

Malcolm Muggeridge

Life is a glorious opportunity, if it is used to condition us for eternity. If we fail in this, though we succeed in everything else, our life will have been a failure.

Rationality is what we do to organize the world, to make it possible to predict. Art is the rehearsal for the inapplicability and failure of that process.

Was Daedalus really stricken with grief when Icarus fell into the sea? Or just disappointed by the design failure

We believe that we can find the end, and that a painting can be finished. The Abstract Expressionists always felt the painting's being finished was very problematical. We'd more readily say that our paintings were finished and say, well, it's either a failure or it's not, instead of saying, well, maybe it's not really finished.

I do not approve of children being beaten. It is always a confession of failure.

Patricia Wentworth

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.

A missionary may persuade a painted savage to worship a cross rather than an idol; but he will not make laws that send that savage's children to school, where they might learn to make the desert they inhabit another Eden by means of the advanced sciences. He may persuade his flock to love one another for his God's sake, but he'll invariably urge them to slaughter any neighboring tribe that still worships stone idols. This is the failure of religion as a force for the common welfare.

Revolt against a tyrant is legitimate; it can succeed. Revolt against human nature is doomed to failure.

You must have failed deeply on some level or experienced some deep loss or pain to be drawn to the spiritual dimension. Or perhaps your very success became empty and meaningless and so turned out to be a failure.