Quotes on Failure
I've failed over and over and over again in my life, and that is why I succeed.
Michael Jordan
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I don’t know the secret to success, but the key to failure is to try to please everyone.
Bill Cosby
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He who has conquered doubt and fear has conquered failure.
James Allen
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A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.
George Bernard Shaw
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99% of the failures come from people who have the habit of making excuses.
George Washington Carver
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You always pass failure on the way to success.
Mickey Rooney
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Failure is only postponed success as long as courage "coaches" ambition. The habit of persistence is the habit of victory.
Herbert Kaufman
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No man ever achieved worthwhile success who did not, at one time or other, find himself with at least one foot hanging well over the brink of failure.
Napoleon Hill
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Blaming destiny is a poor out for those who don't reach desired destinations.
Malcom Forbes
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To be successful, you've got to be willing to fail.
Frank Tyger
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Nobody succeeds in a big way except by risking failure.
William Feather
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Success comes to those who become success conscious. Failure comes to those who indifferently allow themselves to become failure conscious.
Napoleon Hill
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The line between failure and success is so fine that we scarcely know when we pass it - so fine that we often are on the line and do not know it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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To be ambitious for wealth, and yet always expecting to be poor; to be always doubting your ability to get what you long for, is like trying to reach east by traveling west. There is no philosphy which will help man to succeed when he is always doubting his ability to do so, and thus attracting failure. No matter how hard you work for success, if your thought is saturated with the fear of failure, it will kill your efforts, neutralize your endeavors and make success impossible.
Charles Baudouin
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Far better it is 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 the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat.
Theodore Roosevelt
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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.
Thomas Alva Edison
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Failure is the opportunity to begin again more intelligently.
Henry Ford
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Having harvested all the knowledge and wisdom we can from our mistakes and failures, we should put them behind us and go ahead, for vain regretting interferes with the flow of power into our own personalities.
Edith Johnson
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I can accept failure. Everyone fails at something. But I can't accept not trying.
Michael Jordan
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Successful people fail their way to the top.
Jeff Olson
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A man can fail many times, but he isn't a failure until he begins to blame somebody else.
John Burroughs
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Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.
Sir Winston Churchill
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Obviously there have been times when I've failed. But there have never been times when I thought I would fail.
Michael Jordan
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A man may make mistakes, but he isn't a failure until he starts blaming someone else.
John Wooden
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You're not always going to be successful, but if you're afraid to fail, you don't deserve to be successful.
Charles Barkley
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There are no secrets to success. It is the result of preparation, hard work, learning from failure.
Colin Powell
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Failure is not a single, cataclysmic event. You don't fail overnight. Instead, failure is a few errors in judgment, repeated every day.
Jim Rohn
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Everything has a price, including both success and failure. Choose either one and be prepared to pay the price.
Larry Winget
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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.
Joyce Brothers
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You should look upon failure and temporary defeat as part of the price that you pay on your road to the success that you will inevitably achieve.
Brian Tracy
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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.
Elbert Hubbard
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The difference between average people and achieving people is their perception of and response to failure.
John Maxwell
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In life, the question is not if you will have problems, but how you are going to deal with your problems. Are you going to fail forward or backward?
John Maxwell
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People who fail forward are able to see errors or negative experiences as a regular part of life, learn from them, and then move on.
John Maxwell
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Failure is simply a price we pay to achieve success.
John Maxwell
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Failure isn't so bad if it doesn't attack the heart. Success is all right if it doesn't go to the head.
Grantland Rice
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When achievers fail, they see it as a momentary event, not a lifelong epidemic. It's not personal. If you want to succeed, don't let any single incident color your view of yourself.
John Maxwell
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There's nothing more useless than someone who comes to the end of the day and congratulates himself, saying, "Well, I made it through the day without screwing up."
John Maxwell
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Don't waste energy trying to cover up failure. Learn from your failures and go on to the next challenge. It's okay to fail. If you're not failing, you're not growing.
H. Stanley Judd
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To achieve your dreams, you must embrace adversity and make failure a regular part of your life. If you're not failing, you're probably not really moving forward.
John Maxwell
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If you are succeeding in everything you do, then you're probably not pushing yourself hard enough.
John Maxwell
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The most important thing in life is not to capitalize on our gains. Any fool can do that. The really important thing is to profit from your losses. That requires intelligence; and it makes the difference between a man of sense and a fool.
William Bolitho
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If there is any single factor that makes for success in living, it is the ability to draw dividends from defeat.
William Marston
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There is no failure except no longer trying. There is no defeat except from within, no really insurmountable barrier save our own inherent weakness of purpose.
