Quotations about Failure

If you're doing your best, you won't have any time to worry about failure.  ~Quoted in P.S. I Love You, compiled by H. Jackson Brown, Jr.


Failure is an event, never a person.  ~William D. Brown, Welcome Stress!


The only time you don't fail is the last time you try anything - and it works.  ~William Strong


I have not failed.  I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.  ~Thomas Edison


I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.  ~Bill Cosby


There is no failure except in no longer trying.  ~Elbert Hubbard


Supposing you have tried and failed again and again.  You may have a fresh start any moment you choose, for this thing we call "failure" is not the falling down, but the staying down.  ~Mary Pickford


Try again.  Fail again.  Fail better.  ~Samuel Beckett


Failure doesn't mean you are a failure... it just means you haven't succeeded yet.  ~Robert Schuller


One fails forward toward success.  ~Charles F. Kettering


One must be a god to be able to tell successes from failures without making a mistake.  ~Anton Pavlovich Chekhov


A man may fall many times, but he won't be a failure until he says that someone pushed him.  ~Elmer G. Letterman


Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.  ~F. Scott Fitzgerald


In a world flagrant with the failures of civilization, what is there particularly immortal about our own?  ~G.K. Chesterton


They say President Wilson has blundered.  Perhaps he has, but I notice he usually blunders forward.  ~Thomas Edison


There are defeats more triumphant than victories.  ~Michel de Montaigne


Failure sometimes enlarges the spirit.  You have to fall back upon humanity and God.  ~Charles Horton Cooley


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."  ~S.I. Hayakawa


A failure is a man who has blundered, but is not able to cash in the experience.  ~Elbert Hubbard


No man is a failure who is enjoying life.  ~William Feather


Failure is only the opportunity to begin again more intelligently.  ~Henry Ford


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


You can't have any successes unless you can accept failure.  ~George Cukor


There is no failure.  Only feedback.  ~Robert Allen


Failure changes for the better, success for the worse.  ~Lucius Annaeus Seneca


There is much to be said for failure.  It is more interesting than success.  ~Max Beerbohm, Mainly on the Air, 1946


You always pass failure on your way to success.  ~Mickey Rooney


Nothing fails like success because we don't learn from it.  We learn only from failure.  ~Kenneth Boudling


Our business in life is not to succeed, but to continue to fail in good spirits.  ~Robert Louis Stevenson


It is a mistake to suppose that people succeed through success; they often succeed through failures.  ~Author Unknown


The men who try to do something and fail are infinitely better than those who try to do nothing and succeed.  ~Lloyd Jones