Failure Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Is it dangerous to claim that parents have no power at all (other than genetic) to shape their child's personality, intelligence, or the way he or she behaves outside the family home?... A confession: When I first made this proposal ten years ago, I didn't fully believe it myself. I took an extreme position, the null hypothesis of zero parental influence, for the sake of scientific clarity... The establishment's failure to shoot me down has been nothing short of astonishing.

Judith Rich Harris

To have grazed every form of failure, including success.

Being young is greatly overestimated…Any failure seems so total. Later on you realize you can have another go.

I think the greatest taboos in America are faith and failure.

Bad architecture is in the end as much a failure of psychology as of design. It is an example expressed through materials of the same tendencies which in other domains will lead us to marry the wrong people, choose inappropriate jobs and book unsuccessful holidays: the tendency not to understand who we are and what will satisfy us.

Alain de Botton

Failure to properly conceptualize the nature of knowledge assets condemns firms.

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.

Ambition, I've found, can lead only to failure. I do not read the reviews. No, I am not singing for you.

The story of a theory's failure often strikes readers as sad and unsatisfying. Since science thrives on self-correction, we who practice this most challenging of human arts do not share such a feeling. We may be unhappy if a favored hypothesis loses or chagrined if theories that we proposed prove inadequate. But refutation almost always contains positive lessons that overwhelm disappointment, even when […] no new and comprehensive theory has yet filled the void.

Stephen Jay Gould

Failure alone remains as the one single accomplishable experience;

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.

The success or failure of any historical age is the extent to which those living at that time have fulfilled the special role that history has imposed upon them.

War represents the supreme failure of nations to resolve their differences. From a strictly pragmatic standpoint, it is the most inefficient waste of lives and resources ever conceived.

To avoid an occasion for our virtues is a worse degree of failure than to push forward pluckily and make a fall.

Robert Louis Stevenson

I think perfection is ugly. Somewhere in the things humans make, I want to see scars, failure, disorder, distortion. If I can feel those things in works by others, then I like them.

I don't know whether I am [a world historical figure] or not. But certainly, I do know that I am probably the most Nigerian of Nigerians alive today. I also know that the failure of Nigeria has created a reflex and that reflex can be called Biafra. I know that in the context of Biafra that existed, I am very important. Having said that, I feel that I have a responsibility to always point out the deficiencies of Nigeria and to keep alive the alternative. That's why I say that there will always be, if not the Biafra of territory, Biafra of the heart.

Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu

The peculiar function of history is to discover, in the first place, the words actually spoken, whatever they were, and next to ascertain the reason why what was done or spoken led to failure or success. For the mere statement of fact may interest us but is of no benefit to us: but when we add the cause of it, study of history becomes fruitful.

When a device as simple as a door has to come with an instruction manual—even a one-word manual—then it is a failure, poorly designed.

Problems are the cutting edge that distinguishes between success and failure. Problems call forth our courage and our wisdom; indeed, they create our courage and our wisdom. It is only because of problems that we grow mentally and spiritually.

People are training for success when they should be training for failure.

John C. Maxwell

We are not to call for tyranny and bans on freedom. It is obvious that we cannot stop publication of what we view as indecent in our sacred faith... failing to make use of Western freedom of press and other technologies to show the West the values of Islam is intellectual failure and a guilt that should not be linked to Islam.

Tawakkol Karman

I have written independently without Judgment. I may write independently, and with Judgment, hereafter. The Genius of Poetry must work out its own salvation in a man: It cannot be matured by law and precept, but by sensation and watchfulness in itself — That which is creative must create itself — In Endymion, I leaped headlong into the sea, and thereby have become better acquainted with the Soundings, the quicksands, and the rocks, than if I had stayed upon the green shore, and piped a, silly pipe, and took tea and comfortable advice. I was never afraid of failure; for I would sooner fail than not be among the greatest.

Failure is a reality; we all fail at times, and it's painful when we do. But it's better to fail while striving for something wonderful, challenging, adventurous, and uncertain than to say, " I don't want to try because I may not succeed completely.

As a people we have become obsessed with Health. There is something fundamentally, radically unhealthy about all this. We do not seem to be seeking more exuberance in living as much as staving off failure, putting off dying. We have lost all confidence in the human body.

Insurrection, n. An unsuccessful revolution. Disaffection's failure to substitute misrule for bad government.