Ken Hubbard
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Success is simply a matter of luck. Ask any failure.
Earl Wilson
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One of the most common causes of failure is the habit of quitting when one is overtaken by temporary defeat.
Napoleon Hill
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Fear of failure is a ticket to mediocrity. If you're not failing from time to time, you're not pushing yourself. And if you're not pushing yourself, you're coasting.
Eric Zorn
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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.
Rosalynn Carter
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When you punish your people for making a mistake or falling short of a goal, you create an environment of extreme caution, even fearfulness. In sports it's similar to playing "not to lose" - a formula that often brings on defeat.
John Wooden
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The difference between success and failure is the difference between thought and action.
Praveen Sherman
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Assert your right to make a few mistakes. If people can't accept your imperfections, that's their fault.
David Burns
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The main reason people fail is not because of lack of ability or opportunities. They fail because they lack the inner strength to persist in the face of obstacles and difficulties. That's why trying something almost always leads to failure. By definition, trying something means you will quit if you are not successful.
Ruben Gonzalez
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The biggest enemies we have to overcome on the road to success are not a lack of ability and a lack of opportunity but fears of failure and rejection and the doubts that they trigger.
Brian Tracy
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Failure is nature's plan to prepare you for great responsibilities.
Napoleon Hill
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Men succeed when they realize that their failures are the preparation for their victories.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Would you like me to give you a formula for success? It's quite simple, really. Double your rate of failure.
Thomas Watson Jr.
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Three failures denote uncommon strength. A weakling has not enough grit to fail thrice.
Minna Antrim
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If you're taking risks, and you probably should, you can find yourself failing 90% of the time. The trick is to get paid while you're doing the failing and to use the experience to gain skills that will be useful later.
Scott Adams
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You can't manage luck directly, but you can manage your career in a way that makes it easier for luck to find you. To succeed, first you must do something. And if that doesn't work, which can be 90% of the time, do something else. Luck finds the doers.
Scott Adams
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I believe that our society's "mistakephobia" is crippling, a problem that begins in most elementary schools, where we learn to learn what we are taught rather than to form our own goals and to figure out how to achieve them. We are fed with facts and tested and those who make the fewest mistakes are considered to be the smart ones, so we learn that it is embarrassing to not know and to make mistakes. Our education system spends virtually no time on how to learn from mistakes, yet this is critical to real learning. As a result, school typically doesn't prepare young people for real life — unless their lives are spent following instructions and pleasing others. In my opinion, that's why so many students who succeed in school fail in life.
Ray Dalio
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I've observed that if individuals who prevail in a highly competitive environment have any one thing in common besides success, it is failure—and their ability to overcome it.
Bill Walsh
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Failure is part of success, an integral part. Everybody gets knocked down. Knowing it will happen and what you must do when it does is the first step back.
Bill Walsh
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One of the common traits of outstanding performers—coaches, athletes, managers, sales representatives, executives, and others who face a daily up/down, win/lose accounting system—is that a rejection, that is, defeat, is quickly forgotten, replaced eagerly by pursuit of a new order, client, or opponent.
Bill Walsh
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Everything you want out of life is in that huge, bubbling vat of failure. The trick is to get the good stuff out.
Scott Adams
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The systems-versus-goals point of view is burdened by semantics, of course. You might say every system has a goal, however vague. And that would be true to some extent. And you could say that everyone who pursues a goal has some sort of system to get there, whether it is expressed or not. You could word-glue goals and systems together if you chose. All I'm suggesting is that thinking of goals and systems as very different concepts has power. Goal-oriented people exist in a state of continuous presuccess failure at best, and permanent failure at worst if things never work out. Systems people succeed every time they apply their systems, in the sense that they did what they intended to do. The goals people are fighting the feeling of discouragement at each turn. The systems people are feeling good every time they apply their system. That's a big difference in terms of maintaining your personal energy in the right direction.
Scott Adams
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I find it helpful to see the world as a slot machine that doesn't ask you to put money in. All it asks is your time, focus, and energy to pull the handle over and over. A normal slot machine that requires money will bankrupt any player in the long run. But the machine that has rare yet certain payoffs, and asks for no money up front, is a guaranteed winner if you have what it takes to keep yanking until you get lucky. In that environment, you can fail 99 percent of the time, while knowing success is guaranteed. All you need to do is stay in the game long enough.
Scott Adams
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[A]lways remember that failure is your friend. It is the raw material of success. Invite it in. Learn from it. And don't let it leave until you pick its pocket.
Scott Adams
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Our capacity to try, try, try is inextricably linked with our ability and tolerance to fail, fail, fail.
Ryan Holiday
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